The month of February is Black History Month in The United States. Truly it is an important month because I know of no other "Special" month of the year, and there are eleven more. Makes you wonder what next month "is." But it only affirms the specialness we bestow on Black History Month. I wish to introduce you to a person of history, and a person of tolerance, and a person with a mission. Hiram Rhoades Revels was his name. Born in Fayetteville, North Carolina in 1822. His father was a free man, probably a member of the Luppee Indians, a certified Tribe which has a mixture of Black/White/Indian. The Luppee's may be the Indians associated with the famous Jamestown "Lost Colony" story. For the longest time the Luppee Indians were bunched in with the Croatan Tribe. His mother was an African slave who soon after Hiram's birth was emancipated. Hiram is the first African-American to serve in the U.S. Senate (1870).At the age of 16 he went to Lincolnton, North Carolina to apprentice under his brother Elias as a barber. In 1841, his brother died and Hiram took over the barber shop. In 1844 he continued his education by leaving the barber trade and attending Quaker School in Liberty, Indiana. He also attended school at Knox College in Ohio. Revels became a ordained minister in the African Methodist Church and traveled ministering to African American congregations in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, and Kansas. He finally settled in Baltimore where he was a principal for an African American school and pastor at a local church.
In 1861 the civil war began. Maryland, a border state had divided loyalties, but Revels embraced the side of the Union cause. Revels helped in organizing two regiments of African American troops from Maryland. Hiram went to St. Louis to organize a school for African Americans in 1863 and helped form another regiment of African American men in Missouri. He then began his active service as a Union chaplain with a Mississippi regiment of free blacks. He participated in the siege of Vicksburg, and eventually became provost marshal of Vicksburg.
At wars end he settled in Natchez, Mississippi where he joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1868 he became an alderman from Natchez. Somehow Hiram Revels balanced his political and pastoral duties without racial conflict, winning the respect of both whites and blacks. In 1870 he was elected the first African American member of the U.S. Senate.
More often than not, history creates scenarios that would be hard to fabricate otherwise.
Hiram Rhoades Revels was sworn in February 25, 1870 to fill the seat vacated almost 10 years earlier by Jefferson Davis, the President of the failed Confederacy. The irony is just outstanding.
Hiram Revels spent his charmed life trying to improve the educational and spiritual needs of the African American communities he came in contact with. Attending a church conference in Aberdeen, Mississippi on January 16, 1901, Hiram Revels died. But his courage and conviction lives, if not only in the annals of American history.
