250 AF - America's First Black Congressmen | Special Guest Rep. James Clyburn

About this episode

In December 1870, Joseph Rainey of South Carolina took his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, the first Black man to serve there. Seven more Black South Carolinians followed him through 1897, and then the state didn't send another for nearly a century. The ninth was Jim Clyburn, elected in 1992. His book ⁠ The First Eight: A Personal History of the Pioneering Black Congressmen Who Shaped a Nation⁠ , tells his predecessors' stories, and he joins hosts Margaret Talev and Ghael Fobes to retell some of them: Robert Smalls steering the Confederate steamer Planter out of Charleston Harbor and later pushing for public schools at South Carolina's constitutional convention, the 1865…