Hiram Revels was the first African American elected to the U.S. Senate, where he represented Mississippi. A Republican elected in the Reconstruction years, Revels was born in North Carolina and decamped to Illinois and Indiana to obtain the education unattainable to him in the segregation-stained Fayetteville of his youth. Already an ordained minister and educator, Revels spent just a year in the Senate — he was appointed to finish the term of a senator who vacated his seat at the start of the Civil War — but spent it advocating for the integration of schools and railroads after the defeat of the Confederacy augured, deceptively, a renewed era in race relations. Ironically, in an attempt to pursue a post-Civil War détente with his white Southern brethren, Revels argued on behalf of a bill that would have guaranteed the franchise — and the right to hold office — to the disenfranchised members of the Confederacy.