‘A cautionary tale’: South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn discussed his new book with Gov. Josh Shapiro
Congressman Jim Clyburn's book memorializes eight trailblazing Black politician from South Carolina and weaves commentary on modern American politics.
When U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina became majority whip, he asked the Library of Congress for photos of eight men to hang on the walls of his Washington, D.C., office.
He recalled, years ago, a group of visitors stopped and asked who the men were: The first Black U.S. House members from his home state.
“I thought you were the first,” someone from the group said.
Clyburn replied: “Before I was first, there were eight.”
That became the genesis of his new book, The First Eight: A Personal History of the Pioneering Black Congressmen Who Shaped a Nation, which he discussed at length with longtime friend Gov. Josh Shapiro late Sunday as part of the Free Library of Philadelphia’s Author Events series.
“This book is a cautionary tale: Anything that’s happened before can happen again,” Clyburn told a crowded Parkway Central Library auditorium.
Released in early November, The First Eight chronicles South Carolina’s Black members of Congress who served during and after Reconstruction: Joseph Rainey, Robert De Large, Robert Elliott, Richard Cain, Alonzo Ransier, Robert Smalls, Thomas Miller, and George Washington Murray. Ninety-five years later, in 1992, Clyburn became the ninth.
The book blends history with memoir: Clyburn intends it to be a monument to the legacies of these trailblazers and a discerning commentary on modern American politics. It weaves the men’s careers, which have largely been erased from public discourse, with Clyburn’s experience and observations from his storied three decades in Congress.
The First Eight “allows us to know where we come from, it allows us to know where we need to go in the future, particularly with the challenges we face today,” Shapiro said.
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Clyburn drew parallels between the men’s histories of bitterly contested elections and domestic terrorism to the MAGA movement and Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol; he laid out how a series of events — beginning with the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, the accession of Andrew Johnson, the end of Reconstruction, and rise of Jim Crow — prevented a Black person from representing South Carolina in Congress for nearly 100 years.
“History is supposed to be instructive,” he said. “I believe that we are at a junction in our history that we must intervene in this process like we’ve never intervened before in order to check the movement currently going to the right.”
And while the book is South Carolina-centric, there are historical nods to the commonwealth: Smalls, the first Black man to pilot ships for the U.S. Navy, spent time in Philadelphia, according to Clyburn, and Miller graduated from Lincoln University in Chester County, the first degree-granting historically Black university in the nation. (Miller was also a longtime friend of Nelson Nix, the father of Pennsylvania’s first Black representative in Congress, Robert N.C. Nix Sr.)
Clyburn said the results of the consequential governors races in New Jersey and Virginia, as well as the New York City mayoral election, gives him hope.