Tim Scott

Timothy Eugene Scott (born September 19, 1965) is an American former insurance agent and politician who is the junior United States Senator for South Carolina. A Republican, he joined the Senate in 2013 when South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley appointed him to fill the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Jim DeMint. Scott won a special election in 2014 for the final two years of DeMint's second term, and won election to a full term in 2016. In November 2010, Scott was elected to the United States House of Representatives for , and served from 2011 to 2013. Scott, a conservative, was endorsed for the Senate 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. Along with Democrats Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kamala Harris of California, Scott is one of three African Americans serving in the United States Senate. He is the first African-American senator from the state of South Carolina, the first black Republican elected to the United States Senate since the election of Edward Brooke in 1966, and the first elected from the South since 1881, four years after the end of Reconstruction. He is the first Republican African-American Congressman from South Carolina since 1897 and since the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He is also the first African American to have been elected to both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate since P.B.S. Pinchback.