African Americans in the United States Congress

After the 13th and 14th Amendments granted freedom and citizenship to enslaved people, freedmen gained political representation in the Southern United States for the first time.

[4][5][6] In response to the growing numbers of black statesmen and politicians, white Democrats turned to violence and intimidation to regain their political power.

State legislatures began to pass Jim Crow laws to establish racial segregation and restrict labor rights, movement, and organizing by black people.

The right of black people to vote and to serve in the United States Congress was established after the Civil War by amendments to the Constitution.

The Fifteenth Amendment (ratified February 3, 1870) forbade the denial or abridgment of the right to vote on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude, and gave Congress the power to enforce the law by appropriate legislation.

The act required that the former Confederate states ratify their constitutions conferring citizenship rights on black people or forfeit their representation in Congress.

[12] Black people were elected to national office also from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Texas and Virginia.

From 1868, Southern elections were accompanied by increasing violence, especially in Louisiana, Mississippi and the Carolinas, in an effort by Democrats to suppress black voting and regain power.

In the mid-1870s, paramilitary groups such as the White League and Red Shirts worked openly to turn Republicans out of office and intimidate black people from voting.

This followed the earlier years of secret vigilante action by the Ku Klux Klan against freedmen and allied white people.

Many white people who were also illiterate were exempted from such requirements as literacy tests by such strategies as the grandfather clause, basing eligibility on an ancestor's voting status as of 1866, for instance.

Southern state and local legislatures also passed Jim Crow laws that segregated transportation, public facilities, and daily life.

Finally, racial violence in the form of lynchings and race riots increased in frequency, reaching a peak in the last decade of the 19th century.

From 1910 to 1940, the Great Migration of black people from the rural South to Northern cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland began to produce black-majority Congressional districts in the North.

In the two waves of the Great Migration through 1970, more than six and a half million black people moved north and west and became highly urbanized.

In 1928, Oscar De Priest won the 1st Congressional District of Illinois (the South Side of Chicago) as a Republican, becoming the first black congressman of the modern era.

De Priest, Mitchell and their eventual successor, William Dawson, were the only African Americans in Congress up to the mid-1940s, when additional black Democrats began to be elected in Northern cities.

After Watts retired in 2003, the House had no black Republicans until 2011, with the 2010 elections of Allen West in Florida's 22nd and Tim Scott in South Carolina's 1st.

Hurd forwent reelection in 2020, but two black Republicans were elected to the House that year: Byron Donalds in Florida and Burgess Owens in Utah.

[citation needed] By 2000, other demographic and cultural changes resulted in the Republican Party holding a majority of white-majority House districts.