George Washington Murray served as South Carolina’s eighth Black congressman. Jim Clyburn is the state’s ninth. The time between their elections? Just about a century. In “The First Eight: A Personal History of the Pioneering Black Congressmen Who Shaped a Nation,” Representative Clyburn gives voice to the ambivalence surrounding the almost-century in between.
“The First Eight” tells the story of Reconstruction – how Africans in America gained political power despite inconceivable odds and atrocities. Representative Clyburn homes in on the stories of men such as Joseph Rainey, the first Black politician to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives; Robert Smalls, who stole a Confederate ship to escape slavery; and Richard Cain, the newspaper publisher with ties to the famed Emanuel AME Church in Charleston.
The book also explores what’s happened in the years following – the rise of Jim Crow; the Civil Rights Movement, known as the Second Reconstruction; and how we’ve come to define our tenuous democracy over the past 60 years.
Why We Wrote This
Black Americans fought long and hard for the right to vote and participate in U.S. society, says Rep. Jim Clyburn. His new book, “The First Eight,” remembers that history and offers light on where the country stands today.
The Monitor recently spoke with Representative Clyburn by phone. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What event or events inspired the book?
There were three significant moments. The first occurred after I published my memoir [“Blessed Experiences” in 2014]. I entertained a meeting in my conference room, and on the wall were eight portraits of the Black congressmen from South Carolina who served before me. One of the people in the group asked me who they were; she was under the impression that I was the first African American to serve in Congress from South Carolina. I said to my staff that it might be a good idea for my next book to be about those eight congressmen, and I knew a significant amount about their history.
The second big moment occurred Jan. 6, 2021. Because of my familiarity with the history of Reconstruction, I knew immediately what was taking place on the floor that day. It’s the same thing that happened in 1876, when three states, South Carolina among them, set up these alternative slates of electors and brought the whole election into question.
And then a third thing happened, which I call “Jim Crow 2.0.” That was “Project 2025,” [a set of policy recommendations from the Heritage Foundation] and when you read it, you know that it is a blueprint for undercutting the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, fair housing laws – all of those things that had come to pass as a result of our civil rights activities of the 1960s. I said to myself that it looks like this is an attempt to bring the Second Reconstruction to an end as well.
What is more significant than anything else in this book is the fact that there are 95 years between [the election] of George Washington Murray and myself. This book is all about the fight to stem the tide of retrogression.
Fighting political disenfranchisement came to define the legacy of “The First Eight.” Where does that type of disenfranchisement come from?
You don’t have to be a real student of history to see what’s going on right now and what took place in 1876. I mentioned Jim Crow 2.0. Jim Crow 1.0 was Confederate Gen. Matthew Witherspoon Gary, who wrote the edict that became the blueprint in 1876 to undercut the elections that were taking place. Look at the Hamburg Massacre [in which a group of armed white men killed six Black men]. The massacre was provoked and well-planned.
What do you believe will be the legacy of this book and these men?
Remember, anything that’s happened before can happen again. When I was teaching history, my students used to tell me how boring history was, and asked, “Why are we spending so much time talking about the things that happened way back when?” I think it was Thomas Jefferson who was given credit for saying: “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.” I just think that along the way, we started rejoicing in victories, and we did not maintain vigilance.
Also, look at the power of one vote. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people argue that they’re dropping out of the system because they voted and things did not change the next morning. These people are reaping the benefits of Supreme Court decisions, back when the Court voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Those things were built upon decisions made by a [unanimous] Supreme Court. But the current powers that be went to work, and now have changed those 9-0 decisions in our favor to 6-3 against us.
We must learn the power of one vote, because the vote to end Reconstruction was a committee vote of 8-7 [in the U.S. House of Representatives]. That’s why I spent so much time talking about the end of Reconstruction, the beginning of Jim Crow, and that 95-year gap between Congressman Murray and myself.
