Enlightened Free Thinking Nubian Kings And Queens

In 1870 Republican Joseph Hayne Rainey became the first African American to be elected to the United States House of Representatives and take his seat.  Others were elected earlier but were not seated.  Rainey was born in Georgetown, South Carolina, on June 21, 1832. His parents had been slaves but his father purchased his family’s freedom and taught him to be a barber. The family moved to Charleston in 1846.  Rainey, however, traveled frequently outside the South. In 1859, Rainey went to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania There he met and married Susan, a free woman of color from the West Indies, who was also of African-French descent. They returned to South Carolina, where their three children were born: Joseph II, Herbert and Olivia. In 1861, with the outbreak of the American Civil War, Rainey was among free blacks drafted by the Confederate government to work on fortifications in Charleston, South Carolina. He also worked as a cook and laborer on blockade runner ships....

St. Augustine Catholic Church of New Orleans was the first black church in Louisiana and the first black Catholic church in the United States. In the 1830's a group of free African-American New Orleanians began organizing to create a Catholic church in Tremé, a historically black and multicultural New Orleans neighborhood. With the blessing of Antoine Blanc, the first Archbishop of New Orleans, the parish was founded in 1841 and the first ceremony was held there on October 9, 1842. A group of white Catholics, angered that a Catholic church aimed at black New Orleanians was to be built, began a campaign to purchase pews in an attempt to outnumber the black parishioners. This effort was unsuccessful, as free blacks still greatly outnumbered whites. Additionally, reputedly a first in American history, black members pooled resources to purchase pews for slaves. In 2005 hurricane Katrina devastated the Archdiocese of New Orleans financially. Although St. Augustine was relatively...