By Victor Trammell

Photo credits: Getty Images

Hiram Rhodes Revels, a Republican from Mississippi, was inaugurated into the United States Senate on February 25, 1870.

Revels became the first African American to serve in the United States Congress. Hiram Rhodes Revels was a politician and a preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME).

He was the first African-American to sit in the United States Senate and the United States Congress as a whole. During Reconstruction, he represented Mississippi in 1870 and 1871. He served as a chaplain and helped create two battalions of the United States Colored Troops during the American Civil War.

Susan Revels, his daughter, worked as an editor for a newspaper in Seattle, Washington. Horace R. Cayton, Jr., co-author of Black Metropolis, and Revels Cayton, a labor leader, were among his grandchildren.