On June 12, 1929, First Lady Lou Hoover hosted one of several social gatherings at the White House for the spouses of newly elected members of the House. The tea party for congressional spouses was a polite and quiet tradition, a courtesy that presidents’ wives hoped would encourage goodwill between the legislative and executive branches of government. But this one produced an uproar.
What was the problem? Unforgivably to some, one of the attending spouses brought with her an immutable characteristic. She was black. Her name was Jessie De Priest, wife of Congressman Oscar Stanton De Priest of Illinois.
The Republican Mrs. Hoover couldn’t have been more gracious. Known for her fairness and disdain for racism, she welcomed Mrs. De Priest as she had the other congressional wives.
But in the following days, the White House was deluged with angry letters and telegrams. Condemnations from prominent officials, mostly Democrats, poured forth as if Mrs. Hoover had started a shooting war. To her credit, she saw such ugly invective as “just plain wickedness.” She chose to not dignify it with a direct response and moved on.
The incident would not be the last time that a De Priest focused the nation’s attention on a worthy cause. Mrs. De Priest’s husband would see to that, and for it, he should be remembered as a hero.
The remarkable Oscar De Priest (1871–1951), the son of freed slaves, was born in Alabama, raised in Ohio, and pulled himself up from poverty as a lowly house painter to become a wealthy contractor, landlord, and real estate developer in Chicago. A lifelong Republican, he became Chicago’s first elected black alderman in 1914. Fourteen years later, in 1928, he won election to Congress from the inner-city First District, making him not only the first black congressman ever elected from Illinois but also the first black congressman of the 20th century. For the three terms he served in Washington (1929–1935), he was the only black congressman in the entire House. In a chapter from his book, “Courage in the People’s House,” Joe Neguse wrote:
“What none of De Priest’s critics could dispute ... was that he was a patriot. Indeed, among his first acts was to order ten thousand copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to give to his constituents. He also was an ardent anticommunist, warning of ‘its spread in the urban areas experiencing the acute effects of the Great Depression.’”
Americans of today may think of black voters as a political monolith, an unshakeable corner of the Democratic Party coalition. However, from the end of the Civil War until the 1930s, the black vote was overwhelmingly Republican. During Reconstruction (1865–1877) and beyond, hundreds of black Republicans were elected, from local and state posts to the U.S. House and Senate—and not just in the South. Black voters saw the GOP as the party of Lincoln and emancipation and the Democrats as the party of slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation.
But Oscar De Priest still faced racism and threats when he got to the nation’s capital. During his third term in Washington, De Priest battled the Jim Crow policy that forbade blacks from dining in the official House restaurant. The man who ordered the discriminatory practice was North Carolina Democrat Lindsay Warren. De Priest kicked off a national debate when he introduced a resolution charging that Warren’s discriminatory policy defied the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution and that Warren, therefore, lacked any authority to refuse service to loyal, black U.S. citizens.
Although De Priest’s black constituents always appreciated his work to end Jim Crow, the congressman faced strong headwinds in his run for a fourth term in 1934. He lost narrowly to Democrat Arthur Mitchell, who pledged support for FDR’s growing welfare state.
The 1936 election saw America’s black community shift decisively into the Democratic column. In 1932, only 23 percent of American black voters supported FDR, but four years later, 71 percent cast their ballots for the Democratic president. Despite Donald Trump’s gains in 2024, the black vote remains overwhelmingly Democrat today.
After his 1934 defeat, Oscar De Priest returned to Chicago and the real estate business. The only political office he would hold in the post-Congress phase of his life was that of alderman on the city council again, from 1943–1947. He died at the age of 80 in 1951.
