JACKSON — Heirlooms depicting part of Alcorn State University’s beginnings in Reconstruction-era Mississippi have found their way to the Lorman campus.

Oil paintings of Hiram R. Revels, the university’s first president and the nation’s first black member of the U.S. Senate, and his family were given to the university Friday by Susan Cayton Woodson, 91, a fixture in the Chicago arts community and the former senator’s great-granddaughter. A Seth Thomas mantle clock given to Revels by Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America, is still in Chicago, but will also be part of the collection to be given to Alcorn.

“It’s the clock’s home,” Woodson said following a reception at the Old State Capitol in Jackson where university officials were joined by Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, a Vicksburg native, to announce the donation. “They belong together.”

Born in 1827 in North Carolina, Revels was ordained a minister in 1845 and raised two black regiments during the Civil War, including at the siege at Vicksburg. In 1869, he was elected to represent Adams County in the Mississippi Senate. A year later, he was elected to the U.S. Senate, the first of six black members who have served there to date. He served as president of Alcorn from 1871 to 1882, with a stint as interim Secretary of State in 1873.

“He set the platform for everyone that followed,” Hosemann said.

Woodson, the namesake of the nation’s pre-eminent gallery for Chicago Renaissance and WPA-era art, was in Mississippi for the first time to donate pieces of her collection. Susie Revels Cayton, her grandmother, fought for women’s suffrage and is featured in one of the donated oil paintings, by Chicago artist Eldzier Cortor. Woodson herself appears in another, by Jan Spivey Gilchrist, also a Chicago artist. Also contributed were a rendering of Revels and a stone bust of an African woman.

Planned today are a visit to the Alcorn State-Prairie View football game and to Zion Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Natchez where Revels served as pastor.

“For those of us who went to Alcorn, it just does something to us,” said state Rep. Alyce Clark, D-Jackson, of the donation.

The 3,200-student Alcorn was founded in 1871 as the nation’s first public university for black students. Its current president, Dr. George E. Ross, is its 17th.

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Contact Danny Barrett Jr. dbarrett@vicksburgpost.com