LANSING – The Democratic recapture of Congress and the record number of African Americans there – including the chairs of the Ways and Means, Judiciary and Homeland Security committees – signal a resurgence of black political clout on Capitol Hill this year.

That change has given a high profile to Michigan’s two African American federal lawmakers, Reps. John Conyers Jr. and Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, both Detroit Democrats.

Conyers chairs the House Judiciary Committee, which has tackled such hot-button issues as warrantless surveillance, cybercrime, interrogation of terrorist suspects, immigration, identity theft and voting rights. Kilpatrick chairs the Congressional Black Caucus and sits on the powerful House Appropriations Committee.

But for most of the nation’s history, that level of influence was sadly absent, as our new book, African Americans in Congress: A Documentary History (Congressional Quarterly Press) illustrates.

In 1869, Louisiana newspaper editor J. Willis Menard became the first African American to claim a House seat in a special election marred by intimidation and harassment of black voters.

In arguing his case, Menard became the first African American to speak on the House floor, where he said, “I do not expect nor do I ask that there shall be any favor shown me on account of my race or the former condition of that race.” But the House rejected his effort to be seated, citing extensive election irregularities.

The following year, it took three days of debate before the Senate agreed to swear in the nation’s first black senator, Republican Hiram Revels of Mississippi, who ironically filled the seat of former Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

Democrats couched their opposition largely in irrelevant constitutional terms, but their words demonstrated that racism was the implicit, and sometimes explicit, basis for their opposition to Revels.

After Revels delivered his maiden speech, a pro-Democratic New York newspaper labeled it “the first speech ever delivered by the lineal descendant of an orang-outang in Congress.”

And when he traveled between Washington and home, he was forced to ride in the segregated section of Mississippi River steamboats.

During Reconstruction, the South elected a string of African Americans to Congress, but they wielded little influence, individually or collectively. There were never enough at any one time to constitute an effective voting bloc, and none stayed long enough to accumulate meaningful seniority.

In 1880, Blanche Bruce of Mississippi, the second black senator, did chair a select committee investigating the collapse of the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Co., but he served only a single term, and no African American would chair a standing committee until 1949.

Bleak years followed Reconstruction, with disenfranchisement of black voters across the South, violence and fraud directed at those who dared try to vote and gerrymandering that destroyed black-majority districts.

On Jan. 29, 1901, the sole remaining African American in Congress, Rep. George White of North Carolina, delivered his valedictory speech.

“I want to enter a plea for the colored man, the colored woman, the colored boy and the colored girl,” White said. “This is perhaps the Negroes’ temporary farewell to the American Congress, but let me say, phoenix-like, he will rise up some day and come again.”

Two weeks later, the African Methodist Episcopal Church Review editorialized, “Mr. White gave his congressional death a dramatic tinge in a speech that was in his manliest vein, but whose chief worth, in our opinion, lies in is prophecy that the Negro will return to these halls again. No thoughtful Negro doubts this.”

Yet it would take almost three more decades before another African American would serve, Oscar DePriest, an Illinois Republican.

When President Herbert Hoover’s wife invited DePriest’s wife to a White House tea for congressional spouses, a national firestorm ignited. The Texas legislature even passed a resolution rebuking the First Lady and declaring that “we bow our heads in shame and regret.”

In 1934, DePriest challenged segregation of the Capitol restaurant, declaring, “If we allow segregation and the denial of constitutional rights under the dome of the Capitol, where in God’s name will we get them?”

His plea fell on deaf ears. The restaurant remained off-limits to blacks until at least 1948.

It was the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a series of Supreme Court rulings and the civil rights movement that propelled major transformation of Congress.

Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., D-N.Y., chaired the Education and Labor Committee, shepherding key legislation for Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, until his ethical breaches cost him that post.

In 1966, for the first time since Reconstruction, a black candidate won a Senate seat. He was Edward Brooke, a moderate Republican from Massachusetts, who fell outside the mainstream of the Goldwater conservatives who reflected his party’s rightward swing.

The Congressional Black Caucus was officially born in 1971 as a nonpartisan organization.

In his recent autobiography, And I Haven’t Had a Bad Day Since, Caucus co-founder Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., recalled, “We didn’t want to become the custodians of all black American aspirations because we knew that meant being responsible for all of black America’s problems. We didn’t want to create expectations that would exceed our ability to perform.”

Caucus and leadership opportunities grew until the Contract with America sidetracked Democrats in the 1994 election.

The next year, the new GOP majority sought to hang the portrait of a Virginia segregationist in the House Rules Committee meeting room. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., protested, describing the picture as that of “man perhaps best remembered for his obstruction in passing the country’s civil rights laws,” and the Republicans relented.

Twelve years in the political wilderness followed as Democrats remained the minority party, but Rep. White’s 1901 prophesy has come true, at least until the November 2008 elections.

“Phoenix-like,” as White put it, “African Americans in Congress have “risen up and come again.”

#

Eric Freedman is director of Capital News Service. Stephen A. Jones teaches history at Central Michigan University.