Reconstruction Black Elected Officials

More than I thought...

In one of my previous posts, I mentioned there were hundreds of Black elected officials during the Reconstruction Era.

I recently came across a document that lists over 1500 elected officials during that time and I thought I would share. This document also mentions that historians estimate that the total number of Black officeholders is closer to 2000, these numbers only reflect the records that exist.

And here are the numbers broken down by Federal.

And the numbers for State are staggering.

House of Representatives 683.

And that almost 400 of them had been formerly enslaved.

I think about how we as a people could have thrived, socially, economically, emotionally, if this progress right after slavery, hadn’t been squashed by white supremacy and Jim Crow laws. Just think about the progress that could have been made if the reign of terror didn’t occur.

I look at the images below with pride and awe.

Radical Members of the First South Carolina Legislature after the Civil War.

We were in Jim Crow for almost a hundred years after this.

What are your thoughts?

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Best,

Danita