The 74-Year Silence
Black Political Power in Mississippi, 1870 – Present
The only state to elect Black senators during Reconstruction. The state that murdered its way back to white rule.
Scroll to witness the timeline
Mississippi was 55 percent Black. In January 1870, Black men took 5 of 37 Senate seats and 35 of 75 House seats. Mississippi sent Hiram Rhodes Revels to the U.S. Senate — the first Black senator in American history — filling the very seat vacated by Jefferson Davis when he left to lead the Confederacy.
The Mississippi Plan was not a metaphor. It was an organized campaign of assassination, armed intimidation, and ballot-box destruction designed to end Black political participation by any means necessary. Democratic Party paramilitaries called Red Shirts rode through Black communities before elections, killing organizers and destroying ballots.
The violence was so extreme that the U.S. Senate formed a select committee to investigate. Their final report filled two volumes and more than 2,000 pages of testimony and evidence. It changed nothing. The Redeemers had already won.
When the 1876 legislature was sworn in, Black representation had been cut nearly in half. Lieutenant Governor Alexander Kelso Davis was impeached on fabricated charges. Governor Adelbert Ames, facing the same, resigned. By 1890, a new state constitution had codified Black disenfranchisement into law. By 1894, the last Black state legislator was gone.
They murdered a state senator on Christmas Day and called it redemption. Then seventy-four years of silence — in a state that was more than half Black.
1870–1894
Silence
Caldwell’s Body
The Mississippi Plan was the blueprint. Every Southern state followed it. The silence it created lasted generations.
The churches, schools, and Masonic lodges that Black Mississippians built during the silence are monuments to survival without representation. Help us find them.
The history preserved here is not a museum exhibit. It is a living record with direct implications for how we understand civic participation, community power, and the work that remains.
Black History Every Month
A 90-minute course that reframes Black American history as a year-round practice, not a February obligation. The Political Leadership Overlay data is woven throughout.
Know Your Roots, Know Your Rights
Your family's history is connected to laws, policies, and legal systems that shaped where they lived, how they worked, and what they were allowed to own. This self-paced course bridges genealogy and advocacy.
Know Your Power: Civic Advocacy for Black Women
Understanding who held power where your ancestors lived is itself an act of advocacy. From Reconstruction to redistricting.
Join the Map
Every church, school, lodge hall, and cemetery that Black communities built during the silence is a monument to persistence without representation.
Explore the Map- U.S. House of Representatives — History, Art & Archives (history.house.gov)
- Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (Harper Perennial, 2014)
- BlackPast.org