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Being "the first black anything," declared the Rev. Dr. James Alexander Forbes, Jr., in a recent sermon before a large, historically distinguished black congregation in Washington, D.C., always presents considerable challenges. Forbes should know. He was installed as the fifth Senior Minister of the Riverside Church in New York City on June 1, 1989, and retired on June 1, 2007, after a periodically tumultuous tenure. The 2,400-member congregation's first black senior pastor, Forbes—a former professor at Union Theological Seminary—is himself the son of a North Carolina pastor. Forbes' statement in 2008 is made more poignant by virtue of the fact that he had been elected to lead Riverside, that bastion of theological and social liberalism, a full 22 years after the church had resonated to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s radical speech "Beyond Vietnam—A Time to Break Silence." King had spoken there at a time when many mostly white Baptist churches would have denied membership to blacks on account of color, and had acknowledged privately that leading Riverside was the kind of position he had envisioned all through his formal religious studies and early ministry. Yet in 2008, Forbes, the Pastor Emeritus and a charismatic optimist, lamented the role of "first black," and did so after having served an Upper West Side church that proudly proclaimed itself "Interdenominational, Interracial, International, Open, Welcoming, Affirming."
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If serving in an ostensibly friendly religious context over recent years proved racially vexing, then what must it have been like for a black man of distinction to break the color barrier in a secular institution designed not just by and for the dominant white culture, but also organized to preclude black participation in it—and to break this barrier in 1870 (only five years after the end of the Civil War)? This is the question Philip Dray authoritatively answers in his carefully researched and elegantly written book Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen.
Black men's rights to suffrage and to serve in the United States Congress were established only after the Union's victory over the Confederacy. The Constitution's Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December of 1865, abolished slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in July of 1868, made all people born or naturalized in the United States citizens. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in February 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 amendment by appropriate legislation.
In 1866, two seminal acts of Congress set in motion a chain of events that would lead to unprecedented black political power in a region of the country in which there were many Congressional districts containing black majorities. The Civil Rights Act and the Reconstruction Act dissolved all but one of the former Confederate governments and divided the South into five military districts to protect the rights of newly freed blacks. The Reconstruction Act served an ultimatum on Southern legislatures: The former Confederate states would ratify constitutions conferring citizenship rights on blacks, or the former Confederate states would forfeit their representation in Congress.
The impact of federal action was swift and high-profile. Blacks acquired the right to vote across the South, and in the states of Mississippi and South Carolina, where they were the majority of the state population, they formed coalitions with pro-Union whites to take control of the state legislatures. In those days, state legislators elected United States Senators, and during Reconstruction, Mississippi's legislature elected two black Senators. The first of these came to power on February 25, 1870: Hiram Rhodes Revels became the first black member of the Senate. Later that year, Joseph Rainey of South Carolina won his Congressional election, becoming the first black member of the U.S. House of Representatives and thereby the first directly elected black member of Congress. Blacks subsequently were elected from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Virginia. Eminent Columbia University historian Eric Foner, who authored the definitive history Black Reconstruction, has identified more than 1,500 black officeholders during the Reconstruction Era.
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