Talk:African Americans in the United States Congress
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article was nominated for deletion on 19 July 2005. The result of the discussion was keep. |
 |
African Americans in the United States Congress is part of WikiProject U.S. Congress, an attempt to build a comprehensive guide to the United States Congress. |
| B | This article has been rated as b-Class on the quality scale. |
| High | This article has been rated as high-importance on the importance scale. |
| people | This article is about one (or many) people(s). |
 |
This article is part of WikiProject African diaspora. This WikiProject aims to improve the quality of articles related to topics concerning persons of African descent and their cultures. If you would like to participate in the project, you can choose to edit this article, or visit the Wikipedia:WikiProject African diaspora for more information. (See: Category:WikiProject African diaspora for more pages in this project.) |
| B | This article has been rated as B-Class on the assessment scale. |
| Mid | This article has been rated as Mid-Importance within African diaspora. |
Contents |
[edit] Menard vs. Rainey in intro
John Willis Menard was the first African-American elected to Congress (although he was never seated due to an election dispute); whereas Joseph Rainey was the first African-American who was actually seated as a member.
Menard never took his seat. Arguably, that means that he was never a "member," so he was never "in" the Congress and did not "serve" in the Congress. That means that 121 African-Americans have served in Congress as of 2007. Accordingly, I will rewrite the intro to state this and separately reference the one member who was elected but not seated. (Of course, if someone can find a source that establishes that Menard somehow "served" in Congress despite the fact that he didn't take his seat, then please correct me.) Bry9000 (talk) 17:03, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Last paragraph
I encourage anyone who can to improve the first sentence of the last paragraph. My attempt still isn't where I'd like it to be, but there's not much else I think we can do with it. Opusaug 14:10, 18 May 2005 (UTC)
[edit] POV
This is an oddly POV piece. White Democratic Southern legislators from 1890 to 1908 wrote and passed disfranchising constitutions that utterly suppressed the black vote for more than 60 years, and also disfranchised many poor whites.
The Solid South meant white one-party Democrats for generations. They had seats in Congress based on total population of their states, but they had suppressed about half the vote by disfranchising most blacks and many whites.
Gerrymandering was never limited to late 20th c. Democrats or the courts. White Republican legislators have employed gerrymandering and worse to restrict political power of African Americans and Latinos. Why else would a majority black city like Atlanta not be able to elect African American candidates earlier than it did? Each party has used gerrymandering to its own ends. --Parkwells (talk) 22:48, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Redistricting
Redistricting happens after every census, if necessary, and is controlled by the parties in power at the state level. It's much more complex than suggested here. Not only were blacks disfranchised, but in states such as Alabama, where the rural-dominated legislature refused to redistrict its own seats from 1901 into the 1960s, the result was that by 1960, a minority of 25% of the state's population controlled the majority of the seats in both the houses of the state legislature. With that background, it took Federal court intervention in 1972 to come up with a plan in which districts approximate one man, one vote ideals. --Parkwells (talk) 23:04, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
