Alex has the night off. I'm filling in for her this evening, but we begin tonight with the Supreme Court.

And his name was Hiram Revels. He was born in 1827. He was a minister in the AME Church. He served as a chaplain for the Union Army during

the American Civil War. And then in 1870, he was elected by the Mississippi legislature to the United States Senate believe it or not.

The first ever black man sent to either body of Congress in our country's history was him. And it is sort of hard to imagine that today

Mississippi was the first day to actually send a black man to the US Congress

but they did and they did it all the way back in 1870 and then

believe it or not in 1875 they did it again the Mississippi legislature

sent Blanch K Bruce to the United States Senate.

That is the second time ever a black man was elected to that chamber.

And you're probably wondering why or how that happened and the reason Mississippi was able to actually

make history like that all the way back in the 1870s was because of reconstruction.

After the Civil War, Mississippi was forced to adopt a bunch of new laws in franchising the state's

newly freed black citizens.

And those laws allowed the state's black men to vote in free and fair elections for the first time in history.

And that's what they produced.

It was real historic progress in the American South on an incredible time scale. And as you can

imagine, the backlash to it was Justice Swift. In 1890, aggrieved white

lawmakers in Mississippi, they passed a new state constitution disenfranchising

black voters with poll taxes, literacy tests, a bunch of other stuff designed to make it harder for black people to vote.

It was one of the nation's first ever Jim Crow laws, and while parts of that constitution

were done away with during the civil rights era, other of that

part of it actually remained in place.

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