THE FIRST EIGHT

A group biography of the eight Black men to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives after the Civil War.

The author is the first Black congressman from South Carolina to serve in the House since the late 1800s, arriving a century after the eight men portrayed here. There is a reason for this: Those eight served valiantly but were unable to contain the revanchism that replaced slavery with Jim Crow; Republicans all, they “could not stop the violence and fraud deployed by the group that often referred to themselves as Conservative Democrats, or Southern Democrats.” The best known of Clyburn’s forerunners was Robert Smalls, who sailed a small ship out of Charleston Harbor under the nose of thousands of Confederates and brought it to the Union blockade fleet, saying, “I thought this ship might be of some use to Uncle Abe.” Smalls went on to become a recruiting officer for the federal army, personally enlisting 5,000 Black men. Robert De Large, the son of free Black parents who themselves owned slaves, battled in Congress for the right of Black South Carolinians to vote, which came about only after the federal government required the creation of a state constitution that granted all men the franchise. Richard Harvey Cain helped bring Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church to life after the Civil War, despite substantial opposition from white Charlestonians. Cain worked diligently to secure civil rights for Blacks in the former Confederacy, while back in Charleston a woman named Mary Bowers “took a seat on a streetcar and refused to budge, prompting her unceremonious removal”—nearly 90 years before Rosa Parks. As Clyburn notes, the arrival of five Black representatives in the 42nd Congress, and three others thereafter, inspired some reforms. But more, “it stoked serious fear and trepidation among white supremacists,” who, Clyburn provocatively notes, have been reborn as “MAGA Republicans and their supporters.”

A thoughtful consideration of historical figures too little known to readers today.