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In"The First Eight: A Personal History of the Pioneering Black Congressmen Who Shaped a Nation"(Little, Brown & Co.), South Carolina Democrat Jim Clyburn, the ninth Black man to represent his state in the House of Representatives, writes of his predecessors who helped direct the course of America during and after Reconstruction.
Read an excerpt below, and don't miss Robert Costa's interview with Congressman Clyburn on"CBS Sunday Morning"April 26!
"The First Eight" by Jim Clyburn
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Introduction
I have been talking about the subjects in this book for most of my life. The first eight Black men elected to Congress from South Carolina hold a special significance to me, the ninth. When I became House majority whip in 2007, I requested that their portraits be hung on my conference room wall.
The Library of Congress provided eight elegant black-and-white images, which I still treasure. They are a constant reminder of the shoulders I stand upon. The First Eight's legacies of resistance and resolve, promise and purpose, faith and fortitude, continue to motivate me every day and in every way.
Soon after these portraits were hung, a group came to meet with me, and one of them asked who they were. When I told them, many of them expressed surprise. They had assumed that the first Black person to ever represent South Carolina in Congress was sitting at the table with them. I replied with my playful-with-a-purpose style, "Oh no. Before I was first, there were eight."
Although I have known about these men for most of my life, it doesn't surprise me that many people think I am the first; after all, prior to my election in 1992, it had been nearly one hundred years since the last of the eight, George Washington Murray, had served in Congress. But this conversation solidified my long-held aspiration to tell the stories of the Eight and how they represented the four million Blacks newly emancipated after the Civil War, and who pursued America's promise of equality for all while displaying little malice and much charity in the face of extreme opposition.
I have always maintained that a person can be no more or no less than their life experiences allow them to be. The eight men at the center of this book shared the common experience of being born before the Civil War, when this country was bitterly divided over slavery. Despite this, the differences in their younger, formative years uniquely informed each pioneering man's approach to public service.
Richard Harvey Cain and Robert Brown Elliott were Northerners who did not grow up in slave states. Rather, they arrived in South Carolina as adults, not having experienced the inhumaneness of the nation's original sin.
Meanwhile, Robert Carlos De Large, Alonzo Jacob Ransier, and Thomas Ezekiel Miller had the fortune of growing up in South Carolina with free Black parents. As "mulattos," as they were known — or, in Miller's case, as someone born to white parents and raised by free Black parents — they enjoyed the privileges that their paternity provided.
Finally, Joseph Hayne Rainey, Robert Smalls, and George Washington Murray shared the more common Black experience in antebellum South Carolina; they were born enslaved. However, each secured their freedom through unique means — Rainey through purchase, Smalls through escape, and Murray through emancipation.
Despite their diverse backgrounds and different experiences, each of the First Eight rose to the top of his profession and occupied a unique place in our nation's history during one of its most turbulent periods: the Reconstruction Era. This book tells the history of this era through the perspectives of the First Eight, unfolding chronologically as they contributed to America's reinvention of its political and social structures to reflect the Declaration of Independence's proclamation that "all men are created equal," while incurring the vengeance of former Confederates who wanted to "redeem" South Carolina to its pre-Civil War stance of white supremacy.
Naturally, I define Reconstruction through a South Carolina lens.
Reconstruction came early in parts of my home state with the arrival of the Union troops in late 1861, and ending with the departure of federal troops from its borders in 1877. In this period came African Americans' first opportunity to serve in political office, and over the ensuing decades, the First Eight emerged as leaders among South Carolina's Black majority. While most of them served in Congress during Reconstruction, three — Smalls, Miller, and Murray — were elected in the post-Reconstruction era, although Smalls had been elected earlier, during Reconstruction. Yet, as I will show in the pages that follow, the valiant efforts of the Eight, all Republican lawmakers, could not stop the violence and fraud deployed by the group that often referred to themselves as Conservative Democrats, or Southern Democrats. But I consider both these monikers to be insults to many of my conservative Democratic friends, whom I respect, and my proud Southern family members, whom I love. So throughout this publication I will refer to them, according to their mission of redeeming the antebellum social order of white supremacy, as "Redeemer Democrats."
This history may raise a few questions for today's readers. Why were the First Eight Republicans? And given the history of the Redeemers, why am I, the ninth, a Democrat?
In the nineteenth century, the Republican and Democratic parties espoused very different beliefs than they do today. Founded in 1854 in the lead-up to the Civil War, the Republicans — the anti-slavery party of Abraham Lincoln — were mostly composed of Northern abolitionists, while the Democrats found most of their support in the pro-slavery South. As a result, after the Civil War and well into the beginning of the twentieth century, most Blacks, including my parents, identified as Republicans, remaining loyal to the "party of Lincoln." However, the ideologies of the two parties began to change, a transformation that culminated in the presidency of the Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt. During this period, many Black Americans, drawn to Roosevelt's social platform, began to shift toward his party — although his New Deal policies excluded assistance for most Blacks. This shift accelerated under President Harry Truman, a Democrat who became the first president to address the NAACP's National Convention and whose Fair Deal policies included integration of the armed services; and it continued under subsequent administrations, highlighted by Democratic President Lyndon Baines Johnson's Great Society programs that included Medicare, Medicaid, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the 1968 Fair Housing Act, and other pieces of legislation addressing the effects of past racial discrimination, which the Republican party opposed. Today, the realignment is clear: Civil and political rights for Blacks, among the founding principles of the Republican Party and the fundamental values that I and most African Americans are loyal to, are now championed by Democrats, and consequently, most African Americans today identify with the Democratic Party.
A note about the structure of this book: When comparing any group of political figures, for various reasons, some emerge as more significant than others. By my estimation, Robert Smalls — the only bona fide Civil War hero of the Eight and one of only two Blacks to serve as a delegate to the 1868 and 1895 Constitutional Conventions, which granted, then revoked, Black political and civil rights in the state — lived the most consequential life, not just of the Eight, but of any South Carolinian in memory. Then there is Joseph Hayne Rainey, whose eloquence and status as the first Black man elected to the U.S. House of Representatives made him another man of great significance. Robert Brown Elliott, whose words resonated more deeply than even Rainey's, was a revered orator throughout the country. Smalls, Rainey, and Elliott all rose to national prominence, and their stature naturally results in their receiving more attention in this book, though the lived experiences of the other five also provide lessons to us all.
Finally, a note about language: Throughout this book, words like "Negro," "Colored" (a Black person), and "mulatto" (a person of mixed race) are sparingly used. The majority of the First Eight were "mulattos," a common identifier in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that tends to engender uneasiness today. But perhaps the vilest and most frequently used slur directed at the First Eight and their constituents was the N-word. Because of my visceral aversion to that word, I have made an editorial judgment not to spell it out fully in this book. I have also intentionally minimized the use of the term "slave," which dehumanizes the people who were held in bondage against their will. I refer to them as "the enslaved," which recognizes their humanity and speaks to the condition that was forced upon them. Lastly, I have also chosen to follow the new Chicago Manual of Style guidelines and capitalize "Black" and lowercase "white." This is a relatively new practice that has evolved, as "Black" is a term now associated more with a culture and race than simply describing skin color. During my fifty-eight years of marriage to a librarian, I became a stickler for grammar and happily adopted this new usage.
Like all of us, the First Eight were not perfect. But they rose to the challenges of their time, determined to demonstrate by example that race does not define one's humanity. They knew that until America lived by its founding principle of "liberty and justice for all," our country could not achieve its democratic ideals.
Like my predecessors, my life has been grounded in faith and fortitude. As I wrote in my memoir, Blessed Experiences: Genuinely Southern, Proudly Black, "All my experiences have not been pleasant, but I have considered all of them to be blessings." Indeed, my father, a fundamentalist minister, and my mother, a civic-minded beautician, ensured that I received a foundation grounded in biblical principles, and I have been emboldened by their insistence that I could be successful despite being born under the yoke of Jim Crow. Both of them were adherents to my father's oft-stated philosophy that one should lead by precept and example, and they practiced what Dad preached. Because of their teachings and practices, I became involved with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) at the age of twelve. As a college student, I naturally resisted laws that stripped civil rights from those who looked like me, becoming a founding member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and a student protest leader in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The incarcerations and arrests I accrued during this period only strengthened my dedication to the causes we pursued. Then, in my first professional job as a high school history teacher in Charleston, I found the resolve to tell our history accurately, not through the lens of those whose textbooks sought to diminish and exclude African American achievements.
Through it all, as I looked to the future, the hard-won successes of the movements I had served in — the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act — provided the faith and promise that I could one day serve in public office. This assurance helped fulfill my political purpose: to do everything in my power to ensure that the greatness of America is accessible and affordable to all.
Just like my eight predecessors, I have encountered opposition and set-backs along my journey. Indeed, South Carolina's history has not always been positive. Some of it has been very unpleasant for me and many others, especially those who look like me. But our history is what it is, and I believe that complete history should be told. And as I tell the history of the First Eight, who have paved the way for me and countless others to come, I have never lost sight of our State's motto: "While I breathe, I hope."
From "The First Eight" by Jim Clyburn. Copyright © 2025 by Jim Clyburn. Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group. All rights reserved.
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