List of African-American United States Representatives

The United States House of Representatives has had 153 elected African-American members, of whom 147 have been representatives from U.S. states and 6 have been delegates from U.S. territories and the District of Columbia.[1] The House of Representatives is the lower house of the bicameral United States Congress, which is the legislative branch of the federal government of the United States.

Joseph Rainey (left) and Shirley Chisholm (right) are, respectively, the first African American and woman to serve in the United States House of Representatives.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the term African American includes all individuals who identify with one or more nationalities or ethnic groups originating in any of the black racial groups of Africa.[2] The term is generally used for Americans with at least partial ancestry in any of the original peoples of sub-Saharan Africa. During the founding of the federal government, African Americans were consigned to a status of second-class citizenship or enslaved.[3] No African American served in federal elective office before the ratification in 1870 of the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Fifteenth Amendment prohibits the federal and state governments from denying any citizen the right to vote because of that citizen's race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Joseph Rainey was the first African-American representative to be seated in the U.S. House. He served South Carolina's 1st congressional district beginning in 1870 during the Reconstruction era following the American Civil War. The first African-American woman to serve as a representative was Shirley Chisholm from New York's 12th congressional district in 1969 during the Civil Rights Movement.

Many African-American members of the House of Representatives serve majority-minority districts.[4] Some of these congressional districts are gerrymandered, limiting serious challenges to their re-election, and limiting their abilities to represent a larger, more diverse constituency.[4] The Voting Rights Act of 1965 includes restrictions on the ability of States to diminish minority representation during redistricting. In the elections of 2016 and 2018 an increasing number of non-majority minority districts have elected racial minority Representatives.

Overall, 30 of the 50 U.S. states, plus the U.S. Virgin Islands and the District of Columbia, have elected an African American to represent them in the U.S. House of Representatives, with Washington being the most recent to elect their first (in 2020); out of these, 21 states, plus the U.S. Virgin Islands and the District of Columbia, have elected an African-American woman to represent them in the U.S. House. Illinois's 1st congressional district has the longest continuous streak of electing African-American representatives, a tendency which has occurred since 1929 to the present. There currently are 56 African-American representatives and two African-American delegates in the United States House of Representatives, representing 27 states, plus the U.S. Virgin Islands and the District of Columbia. Most are members of the Congressional Black Caucus.