List of African-American United States senators

Barack Obama was the first African American U.S. senator to be elected president of the United States.

Kamala Harris was the first African American U.S. senator to be elected vice president of the United States.

This is a list of African Americans who have served in the United States Senate. The Senate has had 12 African-American elected or appointed officeholders. Two each served during both the 19th and 20th centuries.^[1]

Three of the 12 African American senators held Illinois's Class 3 seat, including Barack Obama, who went on to become President of the United States. This makes Illinois the state with the most African-American U.S. senators to date.

In 2016, Kamala Harris became the first African American to be elected a U.S. senator from California. Harris would go on to become the first African-American vice president of the United States and first African-American president of the United States Senate.

Of the 12 African-American senators, seven were popularly elected (including one that previously had been appointed by his state's governor), two were elected by the state legislature prior to the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1913 (which mandated the direct election of U.S. senators by the people of each state), and three were appointed by a state governor and have not subsequently been elected.^{[citation needed]}