Tim Scott
Timothy Eugene "Tim" Scott (born September 19, 1965) is the junior United States Senator for South Carolina. A Republican, he was appointed as senator in 2013 after South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley named him to fill the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Jim DeMint. Scott ran in a special election in 2014 for the final two years of DeMint's second term, and won the seat. In November 2010, Scott was elected to the United States House of Representatives for South Carolina's 1st congressional district, and served from 2011 to 2013. The first Republican African-American Congressman from South Carolina since 1897, Scott, a fiscal and cultural conservative, was endorsed by Tea Party groups. He served one term in the South Carolina General Assembly (2009–2011); prior to that, he had been on the Charleston County Council from 1996 to 2008. Scott is one of two African Americans serving in the United States Senate, the first African-American senator from the state of South Carolina, and the first elected from the South since the late 19th century (specifically, since 1881, four years after the end of Reconstruction.) He is the first African-American senator elected from the South since the states disfranchised blacks around the turn of the 20th century. He is also the first African American to have been elected to both the House of Representatives and the Senate.