Representative Joseph Hayne Rainey rose from his intricately carved wooden desk, ready to deliver one of the most important speeches of his life. The campaign for a new civil rights bill had stalled in the Senate, and Rainey could sense support in the House slipping away. White members of Congress had no experience living in fear of the Ku Klux Klan or being demeaned every day in ways both large and small. Rainey knew these indignities firsthand. On a boat ride from Norfolk, Virginia, to Washington, D.C., the main dining hall had refused to serve him. In a D.C. pub, Rainey had ordered a glass of beer, only to find he’d been charged far more than white patrons. A hotel clerk had pulled the representative by his collar and kicked him out of a whites-only dining room.
African American leaders back home in South Carolina had sent a resolution urging him to fight for the bill, which would guarantee equal treatment of all Americans, regardless of race. Now, Rainey challenged his colleagues. “Why is it that colored members of Congress cannot enjoy the same immunities that are accorded to white members?” he asked. “Why cannot we stop at hotels here without meeting objection? Why cannot we go to restaurants without being insulted? We are here enacting laws of a country and casting votes upon important questions; we have been sent here by the suffrages of the people, and why cannot we enjoy the same benefits that are accorded to our white colleagues on this floor?”
The year was 1873.
A century and a half later, Americans are only beginning to acknowledge Rainey’s contributions. He was the first African American to be seated in the United States House of Representatives and the first member of Congress born into enslavement. He was an architect of a crucial period in U.S. history, the era known as Reconstruction. Yet few are aware that Rainey and 15 other African Americans served in Congress during the decade just after the Civil War—or that there was a protracted battle over a civil rights act in the 19th century.
This obscurity is no accident. Rainey’s hopes were thwarted when white supremacists used violence and illegal tactics to force him and his colleagues out of office. Armed vigilante groups marauded throughout the South, openly threatening voters and even carrying out political assassinations. Southern Democrats—identifying themselves as “the white man’s party”—committed wide-scale voter fraud.