Giannoulias And Kirk Means Illinois Senator Will No Longer Be Black

Illinoisans have nine months to decide who will replace Roland Burris in the U.S. Senate. But we know one thing, as NBC Chicago pointed out Wednesday morning: that person almost certainly won't be black.

For any of the 99 other seats in the Senate, that would be business as usual. Since reconstruction, only one other seat has held an African-American: Edward Brooke, III served two terms as a liberal Republican from Massachusetts, from 1966 to 1978.

But three separate black senators have held this Illinois seat, two of whom have gone on to the national platform (and one who is destined for permanent ignominy). Carol Moseley Braun was elected in 1992, becoming the first and so far only African-American woman in the Senate. She went on to serve as US Ambassador to New Zealand and competed briefly in the 2004 Democratic presidential primary.

Moseley Braun lost the seat to Peter Fitzgerald in 1998, but Fitzgerald retired after one term. In 2004, both of the major-party candidates were black, another historic first--Barack Obama defeated the perennial whipping boy Alan Keyes in that race.

After Obama's ascendance to the presidency in 2008, the seat was shopped around by Rod Blagojevich, and ultimately ended up in the hands of Roland Burris. Burris will not run for re-election in 2010, as he faces a historically low approval rating of 14%.

Cheryle Jackson, a black woman and president of the Urban League, sought the Democratic nomination to replace Burris. But her loss to Alexi Giannoulias in Tuesday's primary all but guarantees that the seat will not be held by an African American come 2011. (The reason for the caveat: LeAlan Jones, a black man from the Green Party, will be on the ballot in November.)

And unless Harold Ford, Jr. runs and wins in New York, this also means that the 112th Congress will have yet another all-white Senate.