Representative Joseph H. Rainey and 

the Struggle for Reconstruction
On the cover: This portrait of Joseph Hayne Rainey, the first African American elected to the U.S. House 

of Representatives, was unveiled in 2005. It hangs in the Capitol.

Joseph Hayne Rainey, Simmie Knox, 2004, Collection of the U.S. House of Representatives
September 2020

Representative Joseph H. Rainey and 

the Struggle for Reconstruction
2 | “We Are in Earnest for Our Rights”
Rainey and the Struggle for Reconstruction | 3

On April 29, 1874, Joseph Hayne Rainey 

of South Carolina arrived at the U.S. 

Capitol for the start of another legislative day. 

Born into slavery, Rainey had become the first 

African-American Member of the U.S. House 

of Representatives when he was sworn in on 

December 12, 1870. In less than four years, he 

had established himself as a skilled orator and 

respected colleague in Congress. 

Rainey was dressed in a fine suit and a blue silk 

tie as he took his seat in the back of the chamber 

to prepare for the upcoming debate on a 

government funding bill. When Speaker James 

G. Blaine of Maine directed Luke Potter Poland 

of Vermont to chair the proceedings, Poland in 

turn called Rainey to the marble rostrum and 

handed him the gavel. Rainey became the first 

Black Member to preside over the House and 

used his command of complex parliamentary 

procedure to guide debate. For nearly an hour on 

that cool spring morning in 1874, a Black man— 

born into bondage and denied his very personhood 

by the law—controlled the People’s House.

Reporters covered the proceedings from their 

elevated perch in the House press gallery 

just above the rostrum, and newspapers later 

announced the extraordinary scene in bold 

headlines. “A Liberated Slave in the Speaker’s 

Chair,” the New York Herald wrote the next day. 

The Springfield Republican noted that Rainey’s 

presence was far removed from “the days when 

men of Mr. Rainey’s race were sold under the 

hammer within bowshot of the capitol.” Below 

the headline, “Africa in the Chair,” the Vermont 

Journal emphasized the historic implications of 

this prodigious event. “Surely the world moves, 

for who would have dreamed it, twenty years ago?” 

Of course, many millions had dreamed it: 

generations of Black men and women held in 

captivity and abolitionists such as Frederick 

Douglass had long envisioned a day when 

African Americans would wield power in the 

halls of government. In fact, in 1855, almost 

20 years before Rainey presided over the 

House, John Mercer Langston—a future U.S. 

Representative from Virginia—became one of 

the first Black officeholders in the United States 

upon his election as clerk of Brownhelm, Ohio. 

But the fact remains that as a Black man in South 

Carolina, Joseph Rainey’s trailblazing career in 

American politics was an impossibility before the 

Civil War. The destruction of the Confederacy, 

the demise of slavery, and the beginning of a 

revolutionary new chapter in American history 

called Reconstruction forged new political 

opportunities for African Americans, especially 

in the South. With Republicans in control of 

both houses of Congress, the party’s Radical wing 

worked with Black leaders to rebuild southern 

state governments. By 1870 Congress had taken 

steps to protect the rights of African Americans 

through constitutional amendments and civil 

rights legislation. The government ultimately 

deployed federal troops to keep the peace and 

secure the ballot. 

But white southerners and their northern allies 

in the Democratic Party resisted these reforms 

at every turn. In Congress, Democrats worked to 

limit the federal government’s reach in the South 

and championed what they believed was a state’s 

prerogative to determine the rights of its citizens 

and the qualifications of its voters. Meanwhile, 

Democrats across the South suppressed the 

voting rights of African Americans and white 

Republicans through lynchings and mob violence. 

Into this maelstrom stepped Joseph Rainey. 

His special election victory in 1870 made him 

the first of 14 Black Representatives elected 

This image of Joseph H. Rainey of South Carolina was produced during his service in the House at the Washington, 

DC, photographic studio of Moses P. Rice and Amos I. Rice.

Image courtesy of the New York Public Library
4 | “We Are in Earnest for Our Rights”

before the end of Reconstruction in 1877. He 

took the Oath of Office nearly ten years to the 

day after South Carolina became the first state 

to secede from the Union on December 20, 

1860. And he represented the state that fired 

the first shots of the Civil War at Fort Sumter 

in Charleston Harbor. But Rainey embraced a 

radically different political vision from previous 

lawmakers from the Palmetto State, and his 

career in Congress—like his time presiding over 

the House—was more than merely symbolic.

Rainey had navigated a unique path from slave to 

citizen to Representative, and his personal 

history informed his words and actions as a 

Member of Congress. He was an ardent defender 

of Black civil and political rights. He demanded 

equal protection under the law. And he showed 

the country how to advocate for principles and 

communities that transcended the boundaries of 

any one congressional district. For Rainey, it was 

not enough to simply support the interests of 

his South Carolina district. He also represented, 

in his words, “the outraged and oppressed negro 

population of this country, those I may strictly 

call my constituency.” 

Rainey served in the House for more than 

eight years, making him the longest-tenured 

African-American Member of Congress in 

the nineteenth century—and, remarkably, the 

longest-serving Black federal lawmaker until 

the 1950s. During his time in office, he directly 

challenged—and in some cases, upended—the 

calcified traditions of American politics and 

society. Over nearly a decade, he witnessed 

firsthand both the expansive possibilities 

and persistent limitations of Reconstruction. 

Throughout it all, Rainey embraced the urgency 

of the moment. “We are in earnest for our 

rights,” Rainey declared in 1872, and, as a 

Member of Congress, he used the full extent of 

his powers to hold the United States accountable 

to the principles it had long professed: 

On April 29, 1874, Joseph Rainey became the first African-American Member to preside over the House. This stereoview, 

created between 1873 and 1890, shows the perspective of a Member walking into the House Chamber and facing the 

rostrum where Rainey directed debate.

Collection of the U.S. House of Representatives
Rainey and the Struggle for Reconstruction | 5

inalienable rights, a commitment to justice, and 

the promise of representative government. 

In the House, Rainey spoke on behalf of the 

boundless hope of four million formerly enslaved 

men, women, and children—and many others—

who believed in the prospect of a better future in 

a reconstructed United States. He refused to be 

silenced. One hundred and fifty years after his 

election in 1870, Rainey’s message still resonates.

Emancipation and the Civil War

Joseph Rainey’s circuitous route to Capitol Hill 

began in Georgetown, South Carolina, a port 

town on Winyah Bay north of Charleston and 

the epicenter of the state’s antebellum “rice 

kingdom.” Rainey was born on June 21, 1832, 

into the cruel system of American slavery that 

valued him not as a person, but as property. 

Both of his parents were enslaved, and his father, 

Edward Rainey, was a barber. In an arrangement 

not uncommon in some parts of the antebellum 

South, Edward Rainey was permitted to work for 

wages and retain a portion of his earnings. He 

eventually saved enough to purchase his family’s 

freedom in the early 1840s, although the exact 

date remains unclear.

As was the case for millions of Black men and 

women enslaved in the South, much of Joseph 

Rainey’s early life is difficult to document. Like 

his father, Rainey trained as a barber, and, by 

the 1850s, he worked at the well-known Mills 

House, a hotel in Charleston. At some point in 

the late 1850s Rainey left South Carolina for 

Philadelphia, where he married Susan E. Cooper, 

a South Carolina native, in 1859. By the time the 

Civil War began two years later, the Raineys were 

living in Charleston. 

Early in the war, the Confederate military 

conscripted Rainey and forced him to construct 

fortifications in the city. He also worked as a 

steward on a blockade runner sailing goods and 

supplies between Charleston and Nassau in the 

Bahamas, maneuvering past the maritime barrier 

the United States Navy established to stifle 

Confederate trade. In 1862 Rainey and his wife 

escaped to Bermuda, a British territory 900 miles 

off the coast of South Carolina that had become 

the new hub for Confederate shipping. As part 

of the British empire, Bermuda had abolished 

slavery in 1834. 

During their four years in Bermuda, the Raineys 

started thriving businesses in the towns of St. 

George’s and Hamilton. Joseph Rainey ran a 

barbershop and, according to contemporary 

reports, may have also had “a finger in the 

blockade-running pie.” Susan Rainey was a 

dressmaker who advertised her store as a “branch 

of Mme. Demorest’s Emporium of Fashion,” 

which was headquartered in New York. At the 

time, Madame Ellen Louise Demorest employed 

Black and white women in a fashion empire 

that linked affiliated local dressmaking shops 

with the company’s patterns and styles. The 

Raineys were still living in Bermuda when the 

Confederacy surrendered in April 1865.

In the 1850s Joseph Rainey worked at the Mills House 

hotel in Charleston, South Carolina. This Frank Leslie’s 

Illustrated Newspaper print depicts an 1860 meeting of 

secessionists outside the hotel.

Image courtesy of the Library of Congress
6 | “We Are in Earnest for Our Rights”

Reconstructing State and Nation

With the end of the Civil War and the passage 

of the Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery, 

the world watched as America began a halting 

process of reinvention. In Washington, Radical 

Republicans clashed with President Andrew 

Johnson over how to reshape the South. Johnson, 

a slaveholder and former Tennessee Senator who 

stayed loyal to the United States during the war, 

had planned to reconcile the federal government 

and the South by quickly reintegrating the eleven 

former Confederate states. With Congress away 

having already adjourned, Johnson issued blanket 

pardons to Confederate officials and soldiers 

who had participated in the rebellion. With their 

political rights restored, southern voters elected 

former Confederates to state legislatures and to 

the 39th Congress (1865–1867). Meanwhile, 

southern state governments enacted Black 

Codes, unjust laws that restricted the rights of 

newly emancipated African Americans known as 

freed people.

On Capitol Hill, Radical Republicans—

including many former abolitionists—refused 

to swear in Members-elect from southern states 

and turned the federal government’s attention 

toward ensuring the rights of the freed people. 

In quick succession, Congress passed the Civil 

Rights Act of 1866, which established equal 

protection under the law and broadly prohibited 

discrimination in employment, housing, 

and accommodations; and the Fourteenth 

Amendment, which stated that anyone born 

on American soil was an American citizen—

including the four million men, women, and 

children who had once been enslaved. 

In September 1866, as new economic and political 

opportunities emerged in America, Joseph and 

Susan Rainey left Bermuda and returned to 

South Carolina. Rainey established himself as 

a merchant in Charleston before moving back 

to Georgetown in 1867. There he helped found 

the state Republican Party and represented 

Georgetown on the party’s central committee. 

Because of the work of organizers like Rainey, 

the Republican Party grew exponentially in the 

South during Reconstruction. The party attracted 

overwhelming support from the freed people as 

well as African Americans from both the North 

The Civil Rights Act of 1866 granted all citizens the “full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security 

of person and property.” It created a new role for the federal government protecting individuals against discrimination.

Image courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration

Published in 1866, Thomas Nast’s political cartoon portrays 

Reconstruction under President Andrew Johnson as a 

Shakespearean tragedy. Nast casts Johnson as Iago who 

betrays Othello, shown as an African-American veteran 

of the Civil War.

Image courtesy of the Library of Congress
Rainey and the Struggle for Reconstruction | 7
8 | “We Are in Earnest for Our Rights”

and the South who, like Rainey, were free before 

the war. They were joined by northern white 

Republicans who moved to the South following 

the Confederate surrender to pursue business 

ventures and political openings. These groups 

converged in southern states to build a Republican 

infrastructure, running and electing candidates 

for local offices, state legislatures, and governors. 

Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress devised 

a new framework for readmitting former 

Confederate states into the Union. The 

Reconstruction Acts of 1867 divided the South 

into five military districts and set the required 

terms for states to regain representation in 

Congress: ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, 

approve new state constitutions, and protect the 

voting rights of African-American men.

Rainey was one of three delegates from 

Georgetown at the state constitutional 

convention in January 1868. Although he would 

grow more radical in Congress, Rainey had a 

rather cautious and conservative approach to 

business and politics at the time. When some 

delegates called on the state to seize property 

to collect unpaid debts—including, Rainey 

said, “debts due for the purchase of slaves”—he 

warned that confiscating the over-leveraged 

farms of former slaveholders would only punish 

the Black men and women who still worked 

the land and further impoverish the state. 

He introduced a resolution that rejected land 

redistribution and stressed that “the only manner 

by which any land can be obtained by the landless 

will be to purchase it.” Rainey also called for a 

$1 a year poll tax for the “educational fund of the 

State,” adding that anyone who could not meet 

this property qualification had “no right to vote.”

Following South Carolina’s constitutional 

convention, Rainey won election to the state 

senate in April 1868 and served as chair of the 

finance committee. He was part of a growing 

number of Black lawmakers elected to office in 

South Carolina after the war. African-American 

legislators were a majority in the state house 

from 1868 to 1876 and in the state senate from 

1874 to 1876. With a Republican governor, a 

Republican-controlled legislature, and Black 

officeholders throughout the state, South 

Carolina’s government was no longer dominated 

by the antebellum oligarchy of white slaveholders 

and Democrats.

Rainey was part of South Carolina’s new state 

government when it approved the Fourteenth 

Amendment in July 1868, making it the final 

state necessary to ratify this landmark addition 

to the U.S. Constitution. But African-American 

citizenship remained incomplete without voting 

rights. In Washington, congressional Republicans 

responded by passing the Fifteenth Amendment, 

which declared that the right to vote “shall not 

be denied or abridged by the United States or by 

any State on account of race, color, or previous 

condition of servitude.” It was ratified in 1870.

In the years following the Civil War, federal 

legislation, constitutional amendments, and 

grassroots organizing fundamentally changed 

American society and transformed southern 

politics. By 1877 roughly 2,000 Black men had 

been elected to local, state, and federal offices 

throughout the South. The Black lawmakers who 

served in Congress were a small percentage of 

that number, but the effect was just as profound. 

In the House, it started with Joseph Rainey. 

African-American businessmen, barbers, teachers, and farmers entered South Carolina state politics immediately after 

the Civil War. Some were born into prosperous free Black communities, while others, such as Joseph Rainey, were 

formerly enslaved. Rainey appears in the lower right corner of this 1876 photomontage of Radical Republican South 

Carolina state legislators from 1868.

Image courtesy of the Library of Congress
Rainey and the Struggle for Reconstruction | 9
10 | “We Are in Earnest for Our Rights”

From South Carolina to Capitol Hill

In early 1870, two-term Representative Benjamin 

Franklin Whittemore of Georgetown, South 

Carolina, was accused of selling appointments to 

the U.S. Naval Academy. Whittemore had been 

born and raised in Massachusetts, served as a 

chaplain in the Union Army, and settled in 

South Carolina after the Civil War. Whittemore 

protested the charges in the House, but the House 

Committee on Military Affairs recommended he 

be expelled. Whittemore resigned in protest on 

February 24. 

Rainey entered the race for the open House seat 

and faced none other than Whittemore himself, 

who had decided to run to fill the vacancy 

created by his own departure. Rainey criticized 

Whittemore for having been “virtually expelled” 

from Congress and cautioned voters to “beware 

how they treated one who had disgraced the high 

position to which he had been elevated by their 

confidence and votes.”

Rainey withdrew from the race before the April 

25 election, and Whittemore defeated another 

Republican challenger. But when Whittemore 

presented his credentials on June 21, the House 

refused to seat him. This time, Whittemore’s 

troubles created an opening for Rainey. South 

Carolina scheduled another special election for 

November, and in August the Republican Party 

nominated Rainey to fill the vacancy in the 41st 

Congress (1869–1871), as well as for the full 

term in the 42nd Congress (1871–1873). He 

won both elections with ease and traveled to 

Washington to take his seat.

Rainey’s swearing-in on December 12, 1870, 

did not make him the first African-American 

Member of Congress. That honor belonged to 

Senator Hiram Rhodes Revels of Mississippi, 

who took the Oath of Office on February 

25, 1870; though, like all Senators before the 

ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment 

in 1913, Revels had been chosen by the state 

legislature. As a candidate for the House of 

Representatives, however, Rainey was the first 

African-American lawmaker directly elected 

by voters to take his seat in Congress. It was 

an important distinction and one nearly held 

by John Willis Menard of Louisiana. Two 

years earlier, in November 1868, Menard, who 

had been born in Illinois and had worked for 

President Abraham Lincoln’s administration 

during the war, appeared to have won a special 

election to represent a New Orleans district 

in the House for the final months of the 

40th Congress (1867–1869). When Menard’s 

Democratic opponent contested his victory, 

Menard defended his election before the House 

on February 27, 1869, becoming the first African 

American to address the chamber while it was 

in session. Ultimately, the House refused to seat 

either candidate.

Two years before Joseph Rainey was elected, John Willis 

Menard of Louisiana claimed victory in a special election 

to the House. Menard, photographed around 1869, 

would have been the first African American elected to 

Congress. However, after his opponent contested the 

election results, the House did not seat either candidate.

Image courtesy of the Library of Congress
Rainey and the Struggle for Reconstruction | 11

Rainey arrived in Washington during a 

transitional moment. After five years of 

Republican dominance on Capitol Hill, a 

resurgent Democratic Party had gained 37 

seats in the House during the 1870 elections, 

significantly reducing the Republican majority 

in the upcoming 42nd Congress. Democrats had 

also begun to claw back control of southern state 

governments, further weakening the long-term 

prospects of Reconstruction. 

Although Rainey missed the heyday of 

Republican power in Congress, his very 

presence nevertheless heralded radical change 

in America. His first day in the House was 

an electric scene that attracted the interest 

of reporters and publishers across the nation. 

“The House of Representatives has opened 

its doors to the colored man,” the Cincinnati 

Daily Gazette declared. Frederick Douglass’s 

newspaper, the New National Era, printed a 

bold headline to celebrate the arrival of “The 

First Colored Representative.” Throughout 

December, papers from Maine to Chicago to San 

Francisco reprinted the same story describing 

Rainey’s arrival in the House. The Washington 

correspondent of the New-York Tribune reported 

that when Rainey took the Oath of Office, “the 

hum and buzz of voices ceased on the floor, 

and almost every member turned with an air 

akin to respect, toward the first representative 

on that floor of the newly-enfranchised race.” 

Many reporters reflexively described Rainey’s 

physical appearance, particularly his hair and 

the color of his skin. Others offered patronizing, 

bigoted commentary about the “mulatto barber” 

in the House. One frequently reprinted article, 

however, focused more on Rainey’s abilities and 

determination than on what he looked like. The 

author commended Rainey for his “thirst for 

education”—despite being born into a system of 

oppression that denied enslaved people access to 

even the most basic instruction—and expressed 

full confidence in his skill as a lawmaker. “He 

is an able man, and will do himself and his 

constituents credit.”

As Rainey took his seat, the New-York Tribune

noted that more than a dozen of his new 

colleagues “warmly congratulated” him—

Members who would soon experience firsthand 

Rainey’s skill, dexterity, and brilliance. As 

America’s first Black Representative, Rainey 

shouldered enormous expectations. In the 

crucible of Capitol Hill and with the entire 

country watching, Rainey relished every 

opportunity to speak on the floor. He was witty 

and fearless during debate. His skill as an orator 

captivated the public, the press, and fellow 

Members. Rainey may have lacked a formal 

education, but he had read widely and carefully. 

His remarks mixed logic and philosophy, and he 

seamlessly alternated between subtle and explicit 

literary and religious imagery. In just one speech 

Rainey quoted or alluded to several Bible verses, 

the early Christian theologian Tertullian, the 

English poets William Cowper, Alexander Pope, 

and Lord Byron, as well as a poem by the former 

Poughkeepsie, New York, publishers James E. Dayo 

and George P. Woods copyrighted this print of Joseph 

Rainey in 1871, during his first full year in Congress.

Image courtesy of the Library of Congress
12 | “We Are in Earnest for Our Rights”

Representative and President, John Quincy 

Adams of Massachusetts. Nearly every major 

speech he made on the House Floor included a 

reference from one of Shakespeare’s great works. 

He frequently drew inspiration from Hamlet, 

Othello, and Julius Caesar—the last a favorite for 

its themes of treason, corruption, and the nature 

of political power. 

During his time in office, Rainey was a conscientious 

lawmaker and a fixture in the House. Although 

he did not compile a lengthy record of legislative 

achievements, his colleagues and the press routinely 

praised his work. Like most Members of Congress 

at the time, Rainey introduced memorials and 

petitions but relatively few pieces of legislation—

mostly private bills for pensions and measures 

meant to help individual constituents. In fact, 

Rainey introduced only five bills related to other 

matters—none of which became law. When 

it came to major national legislation, however, 

Rainey left his mark, pushing the House to adopt 

more equitable and just policies.

But all that would happen later. In his brief first 

term in the winter of 1870 to 1871, during the 

final weeks of the 41st Congress, Rainey voted 

regularly, submitted petitions and memorials, 

but did not speak on the House Floor for the 

remainder of the session.

As he quietly observed proceedings from his 

seat in the chamber, Rainey was nevertheless 

active outside the House as a member of the 

Joseph Rainey’s election credentials from 1874 marked his fourth victory for a seat in the House.

Image courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration
Rainey and the Struggle for Reconstruction | 13

executive committee of the Union League, 

a national fraternal organization working to 

mobilize support for Republicans. On January 

14, 1871, the committee met with President 

Ulysses S. Grant at the White House. Rainey 

informed the President of the League’s efforts 

in his home state, detailing its “indispensable” 

role enfranchising freedmen and building a 

Republican Party in the South.

Two days later, Jefferson Franklin Long of 

Georgia became the second African-American 

Member of the House. One Virginia newspaper 

observed that Rainey and Long “fraternized at 

once, and struck up a conversation as soon as the 

latter was sworn in.” This was a brief legislative 

partnership, however. Long served only the 

remaining weeks of the 41st Congress, but he 

was the first African-American Member to make 

a speech on the House Floor.

On January 20, Representative George Washington 

Julian of Indiana introduced a women’s suffrage 

amendment to legislation establishing a territorial 

government in the District of Columbia. Long 

supported the voting rights amendment, but 

Rainey joined the majority in rejecting it. “The 

colored vote of the House divided on this question,” 

the Boston Journal wrote. Rainey offered no 

explanation for his vote, but as in his earlier 

support for a poll tax in South Carolina, he may 

have been reluctant to support true universal 

suffrage at this stage of his career.

Long’s departure from the House was followed 

by the arrival of four new African-American 

Members elected in 1870 to the 42nd Congress. 

In addition to Benjamin Sterling Turner of 

Alabama and Josiah Thomas Walls of Florida, 

Rainey was joined by two fellow South 

Carolinians, Robert Carlos De Large and Robert 

Brown Elliott. On the first day of the new 

Congress, Members selected seats on the House 

Floor. Turner and Elliott chose seats in the back 

close to the main aisle, while De Large and Walls 

joined Rainey in what one reporter described as 

“a small colored colony” in the southwest corner 

before senior Republican Members dispersed 

the newcomers. When Ginery Twichell of 

Massachusetts tried to lay claim to Rainey’s 

seat, Rainey respectfully declined and kept his 

preferred spot on the Republican side. It may 

have been only hours into the 42nd Congress, 

but Rainey made clear that he would no longer 

remain silent. 

“I Stand upon the Broad Plane 

of Right”

By 1871 the United States had reached a fateful 

crossroads. Despite the Reconstruction Amendments 

and the presence of U.S. troops in the South, 

white southerners continued to violently undermine 

the civil and political rights of African Americans. 

Beginning in 1866, congressional committees 

spent years investigating the vigilante violence 

deployed in the former Confederacy to threaten 

African Americans and white Republicans. 

This 1872 Currier & Ives print shows African-American 

Members of the 41st and 42nd Congresses (1869–1873). 

From left to right: Senator Hiram Rhodes Revels of 

Mississippi, Representatives Benjamin Sterling Turner 

of Alabama, Robert Carlos De Large of South Carolina, 

Josiah Thomas Walls of Florida, Jefferson Franklin Long 

of Georgia, Joseph Hayne Rainey of South Carolina, and 

Robert Brown Elliott of South Carolina.

Image courtesy of the Library of Congress
14 | “We Are in Earnest for Our Rights”

Witnesses submitted graphic testimony of 

murders, beatings, and economic and political 

repression in Southern states. The congressional 

hearings also traced the rise of organized white 

terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. From 

1869 to 1871, the Klan orchestrated a tidal wave 

of racial violence that threatened Republican-led 

Reconstruction governments across the South. 

When the Republican-controlled House convened 

the 42nd Congress on March 4, 1871—one day 

after the end of the 41st Congress—President 

Grant called on lawmakers to find legislative 

solutions to end the turmoil.

On March 28, Samuel Shellabarger of Ohio 

introduced the third in a series of laws referred 

to as the Enforcement Acts. Shellabarger’s bill, 

what came to be known as the Ku Klux Klan 

Act of 1871, created new mechanisms to ensure 

equal protection, expanded the reach of federal 

law enforcement, and empowered federal district 

attorneys to aggressively prosecute the Klan. 

Congress also gave the President the power to 

suspend the writ of habeas corpus and use federal 

troops to quell violence.

For the first time, African-American Representatives 

in the House were in a position to advocate for 

federal legislation that protected the rights of 

African-American citizens. On the afternoon 

of April 1, Rainey’s South Carolina colleague, 

Robert Elliott, forcefully defended the bill, which 

he said was “not only fully warranted, but it is 

imperatively demanded by the present posture of 

affairs in the southern states.” Elliott spoke at 

length to challenge those who claimed the bill 

was unconstitutional, laying out a detailed legal 

defense of its provisions and submitting to the 

record excerpts from the South Carolina state 

legislature’s report on Klan violence in his district. 

After a brief recess, the House reconvened at 

7:30 p.m. for the evening session. Representative 

James Gorrall Blair of Missouri began by 

objecting to the bill on constitutional grounds, 

arguing that it would encourage “centralization” 

and violate “those powers heretofore known as 

‘State’s rights.’ ” 

Rainey immediately rose to dispute Blair’s 

claims. Because legal authorities in the South 

refused to prevent the violence or prosecute 

those responsible, the federal government had 

no choice but to step in given the “enormity of 

the crimes,” Rainey said. The South, he observed, 

had cultivated a society where people loyal to the 

United States were being “murdered for political 

opinion’s sake.”

Rainey called for decisive federal action to 

end the prevailing state of chaos in the former 

Confederacy, and he rejected Blair’s claim that 

the bill was unconstitutional. The Constitution, 

Rainey said, was designed to provide “protection 

to the humblest citizen, without regard to rank, 

creed, or color.” It should be a “bulwark of 

freedom” protecting “inalienable rights” for all 

against “foreign invasion and domestic violence.” 

South Carolina Representative Robert B. Elliott joined 

Joseph Rainey in advocating for legislation to protect 

African-American citizens and prosecute the Ku 

Klux Klan. In 1874 Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper 

published this portrait of Elliott and celebrated his 

oratorical skill.

Collection of the U.S. House of Representatives
Rainey and the Struggle for Reconstruction | 15

This was an essential function of any system of 

government, Rainey said. “Tell me nothing of 

a constitution which fails to shelter beneath its 

rightful power the people of a country!”

The muddled legal and constitutional objections 

to the bill, Rainey argued, dehumanized the 

victims of violence in the South and evaded the 

issues of fairness, justice, and equality. “I stand 

upon the broad plane of right,” Rainey declared, 

adding that throughout its history, the United 

States had been “proudly proclaimed to the world 

the refuge, the safe asylum of the oppressed of all 

lands.” If Congress refused to protect individual 

rights, he asked, was “this grand boast of ours 

... a mere form of words, an utter fraud?” With 

a majority in both chambers, Republicans in 

Congress approved the bill on April 20, and 

President Grant signed it into law. 

Less than a month later, on May 10, Rainey, 

along with two members of the South Carolina 

state legislature, a county sheriff, and the customs 

collector, all received a letter directly from the 

Ku Klux Klan. It was written in red ink and 

adorned with a skull and crossbones. “Your doom 

is sealed in blood,” the letter began. The state and 

local officials were told to leave South Carolina 

or “prepare to meet their God. Take heed, stay 

not. Here, the climate is too hot for you.... We 

warn you to flee. Each and every one of you are 

watched each hour.” 

Rainey forwarded the letter, along with his own 

response to the threat, to John M. Morris, an 

acquaintance and the publisher of the Washington 

Chronicle. “I send this to you direct, because I am 

aware of the presence of many around and about 

Washington who are incredulous on the subject 

of Ku-Kluxism; believing the various reports 

fallacious.” The “ex-rebels,” Rainey said, had 

attacked him in a Democratic newspaper back 

home after his speech in the House defending 

the need for the Ku Klux Klan Act. “They feel 

chagrined and chafed in mind because the truth 

has stung them,” Rainey added.

Although Rainey noted that the recipients of 

the Klan’s letter were landowners, taxpayers, and 

Republicans “of some prominence” in South 

Carolina, he also pointed out that the promise of 

violence was part of a sustained campaign against 

all Republican voters in the state—one that 

extended beyond the ranks of elected officials.

Poor farmers who supported the party became 

targets of growing economic pressure even as 

they faced an ever-present threat of harm. “My 

fears,” Rainey said, “are that want and starvation 

will drive many a good and faithful Republican 

from our ranks, unless they be secured in life, 

liberty and property.” 

Rainey’s letter to the Washington Chronicle was 

a clarion call for the federal government to 

intervene. Democrats had tried to obscure the 

incidents of violence and intimidation against 

African Americans in the South. In fact, soon 

after the publication of Rainey’s letter, a South 

Carolina newspaper proved this very point when 

it wrote that the Congressman had fallen for 

“a very poor joke” that was most likely sent by 

a Republican rival, not the Ku Klux Klan. But 

Rainey was not easily intimidated: he and the 

other officials who received the Klan letter, he 

In this 1872 print, “Visit of the Ku-Klux,” artist Frank 

Bellew portrays the terror caused by the Ku Klux Klan. 

As an African-American woman cooks at home with her 

children, hooded Klansmen approach, and one points a 

rifle at the family.

Image courtesy of the Library of Congress
16 | “We Are in Earnest for Our Rights”

said, “have come to the conclusion to remain, 

and, if needs [sic] be, sell our lives dear as the 

price of liberty and manhood.” 

Rainey’s brush with the Klan was not unique. 

By October 1871, with violence escalating across 

South Carolina, President Grant used the Klan 

Act to declare a “condition of lawlessness” in 

nine counties. He suspended the writ of habeas 

corpus and sent federal troops to occupy the 

region. Many Klansmen fled South Carolina as 

the United States Army arrested hundreds and 

Black-majority juries sentenced several dozen to 

prison. Along with hundreds of indictments in 

North Carolina and Mississippi, Grant’s show of 

force decisively damaged the Klan. 

Although Klan violence subsided in the former 

Confederacy in the early 1870s, Rainey remained 

concerned. In Congress, Democrats sought 

additional ways to weaken the federal presence 

in the South. On March 5, 1872, Representative 

Richard Thomas Walker Duke of Virginia tried to 

cut $1 million in supplemental funding to protect 

voting rights in the South. To Rainey, this was 

outrageous. African-American communities in 

South Carolina had been “persecuted, maltreated, 

murdered, and in every way abused, not only 

men, but helpless women and children,” he said. 

Congress needed to direct the vast resources of the 

federal government to protect its loyal citizens. 

I, sir, for one, stand here in favor of voting 

every dollar that may be necessary to carry 

on these prosecutions until every man in 

the southern States shall know that this 

Government has a strong arm, and that 

there is a power here that will make them 

feel that if they will not obey the statutes 

of the country they shall be made to bow 

submissively to those enactments at the 

point of the bayonet, be they white or black.

Democrat Samuel Sullivan Cox of New York 

spoke after Rainey in support of the funding 

cuts. A renowned debater, Cox was known for 

rhetorical flourishes and lengthy diatribes. He 

accused northern white Republicans who moved 

south after the war of political opportunism and 

alleged the Republican-led state government of 

South Carolina was rife with corruption. The 

federal government, he argued, was careless with 

the public purse and he claimed that any new 

funding would be used to strip white southerners 

of their rights. After disingenuously insisting that 

the Democratic Party had done much to attract 

the support of African-American voters, Cox 

ended his remarks by questioning why Rainey 

and the other Black Members—whom he called 

“the special guardians of the wards of the nation”—

had not done more for the freed people.

Rainey refused to let Cox’s comments stand 

unchallenged. Without more funding to prosecute 

crimes and protect the people, Rainey said, “you 

cannot expect the negro to rise while the 

Democrats are trampling upon him and his rights.” 

Harper’s Weekly printed this drawing of New York 

Representative Samuel Sullivan Cox in 1888.

Collection of the U.S. House of Representatives
Rainey and the Struggle for Reconstruction | 17

Rainey called out Democrats for their duplicity. 

He demanded they stop belittling the everyday 

realities of his Black constituents and instead 

support the much-needed federal civil rights 

legislation. “I will then see who are our best friends 

on that side of the House,” he said, directing 

his comments at Democrats. His Republican 

colleagues erupted in laughter and applause.

The New York Daily Herald called Rainey’s remarks 

“the greatest sensation of the season,” made by “the 

representative of a race who ten years ago were not 

allowed within the walls of the Capitol, except in 

the capacity of servants.” When it was his turn to 

speak, Representative Henry Laurens Dawes of 

Massachusetts said that he could not “add anything 

to the hot words” Rainey had aimed at Cox. The 

Herald ’s Capitol Hill correspondent noted that 

Members on the floor and visitors in the gallery 

frequently applauded Rainey’s “manly, temperate 

and able effort” to deliver the “vindication of his 

race against the aspersions of the member from 

New York.” Ultimately, the House approved the 

$1 million appropriation Rainey supported. 

Education and Freedom

At a time in American history when local 

concerns dictated the rhythms of daily life, Rainey 

had an expansive, national understanding of 

the role of government in American society. He 

believed Congress had a duty to both protect 

its citizens—especially the freed people in 

the South—and to take proactive measures to 

promote the well-being of Americans everywhere. 

On February 3, 1872, Rainey addressed the House

This image, taken between 1862 and 1865, shows African-American men, women, and children outside a building on 

Edisto Island, South Carolina. This structure, which was likely used as a school and a chapel, would have been similar 

to buildings erected by Black communities across the South after the war.

Image courtesy of the Library of Congress
18 | “We Are in Earnest for Our Rights”

to urge passage of an education bill introduced 

by Union Army veteran Legrand Winfield Perce 

of Mississippi that would funnel a percentage of 

the proceeds from the sale of public lands into a 

national network of public schools. 

Education was an immediate and aching priority 

for the freed people. Across the antebellum 

South, law and custom had prohibited enslaved 

African Americans from learning to read and 

write. In his autobiography, Frederick Douglass 

recalled exactly when, as a boy, he realized that 

“the white man’s power to enslave the black man” 

depended on denying men, women, and children 

an education. “From that moment,” Douglass 

wrote, “I understood the pathway from slavery 

to freedom.” 

After the war, African-American communities 

pooled their resources to build schools and hire 

teachers. They received additional funding from 

the federal government’s Freedmen’s Bureau and 

northern aid societies. For Rainey, that was not 

nearly enough, and he implored Congress to 

provide more resources. Rainey told the House of 

children “striving to read” and “old gray-headed 

men, formerly slaves, learning the alphabet, and 

straining their blunted senses in quest of 

knowledge,and this, too, after the hard toils of 

the day.” 

Many northern states already had robust local 

school districts, but Rainey saw in the South 

an opportunity to finance and sustain a federal, 

publicly funded school system to develop the 

“future lawmakers and rulers of our country.” 

The lack of governmental support had created 

a “mental midnight” in America, Rainey said, 

which was “not necessarily sectional.” He cited 

statistics to demonstrate that schools and 

teachers were “needed alike by all classes, both 

white and black,” and dismissed complaints 

about “centralization.” Instead, he celebrated the 

federal government’s capacity to provide equal 

public services. A national school system, he 

added, was a “great remedy” that could eliminate 

America’s “sectional feeling” and prevent future 

Klan violence in the South.

Rainey also rebuked Members who stoked fears 

about integrated public schools. He touted 

what he called the “mixed” schools in New 

England and described Democratic opposition to 

integration as “the remnant of the old pro-slavery 

spirit, which must eventually give place to more 

humane and elevating ideas.” 

Poor access to schools and educational opportunity 

was a major injustice, Rainey believed, and he 

pushed the federal government to distribute “its 

benefits and wealth to another class besides railroad 

corporations, who already have too much of what 

in right and equity belongs to the people.” A 

national education system would better leverage 

public resources, foster an informed citizenry, and 

ensure that “the people are the rightful rulers, and 

those in power are but their servants.” Despite 

Rainey’s impassioned arguments, Perce’s 

education bill never became law.

“The Class to Which I Belong”

On March 3, 1873—the final day of the 42nd 

Congress—Democrat Ephraim Leister Acker 

of Pennsylvania took to the House Floor to 

complain that he had not been allowed to put a 

“general amnesty” bill up for a vote. Following 

the war, Congress limited the opportunities of 

former Confederates to vote and hold public 

office. Democrats from both the North and 

South had long pushed to remove these “political 

disabilities,” and Members from across the 

country introduced private bills erasing such 

restrictions on a case-by-case basis. In May 

1872, Congress passed the Amnesty Act, which 

provided relief for “all persons” in the South 

except for a few hundred who had held specific 

high-ranking federal offices when they joined 

the rebellion. Despite the Amnesty Act, Acker 

wanted Congress to remove once and for all the 

“political disabilities of all persons still laboring 

under them.”
Rainey and the Struggle for Reconstruction | 19

In the House, Rainey had dutifully worked to 

restore rights to some of his South Carolina 

constituents. But he could not support Acker’s 

bill for blanket forgiveness without conditions. 

Rainey took the floor, warning that Acker’s 

call to help “a few men who had raised their 

traitorous hands against this Government,” 

overlooked the very real plight of African 

Americans in the United States. Why, he asked, 

would Congress ignore the rights and interests of 

its most loyal citizens to address the concerns of 

its most disloyal? 

Since 1870, when Senator Charles Sumner 

of Massachusetts introduced a sweeping civil 

rights bill, Republicans in Congress had worked 

to pass new protections for the millions of 

freed people living in the South. Sumner’s bill 

preserved equal access to public accommodations, 

transportation, schools, churches, and 

cemeteries—and, importantly, created federal 

enforcement measures. 

But for three years, Acker and congressional 

Democrats denied the immediacy of the 

situation in the South. For Rainey, the time 

to act on civil rights, not amnesty, was long 

overdue. If the House refused to vote as the 

42nd Congress came to a close in March 1873, 

“four million people” would continue to suffer 

from “the prejudice and oppression that have 

for so long existed against them in this country.” 

The political status of former Confederate 

leaders—the very people who tried to destroy 

the country—was far less important than the 

life, liberty, and general welfare of his Black 

constituents. “We should be generous to all,” 

Rainey said, “not simply to a few.” 

Rainey condemned Democrats who habitually 

rejected any and all legislation “for the benefit 

of the class to which I belong, a class that have 

always been ready to stand up for the country 

and its rights, and for the rights of all.” As had 

been so often the case, the House adjourned 

without acting on the civil rights bill. 

In the summer of 1873, with the opening of the 

43rd Congress (1873–1875) still months away in 

December, Rainey was invited to visit the village 

of Tariffville in northern Connecticut in late July. 

A year later, he purchased a summer home in the 

nearby town of Windsor, Connecticut, where his 

family became enmeshed in the local community.

In Tariffville, Rainey spoke to a mostly Black 

crowd of more than 700 who had gathered to 

commemorate the end of slavery in the West 

Indies nearly 40 years earlier. According to 

the Hartford Courant, Rainey did not mention 

his time in Bermuda, but he was effusive in 

his praise for those who had rid the British 

territories in the Caribbean of slavery and offered 

“glowing words” for the Haitian revolutionary 

Toussaint L’Ouverture. 

During his remarks, Rainey promised to 

“represent the interests of the colored men of 

the whole country; first the colored men, then 

Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, photographed 

by Mathew Brady, was a prominent abolitionist in 

Congress before the Civil War and a leading Radical 

Republican during Reconstruction. 

Image courtesy of the Library of Congress
20 | “We Are in Earnest for Our Rights”

somebody else’s interests.” Rainey was one of 

seven African-American Representatives in 

the 43rd Congress, all of whom, he said, were 

prepared to return to Washington and “go against 

the interests of every state whose representatives 

go against ours.” For Rainey, the very presence 

of more African-American lawmakers was 

essential to transforming American society and 

politics. Once ensconced in their “high office,” 

Rainey said, each African-American Member of 

Congress will “make the white man recognize his 

black face, and know he has met his equal.”

Creating a More Equitable America

Despite the departure of Turner and De Large, 

four first-term African-American Members were 

elected in 1872, thereby establishing the largest 

contingent of Black Representatives in any 

Congress during the nineteenth century. Once 

again, South Carolina led the way with two new 

Members, Richard Harvey Cain and Alonzo 

Jacob Ransier, meaning that four of South 

Carolina’s five Representatives in the U.S. House 

were Black. They were joined by John Roy Lynch 

of Mississippi, James Thomas Rapier of Alabama, 

and the remaining incumbent from the 42nd 

Congress, Josiah Walls of Florida. 

On December 18, 1873, only three weeks into 

the 43rd Congress, Representative Benjamin 

Franklin Butler of Massachusetts introduced a 

version of Sumner’s civil rights bill in the House. 

Butler, a dour and brash lawyer, was a convert to 

the cause of civil rights. A former Democrat, he 

had served as major general in the Union Army 

Photographed by Mathew Brady’s studio, Benjamin 

Franklin Butler served as a major general in the Union 

Army. In 1873, as a Massachusetts Representative, Butler 

introduced the civil rights bill that later became law.

Image courtesy of the Library of Congress

Josiah T. Walls served in the House from the 42nd to 

the 44th Congresses (1871–1877). In 1870 Walls was 

nearly assassinated on the campaign trail. At a rally in 

Gainesville, Florida, a bullet missed him by inches.

Image courtesy of the Library of Congress
Rainey and the Struggle for Reconstruction | 21

and almost singlehandedly created the military’s 

contraband policy, which instructed U.S. forces to 

offer shelter and protection to enslaved men and 

women who fled to Union lines. Butler became 

a Republican and after the war championed the 

cause of the four million freed people in the South.

The day after Butler introduced the civil rights 

bill, Representative James Burnie Beck of 

Kentucky argued against it. Much like the earlier 

resistance to the Ku Klux Klan Act, Beck and 

his Democratic colleagues accused Republicans 

of federal overreach. He cited Kentucky’s 

decision to allow “colored men to testify in cases 

where white men were parties,” and insisted that 

such a change would not have been possible 

if “forced upon” the people of his state by the 

federal government. 

For Democrats—and even many Republicans— 

it was enough that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth 

Amendments provided equality under the law. 

Legislation that might provide conditions for 

an equitable society was a step too far. During 

Rainey’s career on Capitol Hill, opponents routinely 

decried “social equality” in the halls of Congress. 

When used by Beck and his contemporaries, 

“social equality” signaled the creation of personal 

relationships across the color line—from interracial 

marriages to more subtle violations of longstanding norms barring interracial socialization 

and association in public spaces. White southerners 

saw this and feared the collapse of the established 

racial order in the South.

Rainey patiently explained to the House that he 

understood these issues much differently. Social 

and legal equality, he said, should be understood 

in “the light of humanity; I view it in the light of 

progress and civilization which are now rapidly 

marching over this country.” Democrats, Rainey 

said, “have a feeling against the negro in this 

country that I suppose will never die out.” But 

he insisted that this “feeling” should not derail 

the effort to codify, once and for all, the right to 

equal standing and equal status.

“I can say for myself that I am contented to be 

what I am so long as I have my rights,” Rainey 

declared. “I prefer to choose my own associates, 

and all my colleagues here and the whole race 

I belong to prefer to make that choice. We do 

not ask the passage of any law forcing us upon 

anybody who does not want to receive us. But we 

do want a law enacted that we may be recognized 

like other men in this country.”

During his remarks, Rainey made the case for 

what he often referred to as “class legislation”—

laws designed to ensure the rights of a specific

group in American society. At the time, opponents 

criticized these laws for applying differently to 

diverse groups, which they claimed established 

social, economic, or political hierarchies. For 

Rainey, however, “class legislation” was key to 

creating a more equitable America. The civil 

rights bill, for instance, rectified an injustice and 

did not create new restrictions. If southern states 

refused to acknowledge and protect the rights 

of the freed people, then Congress needed to 

pass targeted legislation to eliminate legal 

disparities and guarantee those rights. The 

revolutionary promises of American democracy, 

Rainey argued, were only as secure as America’s 

least protected citizens. 

Three months later, on March 11, 1874, Senator 

Charles Sumner died in Washington, DC. 

Before the war, Sumner had been a stalwart 

abolitionist who was nearly beaten to death by 

South Carolina Representative Preston Smith 

Brooks on the Senate Floor following comments 

condemning slavery. After the war, Sumner was 

a leading Radical Republican and a champion 

of Radical Reconstruction. Rainey was the 

only African-American Member in the House 

delegation appointed to accompany Sumner’s 

body home to Boston.

On April 27, Rainey eulogized Sumner on the 

House Floor, offering a “humble and heartfelt 

tribute.” “The cause of my race was always foremost 

in his mind,” Rainey said. Rainey recalled “the 
22 | “We Are in Earnest for Our Rights”

warm and friendly grasp he gave my hand soon 

after I was admitted a member of this House. On 

my first visit to the Senate he said: ‘I welcome you 

to this Chamber. Come over frequently; you have 

rights here.’” Sumner’s dying words were reportedly 

an appeal to pass the civil rights bill, a fitting end 

for someone who had spent his entire life, Rainey 

said, as “an advocate of human rights.” 

Reconstruction and Human Rights

Sumner had made “human rights” for the freed 

people a central goal of Reconstruction, using 

the term almost interchangeably with “equal 

rights” and “the rights of man.” Rainey’s vision of 

human rights was similarly expansive. After the 

Civil War, for instance, as the federal government 

brutally suppressed American Indian nations 

west of the Mississippi River, Rainey advocated 

for the rights of Native Americans on the House 

Floor. Like many of his contemporaries, Rainey 

seemed to believe in the inevitability of westward 

expansion. But he urged the U.S. government to 

abandon the “sword and bayonet” and abide by 

its existing treaties with western tribes. Rainey’s 

support for tribal autonomy was complicated by 

his desire to impart what he called the “civilizing 

influences” of American society to Native 

Americans. At the same time, he recognized their 

sovereignty and condemned the government’s 

willingness “to dictate to them, as though they 

were children and not entitled to say one word in 

behalf of their own rights.”

Rainey also applied his perspective on individual 

rights to the workplace. On June 13, 1874, 

Representative John King Luttrell of California 

offered an amendment to a spending bill to prevent 

employers from hiring Chinese immigrants 

to work on a federally funded building project 

north of San Francisco. Luttrell’s measure, which 

ultimately failed, explicitly banned Chinese 

laborers because he believed they would “displace 

white labor.”

Rainey objected to the amendment on several 

grounds, but chief among them was that he 

welcomed Chinese workers as part of a needed 

influx of immigrants to the United States. “They 

come here and are willing to work and assist in 

the development of the country,” he said, and they 

should be free to sell their labor without restriction. 

Rainey rejected the claim that Congress had 

the power to condition federal funding on 

discriminatory hiring requirements, and he could 

see the inevitable end of such a policy: if Congress 

could limit the opportunities of Chinese 

immigrants, “not many days will elapse before we 

shall have a proposition presented that negroes 

shall not be employed under appropriations made 

by the Government,” he predicted. Equal access 

to the workplace was an essential part of a truly 

democratic society, according to Rainey. “I say 

that the Chinaman, the Indian, the negro, and 

In a letter dated March 29, 1874, Joseph Rainey informs 

Osborn H. Oldroyd, a former Union sergeant and 

author, of the death of Senator Charles Sumner. “I regret 

to inform you that we have lost an eminent Statesman, 

renown [sic] philanthropist, and faithful friend.”

Image courtesy of the Alexander Gumby Collection of 

Negroiana, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia 

University in the City of New York
Rainey and the Struggle for Reconstruction | 23

the white man should all occupy an equal footing 

under this Government; should be accorded 

equal right to make their livelihood and establish 

their manhood.” 

“Tired of this Dilly Dallying”

In June 1874, a reporter from the Pittsburgh 

Evening Leader interviewed Rainey about the 

fate of the civil rights bill. Rainey’s responses 

underscored his increasing concern about the slow 

pace of political change. Appalled at the lack of 

urgency on Capitol Hill, Rainey noted that he 

and the other African-American Members were 

“tired of this dilly dallying” and demanded action 

on a bill guaranteeing equal access to education 

and public accommodations. He conceded, though, 

that desegregating churches was not his priority. 

“I guess I can get to heaven by some other road 

if necessary, and will not ask Congress to help 

me in that.”

For Rainey, equal access to educational opportunity 

was paramount. He had been denied an education 

before and after his emancipation and told the 

reporter that he would rather send his children 

to Europe or Canada than have them educated 

in segregated schools in America. Why should 

his children be “hindered in the enjoyment of the 

educational institutions of the country,” he asked, 

“merely on account of their color, when we are 

taxed for the support of these schools?” 

Rainey also spoke frankly about his experience as 

an African-American Member of Congress living 

and working in the distinctly southern confines of

Washington, DC. Every day, he said, he and the 

other Black lawmakers confronted the types of 

discrimination the civil rights bill sought to outlaw. 

There was an inherent contradiction in their status 

as duly elected legislators, Rainey noted. They had 

the right to vote on “important legislation having 

a direct effect upon the interest of the country,” he 

said, “and yet when we go out it is with fear and 

trembling that we may be openly insulted when we 

are seeking only the common necessities of life.” 

Rainey noted that he and his fellow AfricanAmerican Representatives were “charged more 

for living than any of the white members”—so 

much so that he did not even consider staying 

at any Washington hotels. And he described 

visiting a Washington establishment where he 

was charged 50 cents for a glass of beer—ten 

times the standard price. “Is this because I am a 

colored man?” Rainey asked. The waiter replied 

that it was. “I went away, at this very much 

mortified,” Rainey recalled.

Rainey also struggled to secure equal 

accommodations during his travels. When he 

boarded a train in Charleston, for instance, 

Rainey noted he could sit in the first-class car 

for the entire trip south to Savannah, Georgia. 

On the return journey, Rainey was forced to sit 

in the second-class car, despite his first-class 

ticket. “Now how can it be that I am all right 

one way and a social leper the other?” Similarly, 

when Rainey traveled first class by boat between 

Washington, DC, and Norfolk, Virginia, he 

was prevented from eating in the main dining 

hall and forced to sit with the wait staff. On 

subsequent trips, he carried his own lunch. 

In the summer of 1874, Rainey tried to eat at a 

hotel in Suffolk, Virginia, and was refused service 

in the dining room with white patrons. The press 

then subjected him to further indignity. One 

article about the incident, which was reprinted 

across the country, almost surely exaggerated 

Rainey’s reaction to make him seem like the 

aggressor rather than the victim of yet another 

injustice. “Rainey became so violent in his 

expressions that the clerk took him by the collar 

and threw him out,” the reporter noted. 

The Civil Rights Act of 1875

Incidents of public discrimination had become 

more frequent during Rainey’s tenure in 

Congress and served as a harbinger of changes 

to come. In November 1874, the Democratic 

Party seized the majority in the House for the 
24 | “We Are in Earnest for Our Rights”

first time since before the Civil War. A severe, 

nationwide economic depression that began 

in 1873, coupled with significant Democratic 

victories at the state level, primed the party for 

a return to power on Capitol Hill at the start of 

the 44th Congress (1875–1877). 

The incoming Democratic majority threatened 

the fragile progress Rainey and others had made 

on the civil rights bill. With Republicans still in 

control of the House for the remaining months 

of the 43rd Congress, proponents redoubled their 

efforts to pass a compromise agreement before 

the session ended on March 3, 1875.

On February 3, Rainey again brought his 

concerns about segregated public spaces to the 

House Floor. With Republicans racing against 

the clock, Democrats dug in. During debate 

on the civil rights bill, Democrat Thomas 

Whitehead of Virginia boldly claimed that 

discrimination in public transportation and in 

restaurants did not exist in his state. Rainey 

responded by describing a visit to Richmond 

where he said he was forced into a segregated 

carriage on the city’s street cars. “Did you tell 

them who you were?” Whitehead asked. Rainey 

replied that he did not. “It is not necessary for 

me to do so in order to ride in the street cars of 

New York or Boston,” Rainey said, making the 

accompanying point that his status as a Member 

of Congress should have no bearing on his rights. 

Representative Richard Cain cited a similar 

example of an acquaintance who experienced 

segregated street cars in Richmond. 

As the day wore on, Rainey once again rose to 

defend the civil rights bill. He was adamant that 

school integration was both a matter of equal 

rights and the key to building a better society. 

Bringing together white and Black children in 

the classroom, he said, was a way to “remove 

fears and annihilate that prejudice” at a young 

age. “Surely the children are not better than their 

parents, who now sit with us in the jury box 

[and] the legislative hall.”

Democrats repeatedly cited the Fourteenth 

and Fifteenth Amendments to make the case 

that Congress did not need to pass additional 

legislation. Rainey, however, noted that 

Democrats read the Constitution “with partial 

and selfish motives.” African Americans were 

part of the larger body politic and were thus 

afforded rights by the entire document. The civil 

rights bill, he said, was necessary to ensure the 

enjoyment of these rights. “The only ground 

upon which these privileges and immunities 

are withheld,” Rainey said, “is because of 

complexional differences.”

For nearly five years, Democrats told Rainey 

that the discrimination, threats, and inequality 

he and millions of African Americans faced 

A pastor, newspaper editor, and state senator, Richard 

Harvey Cain represented South Carolina during the 

43rd and 45th Congresses (1873–1875; 1877–1879). 

Cain, photographed by the C. M. Bell Studio in 

Washington, DC, spoke forcefully in support of civil 

rights on the House Floor.

Image courtesy of the Library of Congress
Rainey and the Struggle for Reconstruction | 25

everyday simply did not exist. Rainey rebuffed 

them, imploring Congress to uphold America’s 

founding declaration that all men were created 

equal. Finally, on March 1, 1875, Butler’s civil 

rights bill, H.R. 796, was signed into law, only 

two days before the end of the Congress. It was 

a partial victory. Although the law prohibited 

discrimination in juries, transportation, and 

public accommodations, it lacked enforcement 

power, and the provisions related to schools, 

churches, and cemeteries had been removed. 

Only eight years later, in 1883, the Supreme 

Court ruled that key portions of the Civil Rights 

Act of 1875 were unconstitutional. The decision 

had a lasting effect and severely curtailed the 

federal government’s ability to protect AfricanAmerican civil rights for decades. 

“Sent Here by the Suffrages 

of the People” 

Beyond the bills and resolutions and 

amendments, Rainey saw the House itself as a 

forum to assert his rights and demonstrate how 

to reform an institution traditionally resistant 

to change. It was an uphill struggle. Rainey and 

his African-American colleagues faced daily 

indignities on and off Capitol Hill. But over 

the course of nearly a decade, Rainey became 

an expert in House procedure and a tireless 

contributor in committee. 

Just as Rainey and the other African-American 

Members faced discrimination when traveling, so 

too did they confront it in the seat of America’s 

A significant but flawed achievement, the Civil Rights Act of 1875 extended federal protections to African Americans 

but did not ban discrimination in education. “To Thine Own Self Be True,” an 1875 print by artist Thomas Nast, imagines 

Columbia, a female personification of the United States, passing the civil rights bill to an African-American man.

Collection of the U.S. House of Representatives
26 | “We Are in Earnest for Our Rights”

government. And just as Rainey demanded 

equality under the law, so too did he demand equal 

treatment in the House. Rainey and the other 

Black lawmakers had been duly elected by the 

voters of their district—“sent here by the suffrages 

of the people,” he said in 1873—like every other 

Member who had ever served in the House. 

“Why cannot we enjoy the same benefits that are 

accorded to our white colleagues on this floor?”

Of the House’s 292 total seats in the 43rd Congress, 

only seven were held by African-American 

lawmakers. Although they had limited power as a 

voting bloc, Rainey occasionally appealed to the 

House’s byzantine rules to influence the legislative 

process. “It is nonsense to suppose that we colored 

members cannot hinder legislation, if we feel 

so inclined. We have the same right to object 

and move advancements as any other members.” 

Rainey acknowledged that while he and other 

Black Members had been “content to defer so 

far as possible to the wishes of all the members,” 

he could nevertheless look to the House Rules 

for a measure of support. “I will say that if we 

are crowded to the wall, and no consideration 

shown for us, whatever, we will retaliate with the 

weapons the rights of our position have placed in 

our hands.”

Unfortunately for Rainey, those procedural 

weapons were only so powerful in the House, 

where a simple voting majority could override 

Josiah T. Walls (FL) 97

Robert B. Elliott (SC) 146

Joseph H. Rainey (SC) 96 John R. Lynch (MS) 94

James T. Rapier (AL) 121 Richard H. Cain (SC) 136

Alonzo J. Ransier (SC) 92

In the 43rd Congress (1873–1875), African-American Members held seven of the 292 seats in the U.S. House. This 

seating chart from 1874 depicts their desk locations on the House Floor. 

Congressional Directory, 43rd Cong., 1st sess., 4th ed. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1874): 140.
Rainey and the Struggle for Reconstruction | 27

any dilatory motions. Despite his avowal, Rainey 

rarely used his right to object, and when he did—

as was the case for several bills returning political 

rights to Confederate military officers—the 

House voted him down.

Away from the House Floor, in cramped 

committee rooms scattered around the Capitol, 

Rainey worked on policies that concerned people 

who had long been marginalized by society. 

His first assignment was on the Committee 

on Freedmen’s Affairs. He also served on the 

Committee on Indian Affairs and the Committee 

on Invalid Pensions, which considered pensions 

and federal benefits for wounded veterans.

On the Select Committee on the Freedman’s 

Bank, Rainey sought to protect the interests and 

investments of tens of thousands of AfricanAmerican depositors and their families following 

the collapse of the Freedman’s Savings and Trust 

Bank in 1874. Originally chartered by Congress 

in 1865, the Freedmen’s Bank was intended to 

help Black Union veterans and freed people 

across the South build wealth. Rainey himself 

had opened an account. But the bank failed amid 

gross mismanagement and the effects of the 

1873 financial crisis. In 1875 Rainey successfully 

warded off a measure to limit oversight of the 

distribution of its remaining assets. Several 

months later, the House created the select 

committee to lead the salvage operation. During 

committee hearings, Rainey worked to identify 

what went wrong and help depositors recover 

their money, but ultimately few did.

Rainey also received appointments on committees 

that handled the administrative business of 

the House. As the United States approached 

its century mark, Rainey served on the Select 

Committee on the Centennial Celebration, 

which planned commemorative events in 1876. 

And during his final term in the 45th Congress 

(1877–1879), Rainey was praised for his diligent 

work on the Joint Committee on Enrolled Bills, 

where he collaborated with House clerks and his 

Senate counterparts to ensure that each measure 

Congress considered was properly formatted and 

accurate as it passed between chambers. 

After five years on the Committee on Freedmen’s 

Affairs, Rainey submitted a resolution to abolish 

it at the start of the 44th Congress. Although he 

did not speak on the resolution, former Speaker 

of the House James G. Blaine took the floor 

to explain Rainey’s reasons for changing the 

way the House considered the interests of the 

freed people in the South. Rainey, Blaine said, 

was acting “on behalf of those whom he more 

especially represents” to eliminate the committee, 

as “circumstances have entirely changed” since 

its creation in 1865. Following the burst of 

constitutional amendments and the passage of 

the Civil Rights Act, Rainey believed that there 

was “no longer any distinction between American 

citizens,” and therefore no need to direct the 

concerns of the freed people to a separate 

committee. Rainey insisted that “all legislation 

respecting the rights of any person should go 

through the ordinary standing committees,” 

Blaine said. The House agreed and disbanded the 

committee in December 1875.

“Nominal or Actual Freedom?”

Despite Rainey’s work on Capitol Hill, an 

emerging political upheaval back home in South 

Carolina threatened his seat in Congress. Rainey’s 

final two elections were close victories contested by 

his opponents. He was not alone: six other AfricanAmerican Members had their elections formally 

challenged by Democrats during Reconstruction. 

Contested elections were common in the nineteenth 

century, and the House Committee on Elections 

often dealt with a flood of cases every two years. 

The committee frequently voted along partisan 

lines to seat Members-elect from the party in the 

majority. Rainey held on to his seat in 1874, but his 

1876 re-election campaign and his final two years 

in office highlighted the changing fate of African 

Americans as Reconstruction wound to a close. 
28 | “We Are in Earnest for Our Rights”

By 1876 violence against African-American 

voters and political candidates had become the 

defining characteristic of elections across the 

South. Democrats established so-called “rifle 

clubs” to disrupt Republican gatherings, and in 

South Carolina former Confederate general and 

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wade Hampton 

and his supporters, known as “Red Shirts,” engaged 

in a campaign of violence and intimidation 

that would ultimately bring the Democratic 

Party back into control of the state government. 

In response, Black militia groups mobilized 

for self-defense—some as independent local 

organizations and others sanctioned by the state. 

The intensity of the violence committed by 

Democrats was devastating. In July 1876, a 

small South Carolina town near the Georgia 

border named Hamburg became the site of racial 

conflict that profoundly shaped the pivotal fall 

election that year. What came to be known as the 

Hamburg Massacre began with a white farmer’s 

dispute with the local Black militia. Days later, a 

white mob—including residents from both sides 

of the state border—attacked the Black militia, 

killing six men, taking 25 prisoners, and destroying 

homes and property in the town’s AfricanAmerican neighborhood. Rainey later called the 

incident in Hamburg a “cold-blooded atrocity.”

On the House Floor, Rainey and his South 

Carolina colleague, Robert Smalls, forced 

Congress to confront what happened in 

Hamburg. Smalls was a celebrated United States 

Navy veteran who had escaped slavery during the 

war by piloting a Confederate ship to freedom. 

On July 15, Smalls introduced an amendment 

barring the removal of federal troops from South 

Carolina so long as Black militias were being 

“massacred in cold blood by lawless bands of men 

invading that State from the State of Georgia.” 

During debate on the amendment, Rainey 

yielded time to Smalls, who read an account 

of the massacre. Rainey asked the Members in 

attendance if they would submit to such violence 

in their own communities and wondered aloud 

if the Black population of the United States 

were American citizens or “whether we are to be 

vassals and slaves again?” 

As summer gave way to fall, Rainey stood for 

re-election against John Smythe Richardson, a 

former Confederate soldier and a member of the 

Democratic state committee. Violence continued 

to escalate in South Carolina, as Black Republicans 

fought back against Democratic aggression. 

At one point during his 1876 campaign, Rainey 

traveled 14 miles on horseback between the towns 

of Cheraw and Bennettsville in his congressional 

district, accompanied by “fifty or sixty of our 

republican friends.” On the way, “mounted and 

armed democrats, numbering several hundred” 

Robert Smalls became a national celebrity during the 

Civil War by seizing the Confederate supply ship on 

which he was enslaved and turning it over to the U.S. 

Navy. Photographed between 1870 and 1880, Smalls 

served five terms in the House, where he strongly 

denounced white violence against African-American 

voters in the South.

Image courtesy of the Library of Congress
Rainey and the Struggle for Reconstruction | 29

confronted his party at an intersection. Luckily, 

a company of federal troops arrived on the scene 

and prevented bloodshed. “I felt as though I 

carried my life in my hands during the last 

campaign,” Rainey recalled. Despite concerted 

Democratic efforts to intimidate at the polls, 

Rainey prevailed by 1,500 votes.

Rainey may have won in 1876, but he feared 

the worst was yet to come. Hampton’s victory 

as governor had turned the tide against the 

Republican Party in the Palmetto State. Since 

the end of the Civil War, Democrats had made 

it clear that they would never willingly share 

power with African Americans. As Republicans 

lost control of the levers of power throughout the 

South, the civil rights victories of the previous 

decade grew increasingly tenuous and uncertain.

Rainey knew that the military might of the 

federal government had enabled African 

Americans to retain the franchise during 

Reconstruction. And he warned that as those 

protections became less certain, Democrats 

would try to force Black voters to “consent to 

become docile to dictation from our former 

masters.” Rainey offered a reminder that 

violence, voter suppression, and outright election 

fraud had already curtailed the civil and political 

rights of African Americans. The “great southern 

question,” Rainey said, centered on the extent 

to which Reconstruction had truly changed 

the South. “Has the negro become possessed of 

nominal or actual freedom?”

South Carolina had once been in the vanguard 

of a revolutionary experiment in interracial 

government—Black Republicans, many of whom 

had once been enslaved, and white Republicans 

sharing power. The terror campaign waged by 

white Democrats had smashed that alliance. By 

1877, Rainey lamented, “I regret to say the color 

line is the party line in my state.” 

Rainey’s fourth full term in the House began 

under the cloud of a contested election. The 45th 

Congress opened on October 15, 1877, nearly 

a year after the 1876 election. In the House, 

Rainey presented election credentials signed by 

South Carolina’s Republican secretary of state, 

as had other members of the state delegation. 

Richardson challenged Rainey’s victory and 

provided a statement from the secretary of state 

installed by Democratic Governor Hampton, 

who assumed office in 1877. Hampton added 

a personal endorsement to the letter that 

questioned Rainey’s claim to the seat and 

criticized the presence of federal troops in South 

Carolina as part of a campaign of intimidation 

against Democrats. 

Rainey agreed to send the case to the Committee 

on Elections—but only after he was seated. 

Otherwise, the House would set a precedent 

that could be used to prevent any Member 

from being sworn in. “Though I be a republican 

and a colored man,” Rainey said, “I know that 

I have rights under the Constitution.” The 

House agreed, swore in Rainey, and immediately 

referred the case to the Committee on Elections.

Contesting elections in the House both challenged 

the legitimacy of Black Members like Rainey 

and defied the will of Black voters across the 

South. Had Rainey not been seated, the slowmoving Committee on Elections, saddled with a 

large workload, would have left Rainey’s district 

without representation in Congress for months.

In May 1878, the committee, led by Democrats, 

concluded that federal troops and the Republican 

Party had undermined the integrity of the 

election and declared Rainey’s seat vacant. But 

the full House refused to vote to remove Rainey, 

and he remained in office.

Rainey faced Richardson for a rematch in 1878. 

Given the Republican voter majority in his district, 

Rainey was confident that he could not be defeated 

“by any fair means.” But once again, rifle clubs 

and other organized bands of white Democrats 

perpetrated violence across the state in the weeks 
30 | “We Are in Earnest for Our Rights”

leading up to the November election. During the 

campaign, opponents threatened Rainey and Smalls 

with physical violence and prevented them from 

addressing crowds. On October 12, white state 

militia went so far as to fire on Republicans with 

cannons in Sumter County. 

Rainey went to the press to draw attention to the 

plight of Republicans in his home state, citing 

instances of violence and voter suppression. 

Hoping to enlist federal troops to ensure a fair 

election, Rainey and Stephen Swails, a former 

South Carolina state senator and Civil War 

veteran of the famed African-American 54th 

Massachusetts Regiment, met with President 

Rutherford B. Hayes in Washington, DC, on 

October 14, 1878. Swails had been shot at twice 

before being given an ultimatum to leave South 

Carolina or risk being assassinated, and he and 

Rainey asked Hayes to send in the military to stop 

the attacks on Republicans throughout their state. 

A little more than a year earlier, Hayes had 

prevailed in one of the closest presidential 

elections in American history. When no candidate 

captured a majority in the Electoral College in 

1876, Congress created a special commission 

to determine the victor. As part of a deal to 

secure the presidency, Hayes agreed to turn the 

attention of the federal government away from 

the South, effectively ending Reconstruction. 

As federal troops pulled out of the region, 

emboldened Democrats waged a campaign of 

violence to win the 1878 election. Hayes did 

little to stop it. Weeks before the election, the 

Yorkville Enquirer celebrated the Democrats’ 

return to power in South Carolina by declaring, 

“The Republican Party is dead.” Richardson, a 

Democrat, took nearly 62 percent of the vote 

against Rainey in a predominantly Republican 

district. Rainey considered challenging the 

election results, but ultimately decided against it. 

With several months remaining in the 45th 

Congress, Rainey pursued legislation to combat 

some of the Democrats’ more underhanded 

voter suppression efforts. Rainey argued that 

he had been “legally elected, but was defrauded 

and tissued out of my seat” in 1878. In an era 

before rigorous election oversight, ballots for 

Democratic candidates were printed on tissuethin paper, which allowed voters to combine, 

fold, and insert multiple ballots into the ballot 

box. Moreover, a South Carolina law required 

that whenever the total number of votes 

surpassed the number of voters recorded by poll 

managers during the election, the excess votes 

would be removed randomly by blindfolded 

judges. Since Democrats controlled the local 

polls, they judiciously removed only those ballots 

not printed on tissue paper—invariably votes for 

the Republican candidate. On December 3, 1878, 

Rainey proposed a bill to make the use of “tissue 

paper” ballots a felony, but it was never voted on. 

In the final weeks of the 45th Congress, Democrats 

again tried to force a vote on the Committee on 

Elections report and remove Rainey from his seat. 

The House roundly defeated the ouster effort after 

Representative Omar Dwight Conger of Michigan 

pointed out that Rainey was needed on the 

Joint Committee on Enrolled Bills to guide the 

pending appropriations bills through Congress. 

On his last day in Congress, Rainey made one 

more attempt to defend his 1876 election. 

He had compiled testimony, vote tallies, and 

accusations of vote tampering—made all the 

worse by egregious episodes of violence—to 

press his case. The Sumter County attack, he 

said, was both an effort by Democrats to “defeat 

my re-election in 1878,” and “a specimen of the 

manner in which they acted not only throughout 

my congressional district but in every other part 

of the State.” Massive resistance from white 

southerners and indifference on Capitol Hill 

had crushed democracy in the South and erased 

the voting rights of African Americans across 

the region. “The Government that had bestowed 

the gift,” Rainey declared, “failed to sustain and 

protect them in the enjoyment of the same.” 
Rainey and the Struggle for Reconstruction | 31

Rainey spent his remaining hours as a Member of 

Congress enrolling bills and dutifully submitting 

pension requests for Civil War veterans. The 45th 

Congress adjourned the next day, and Rainey was 

out of work. 

The “Imperishable Truth” 

of Reconstruction

Well-connected in Washington after nearly a 

decade in Congress, Rainey searched for a federal 

position after leaving the House in 1879. For the 

46th Congress (1879–1881), Republicans nominated 

Rainey for Clerk of the House, the office responsible 

for the chamber’s daily operations. But with the 

Democrats in control, the nomination was merely 

symbolic. Rainey was, however, able to procure 

an appointment as a special agent of the U.S. 

Treasury Department in South Carolina. 

During a visit to New York in July 1879, a reporter 

from the New-York Tribune asked Rainey about 

the conditions facing African Americans in the 

South. In swift succession, Rainey outlined the 

range of political and economic issues facing Black 

communities in the region. Ever the Representative, 

Rainey reached into his satchel to retrieve a stack 

of letters he received filled with descriptions of the 

dire conditions in South Carolina.

Rainey observed that the southern states had 

abused the system of representative government 

by “defrauding the other parts of the country.” 

The former Confederate states enjoyed increased 

representation in Congress “based upon the colored 

population,” he said, but white southern Members 

refused to advocate for the interests of their Black 

constituents. In these conditions, Rainey said, 

African Americans consider “freedom as a mere 

name and sham.” By 1879 Rainey had concluded 

that the only solution to such entrenched 

inequality was for African Americans to leave 

the South and search for a new home where they 

could enjoy the full benefits of citizenship and 

representation in the United States.

Following another unsuccessful attempt to secure 

an appointment as Clerk of the House in 1881, 

Rainey moved on. He started a brokerage and 

banking firm in Washington, DC, and later a 

wood and coal business with a partner. 

Rainey may have been out of Congress, but many 

continued to look to him for leadership. He 

remained active in political circles, and regularly 

accepted invitations to speak at conventions and 

commemorative events. In 1885 and 1886, he 

boarded at the Washington home of educator 

and activist Louisa Jacobs and her mother, 

renowned African-American activist Harriet 

Jacobs, whose narrative of her escape from 

slavery, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, was 

published in 1861. In 1887 Rainey returned

to his home on Prince Street in Georgetown, 

South Carolina, where, in August that year, he 

died after a brief illness at age 55. His house was 

added to the National Register of Historic Places 

in 1984.

A year and a half after he left the U.S. House, 

Rainey reflected on his career in a letter to an 

autograph seeker in New York, proudly writing 

that he had been “the first colored (bona fide) 

Member of Congress.” But his unceremonious 

exit in 1879 remained a disappointment. The 

46th Congress was the first since Rainey’s 

election in 1870 that no African-American 

Members served in the House. Only Senator 

Blanche Kelso Bruce of Mississippi remained 

in Congress, and Rainey sensed the window of 

opportunity was closing for African Americans 

in politics. “I might add that, up to this time, I 

have not only been the first, but the last of our 

race that held membership in the U.S. House of 

Representatives,” he lamented.

Although John Roy Lynch of Mississippi and 

Robert Smalls of South Carolina successfully 

contested elections to take their seats in the 47th 

Congress (1881–1883), the declining fortunes 

of African-American candidates paralleled the 

steady consolidation of Jim Crow segregation 
32 | “We Are in Earnest for Our Rights”

across the South. By the dawn of the twentieth 

century, African Americans in the region had 

seen their voting rights all but eliminated. 

Transportation and public accommodations 

had been rigidly segregated. And limited access 

to educational opportunities and devastating 

economic prospects restricted the accumulation 

of wealth across generations. The constant 

threat of violence—the number of lynchings in 

the United States peaked in the decades after 

Rainey left the House—compounded a harsh 

and undemocratic society that was both separate 

and unequal. By the 56th Congress (1899–1901), 

only George Henry White of North Carolina 

remained in the House—the last of the Black 

Representatives elected in the nineteenth century. 

White tried valiantly to address the problems 

facing African Americans in the South. He 

introduced the first federal anti-lynching bill 

in American history on January 20, 1900, and 

worked to enact provisions of the Fourteenth 

Amendment to punish noncompliant states by 

reducing their representation in Congress. In his 

final speech on the House Floor, White reflected 

on his imminent exit in early 1901 and what it 

meant for African Americans across the nation.

This, Mr. Chairman, is perhaps the negroes’ 

temporary farewell to the American 

Congress; but let me say, Phoenix-like he 

will rise up someday and come again. These 

parting words are in behalf of an outraged, 

George Henry White of North Carolina (left) introduced the first federal anti-lynching bill in 1900. When he left the 

House in 1901, no African American served in Congress until Oscar Stanton De Priest of Illinois (right) nearly 30 years 

later. De Priest was the first African American elected in the twentieth century and the first from a northern state.

Images courtesy of the Library of Congress
Rainey and the Struggle for Reconstruction | 33

heart-broken, bruised, and bleeding, but 

God-fearing people, faithful, industrious, 

loyal people—rising people, full of 

potential force.

For the next six decades, however, the crushing 

weight of Jim Crow stifled that force in the 

halls of government. After White’s departure, 

Congress did not seat another African-American 

Member until 1929, when Oscar Stanton De Priest 

of Illinois was sworn in to represent a Chicago 

House district with a large Black population. 

De Priest was the first congressional beneficiary of 

the Great Migration, a demographic shift that by 

the 1920s established thriving Black communities 

in the urban industrial north. Another wave of 

migration during the Second World War created 

Black enclaves in western states. The number of 

African-American Members in Congress slowly 

increased, with each one representing districts in 

northern and western cities.

Nearly 100 years after Rainey’s election to 

the House, Congress finally passed legislation 

that realized some of the goals set by the first 

African-American Congressmen in the 1870s. 

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited racial 

discrimination in public accommodations, 

schools, and the workplace. The Voting Rights 

Act of 1965 set the stage for a dramatic increase 

in the number of Black Members, especially 

from the South, by providing federal oversight 

of elections. In the twentieth century, no more 

than six African-American Members served 

simultaneously until the 91st Congress (1969–

1971), when 10 Black Members held seats in the 

House for the first time. After White’s departure 

in 1901, no African-American legislator served 

in Congress from a southern state until 1973, 

when Barbara Charline Jordan of Texas and 

Andrew Jackson Young Jr. of Georgia took their 

seats in the U.S. House.

By the 1970s, African-American Members of 

Congress began to slowly chip away at the 

restrictions minority lawmakers faced in the House. 

As their numbers increased, so did their power. 

They organized the Congressional Black Caucus 

(CBC), chaired committees and subcommittees, 

and took the lead on sweeping, national legislation. 

Since 1968, when Shirley Anita Chisholm of 

New York became the first African-American 

woman elected to Congress, a total of 47 Black 

women have served in Congress. At the start of 

the 116th Congress (2019–2021)—the Congress 

marking the 150th anniversary of Rainey’s 

historic seating—African Americans held 54 seats 

in the House and three in the Senate, the highest 

total in any Congress in U.S. history.

It was impossible for Rainey to know what the 

future held, but he knew with certainty that the 

African-American Members of Congress had 

left their mark on the institution during the 1870s. 

Barbara Jordan of Texas was the first African-American 

Congresswoman from the South. Jordan took her seat 

in the House in 1973, around the time this photograph 

was taken. 

Collection of the U.S. House of Representatives
34 | “We Are in Earnest for Our Rights”

On March 3, 1879, Rainey reflected on his time 

on Capitol Hill. Over nearly a decade, Rainey 

had worked to re-shape America and experienced 

firsthand the achievements and disappointments 

of the struggle for Reconstruction, from the 

successful pursuit of civil and political rights for 

African Americans to the startlingly rapid decline 

of this promising experiment in American 

democracy. It would require an “impartial 

historian,” Rainey said, to fully capture the 

“imperishable truth” of Reconstruction: that for 

a brief moment Congress worked to establish a 

government founded upon the full expression of 

“human liberty and human rights.” 

“These are fundamental and much prized by my 

race; yes, sir, superior to all pecuniary consideration, 

as the soul is to the body.” For Rainey, this was 

the “political heritage of American citizens,” 

realized in fleeting moments during Reconstruction, 

and requiring constant vigilance to sustain.

As the first African American to serve in the House, 

Joseph Rainey paved the way for future Members of 

Congress. “We were earnest in the hour of the nation’s 

perils and dangers,” Rainey proclaimed on the House 

Floor in 1872, “and now, in our country’s comparative 

peace and tranquillity, we are in earnest for our rights.”

Image courtesy of the Library of Congress
Rainey and the Struggle for Reconstruction | 35

s Member of er b Num

Republicans Democrats Independents Black Americans in the U.S. House of Representatives, 41st to 116th Congresess

*As of July 1, 2020 Congress

41st

43rd

45th

605040302010

0

47th

49th

51st

53rd

55th

57th

59th

61st

65th

63rd

69th

71st

73rd

75th

79th

83rd

87th

91st

95th

99th

103rd

107th

111th

77th

81st

85th

89th

93rd

97th

101st

105th

109th

113th

115th

67th

Beginning in 1870 with Joseph Rainey, 153 African-American Members have served in the House of Representatives as of July 1, 2020. During the 116th Congress (2019–2021), a record number of Black Members have served in the House: 55.https://history.house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/BAIC/Black-Americans-in-Congress/
On December 12, 1870, Joseph H. Rainey of 

South Carolina was sworn in as the first African-American 

Member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Born enslaved, 

Rainey worked to remake America during Reconstruction by 

advocating for civil rights, public education, and an active federal 

government to ensure equal protection for all. By the end of 

his House career in 1879, he was the longest-tenured Black 

Member of Congress during the nineteenth century.

history.house.gov @USHouseHistory

Office of the Historian and Office of the Clerk

united state s house of representatives