![]() ![]() In fact, during Reconstruction, the historian Eric Foner tells us, three of the first sixteen African American members of Congress were ministers, and of the more than 2,000 Black officeholders at every level of government in that era, more than 240 were ministers-second only to farmers.Īll of this was a powerful reminder to me of the vital role that the Black Church and its leaders-men and women-have always played at pivotal moments in our collective struggle to realize that “more perfection union”: a lesson that had already been brought vividly home to me in filming my new history series for PBS and authoring its companion book, The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song. The first had been Hiram Revels, of Mississippi, in 1870, and, like Warnock, Revels had been a man of the Word. King’s church in Atlanta, became the first African American ever sent to the Senate from his state and the eleventh Black American to be elevated to that chamber overall. Then came the special elections in Georgia in January, when, on the eve of the insurrection at the U.S. Vivian-only reinforced my sense that the history of the first Reconstruction was being refracted through our own lives and in our own time. The tense days that followed-made all the more desolate by the loss of such icons as John Lewis and C.T. ![]()
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