Black Americans in Congress

Black Americans in Congress: An Introduction

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“The Negroes’ Temporary Farewell,” 1887–1929

A U.S. Senator encounters a hanging anti-lynching bill outside the Capitol in this Edmund Duffy cartoon. The Senate’s unique parliamentary procedures allowed southern Democrats to kill civil rights and anti-lynching legislation, allowing the upper chamber to act as a bottleneck for measures seeking to overthrow Jim Crow until the mid-20th century.Image courtesy of Library of Congress

This era was defined by a long war on African-American participation in state and federal politics, waged by means of local southern laws, Jim Crow segregation, and tacit federal assent. Between 1887 and 1901, just five blacks served in Congress. Black Members of Congress encountered an institution that was often inhospitable to their very presence and their legislative goals. With their middling to lower-tier committee assignments and few connections to the leadership, they were far from the center of power.¹¹ Moreover, black Members of Congress were so rare that they were incapable of driving a legislative agenda.

Over the years, electing African Americans to Congress grew more difficult. Obstacles included violence, intimidation, and fraud by white supremacists; state and local disfranchisement laws that denied increasing numbers of blacks the right to vote; and contested election challenges in Congress. Moreover, the legislative focus shifted from the idealism of the postwar Radical Republicans to the business interests of a rapidly industrializing nation. Ambivalence toward protecting black civil rights bolstered southern racial conservatives, who sought to roll back the protections that were extended to African Americans during Reconstruction. “I beg all true men to forget party and partisanship and right the great wrongs perpetrated upon humble and unoffending American citizens,” said Representative George W. Murray of South Carolina (1893–1895; 1896–1897). “I declare that no class of people has ever been more misrepresented, slandered, and traduced than the black people of the South.”¹²

Though Black Americans were excluded from Congress after 1901, larger social and historical forces portended future political opportunities for African Americans in the northern United States. Southern black political activism transferred northward changing the social and cultural dynamic of established black communities in northern cities, as rural, agrarian African Americans were lured to industrialized cities by jobs and greater political freedoms. Advocacy groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded during this era, lobbied Congress on issues that were important to the black community. Geographical relocation also contributed to the gradual realignment of African Americans from the Republican Party to the ranks of northern Democrats during the mid-20th century.

Without a single black Member to advocate black interests, both major political parties in Congress refused to enact legislation to improve conditions for African Americans. Except for a few stalwart reformers, Congress responded to civil rights measures with ambivalence or outright hostility. During this era, too, a corps of southern racial conservatives was positioned, by virtue of their seniority, to hold a strong grip on the levers of power when Democrats gained control of the House Chamber in 1931.

Footnotes

For a discussion of the relative influence and attractiveness of individual House committees during this era, see Charles Steward III, “Committee Hierarchies in the Modernizing House, 1875–1947,” American Journal of Political Science 36 (1992): 835–856.
Congressional Record, House, 53rd Cong., 1st sess. (5 October 1893): 2161.