Congress debated forcing Georgia to seat Black legislators denied their offices

Evidence

A month after being sworn in, Mississippi Senator Hiram Rhodes Revels, the first Black member of either house of Congress in U.S. history, gives his first speech on the floor of the Senate. His comments address a debate on whether Congress should force the Georgia state legislature to accept twenty-nine Black state representatives and three Black state senators who had recently been elected but were being denied their seats. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 822

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why did Revels address Georgia’s legislature specifically rather than his own Mississippi? Worth checking the speech’s text.
• XREF: Connects to Reconstruction-era congressional debates and the enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. — connects to: States-rights arguments in Congress blocked federal anti-lynching legislation. — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 3899