There is a movement in the United States to tear down Southern Civil War statues, particularly those honoring Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. Those statues were erected with no acknowledgment of the reason for the Civil War, which was to end the horrible practice of slavery. Removing those statues doesn’t do anything to recognize the black leaders who stepped forward during the Reconstruction era to work for a free and open society in the South. One such leader was Hiram Rhodes Revels.

During Reconstruction most black men in the South were Republican. Revels was a college-educated minster in the African Methodist Church. During the Civil War he helped organize two regiments of U.S. colored troops (as they were then called), served as a chaplain for black troops fighting in the Union Army, and took part in the Battle of Vicksburg. During Reconstruction he was elected an alderman in Natchez in 1868. In 1869 he was elected a state senator. In 1870 the Republican-controlled Mississippi Legislature elected Revels as a U.S. senator to fill the vacant seat once held by Jefferson Davis before he resigned from the U.S. Senate to lead the South in the Civil War.