‘Nearly forgotten’ story of 1st Black members of Congress told in new book

New Haven — The names Hiram Rhodes Revels, Blanche Bruce, P.B.S. Pinchback, Jefferson F. Long, Benjamin S. Turner and Josiah T. Walls may be unfamiliar.

But Darryl Brackeen Jr., a New Haven public school teacher, thinks people should know them, and has written a book, “The Almost Forgotten: America’s First Black American Congressmen,” to make entirely sure they aren’t forgotten.

Brackeen, 34, also thinks children — especially Black children — should know the history, including the Reconstruction Era, which lasted for a dozen years following the end of the Civil War.

That’s why Brackeen, a historian and eighth-grade social studies teacher at Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School, wrote the book and self-published it through Amazon, with the intention of getting it in the hands of as many schoolchildren as possible.

The first Black men elected to Congress took their places in history just a few years after the abolition of slavery through President Abraham Lincoln’s issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863.

For Brackeen, a married father of three girls who got the idea to write the book while researching his own family history, it’s very personal.

“It actually started when I started looking to my family ancestry,” Brackeen said. For many Black Americans, including him, “it’s often a little tough to go back and look at one’s ancestry because of slavery.”

But he was able to successfully identify his great-greatgreat-great-grandfather, a man named Dempsey Coats who lived in Laurence County, Ga., and began to show up in census records at the age of 55. He was a sharecropper who became a free man at age 52.

Coats first registered to vote in 1867. He couldn’t read or write, so to register to vote, he “left his mark” on the registration form, Brackeen said.

That came at a time when “for a brief moment, hundreds of thousands of Black men” were able to register and vote, he said.

“So, of course, as somebody who is involved in electoral politics, the thought went through my head, ‘Who did he vote for?’” Brackeen said. “I have to assume he voted for one of these gentlemen.”

Brackeen believes it might have been Jefferson Long, who ended up being the second Black man elected to the

House of Representatives and the first elected to represent the state of Georgia, he said.

Long, born into slavery in Knoxville, Ga., to an enslaved mother and a white man, learned to read because he worked setting type for a local newspaper, Brackeen wrote in the book. He later learned to be a tailor after being sold to a local businessman. He returning to tailoring after serving in the House of Represenatives, according to Brackeen’s book.

In education, too often Black children “don’t see themselves in the classroom,” said Brackeen, also a Democratic member of the Board of Alders representing Westville’s Ward 26. “Basically, if a student can’t connect to what’s taught, we can’t expect them to excel in it.”

He started working on the book, which became a pandemic project, in 2019. Much of the work was done in Brackeen’s spare time, and “verifying some of the information was tough,” he said.

Now, “I’ve actually been hitting the road, speaking at churches and wuniversities,” he said.

In publishing the book, “The hope is that there’s an acknowledgement in the classroom of this time period,” Brackeen said. “We acknowledge Abraham Lincoln. But we don’t acknowledge the people who came after him.”

“Basically, what I realized” in researching the book was that “not much has changed,” he said.

What did come out of the Reconstruction Era were “some of our very crucial laws,” Brackeen said. “A lot of our laws to protect immigrants came from this time” and a number of those early Black congressmen were involved in creating laws to protect Chinese immigrants, among others, he said.

The period also spawned concepts such as natural born-citizenship, he said.

“If it wasn’t for these folks, a lot of these things that we take for granted would have never been talked about,” he said.

“The Almost Forgotten: America’s First Black American Congressmen,” is available through Amazon at https://amzn.to/3J6e86p.

Brackeen has printed more than 100 copies so far at a cost of about $2 per book, he said.

As a member of the local chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, he said he plans to donate a portion of the proceeds to the Eta Alpha Lambda Education Foundation, which funds scholarships for Black students.

“The Almost Forgotten: America’s First Black American Congressmen,” is available through Amazon at https://amzn. to/3J6e86p.