The “Fulfillment of White’s Prophecy”

In his last speech on the House Floor, in 1901, George Henry White of North Carolina—the final Black lawmaker elected in the nineteenth century—had predicted the return of Black Members to Congress. Oscar De Priest arrived on Capitol Hill 28 years later. Six months before his election, the Chicago Defender hailed the candidate as the “fulfillment of White’s prophecy.” African Americans across the country celebrated De Priest’s victory, and he recognized his responsibility to act as a voice for Black Americans beyond his district, especially those still residing in the South. “It’s a long, hard fight down there,” he acknowledged, “and I appreciate the fact the eyes of America are centered upon me. Prejudice has got to be broken down in this country and I’ve got to help do it.”²⁸

Taking office in 1929, De Priest’s first term coincided with the stock market collapse and the onset of the Great Depression, which had devastating effects on his Chicago constituents. During his three terms in office, De Priest represented a district facing economic upheaval and undergoing a political transformation. He navigated a world in which his voters actively questioned his party’s handling of the economy, and his Black constituents, in particular, began to leave the Republican Party in response to the New Deal policies of Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Black Representation Returns

Southern lawmakers reacted to De Priest’s election with disdain. In December 1928, before De Priest was even sworn in as a Member of the House, third-term Representative Miles Clayton Allgood of Georgia resigned his seat on the House Committee on Enrolled Bills when he learned that De Priest had been assigned to that panel. “It is largely an honorary committee,” Allgood explained, “and, so far as I am concerned, all honor departed from it when De Priest was made a member.”²⁹

Reached for comment by a reporter, De Priest responded, “Who cares?” But his remarks belied the fact that during his six years on Capitol Hill, De Priest worked to combat both openly racist actions by House colleagues and more subtle slights that chipped away at his equal standing on Capitol Hill. De Priest responded with indignation to both types of attacks and used the levers of power at his disposal—however limited they were—to seek retribution. He also invoked the privileges of membership in the House to make clear to his colleagues that he was willing to challenge discrimination within the Capitol and beyond.³⁰

On February 20, 1930, De Priest was part of a celebration of “Negro History Week” held under the auspices of Black historian Carter G. Woodson’s Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Former Members John R. Lynch and Thomas E. Miller attended the event; Henry Plummer Cheatham had to decline the invitation after sustaining injuries in a car crash. Before the meeting, De Priest brought Lynch and Miller, as well as several other guests including Woodson, to the Speaker’s private dining room in the Capitol. At the gathering a short while later, the former lawmakers told the assembled crowd of their time in office. De Priest used the occasion to call for the enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, pointing out that Congress had no problem appropriating money for the enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment prohibiting the sale of alcohol.³¹

In the House, De Priest built on the legacy of his predecessors, including Lynch, Miller, and Cheatham. He introduced an antilynching bill and proposed a measure that would enable defendants to appeal for a change of trial venue if they were concerned about discrimination from a state or local court based on “race, color, or creed.” Aiming to leverage the power of the federal government in overcoming discrimination, he recognized the need to address federal programs first. De Priest was critical of the New Deal and amended a funding bill to prevent discriminatory hiring practices at the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), one of the Roosevelt administration’s high-profile public work initiatives.³²

De Priest tried to eliminate discrimination in public accommodations and waged a battle to desegregate the House restaurant in the U.S. Capitol. In 1934, a member of De Priest’s staff was denied access to the White-only dining room. De Priest had eaten in the restaurant with his staff before without incident and objected to the enforcement of the policy in his absence. He introduced a resolution for the House to investigate the practice of exclusion, asking his colleagues, “If we allow segregation and the denial of constitutional rights under the Dome of the Capitol, where in God’s name will we get them?” Ultimately, the House approved the resolution, but the committee report tacitly supported the restaurant’s policy. Whether on or off Capitol Hill, De Priest found that challenging segregation from the House was often an uphill battle.³³

Black Americans and the Democratic Party

In 1930, former Representative John Lynch described the plight of Black voters in decidedly unfavorable terms. They were, he observed, forced to choose “the least of two evils.” Republicans had become largely indifferent to the needs of African Americans, once a core party constituency. The only other option for Black voters, Lynch said, was a Democratic Party as openly opposed to their interests as it had been since before the Civil War. “So if some of us want to punish the Republican party we can’t do it without endorsing, approving, ratifying and condoning the denial of every one of our human rights and every wrong which we as a race have been forced suffer,” he concluded. But by the 1930s, the Great Migration and the Great Depression would transform the northern wing of the Democratic Party and give rise to new forms of Black political participation that Lynch did not foresee at the start of that tumultuous decade. These changes also opened new opportunities for ambitious Black politicians such as Arthur Mitchell and William Dawson, who identified a pathway to power through a rapidly changing Democratic Party.³⁴

Oscar De Priest learned this firsthand, and Illinois’s First District provided a window into the process of Black political realignment in northern cities. Upon arriving in Chicago, most Black Americans had followed long-standing tradition and embraced the Republican Party. The local GOP welcomed their votes and encouraged their support by elevating men such as De Priest to positions of prominence. But in 1934, De Priest faced Mitchell, a Chicago Democrat who had left the Republican Party two years earlier. Mitchell responded to the overtures of a Democratic Party that was actively courting Black voters, seeking to unite them with White immigrant voters in a new coalition that was committed to supporting an active government solution to the country’s economic despair. This development coincided with the election of President Roosevelt, who at the time of Mitchell’s political conversion was about to initiate a massive spending effort to combat the problems of the Great Depression. Mitchell touted his support for the New Deal on the campaign trail and claimed that Black Americans would be better served by voting Democratic. De Priest rejected these arguments and claimed that Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation had increased Black unemployment. He also criticized New Deal agricultural policy, which he claimed was hurting Black farmworkers in the South. Mitchell won the November contest by a slim margin, becoming the first Black Democrat elected to Congress in American history. His victory signaled the beginning of a long-term shift in Black political allegiance to the Democratic Party.³⁵

The expansion of the federal government under Roosevelt produced a vast array of programs that cemented new bonds between Washington and the people of Mitchell’s district. The New Deal prioritized economic relief for those in need, an important policy goal to the countless families Mitchell represented who had left the South in recent years and who often faced discrimination in the labor market as they sought to establish themselves in the Windy City. The New Deal also established an extensive jobs program delivered through a slew of new federal agencies, including the CCC, the Public Works Administration (PWA), and the Works Progress Administration. While discrimination remained—as De Priest emphasized with his CCC amendment—Black workers generally benefited from these programs. The PWA notably tried to employ Black workers in proportion to their share of the local population, thereby ensuring fair access to work, and helped construct public buildings worth millions of dollars in Black neighborhoods.³⁶

Black voters nationwide began leaving the Republican Party because of the growing perception that local Democratic organizations better represented their interests. Local patronage positions and nationally administered emergency relief programs in Depression-era Chicago and other cities, for instance, proved crucial in attracting African-American support. There were limits to the New Deal’s aid to Black Americans, however. The protections of the Social Security program did not apply to workers in agriculture, for instance, thus excluding from a key economic security program the large subsection of Black workers who still toiled on farms. Moreover, federal funds and jobs were channeled largely through state and local governments, which enabled varying amounts of discrimination. While New Deal programs typically failed to equally distribute economic relief to Black Americans, particularly in southern states, the tangible assistance was significant. Black voters began consistently voting Democratic by the late 1940s, and the party attracted more support from African Americans in the ensuing decades.³⁷

While John Lynch may have misjudged the capacity of Democrats in the North to appeal to Black voters, his assessment was more accurate when it came to the southern Democrats who held significant levers of power in the legislative process—enough to hinder any New Deal legislation they opposed. Having already narrowed the benefits of Social Security legislation, southern Democrats worked in the House Rules Committee to ensure that the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 excluded agricultural, domestic, and service workers—exempting many Black workers in the South from the benefits of the law, such as the minimum wage.³⁸

Northern New Dealers in Congress were largely supportive of Black civil and political rights. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, several attempts were made to pass antilynching legislation. But the southern wing of the Democratic Party obstructed these efforts, just as they consistently used procedural maneuvers to ensure that the core economic New Deal legislation did not disrupt the racial hierarchy in the South. By withholding their votes, they could sink administration proposals with ease.³⁹

The War for Democracy on Capitol Hill

Black Americans continued to remake the demographic and political landscapes of the United States after the country entered World War II in December 1941. The recovery initiated by the New Deal stabilized American society but had been unable to end the Great Depression; only wartime mobilization did that. The massive federal effort to retool the American economy and wage a two-theater war required all hands to work, and it drew another wave of migrants out of the South in search of new opportunities in war production industries. During the war and the rest of the 1940s, nearly 1.5 million African Americans followed well-worn paths out of the South and to the destination cities of two decades earlier, such as New York and Chicago, and to new industrial centers along the West Coast, including California’s Los Angeles and Oakland and Seattle, Washington. All told, during the roughly two decades of migration accelerated by the two world wars, more than 3.5 million African Americans emigrated from the South to start new lives in the urban North and the West.⁴⁰

As Black Americans reconstituted their communities in new places, they exercised their civic voice in new ways. Many embraced wartime rhetoric that depicted the United States as being in a fight to preserve democracy against an avowedly racist foe in Nazi Germany. The Pittsburgh Courier coined the wartime slogan of Black America when it declared a “Double V” campaign—victory over fascism abroad and victory over racism at home.⁴¹

The federal government’s dominance in the wartime economy opened new opportunities for Black Americans to challenge entrenched systems of labor market discrimination. The military effort necessitated the hiring of hundreds of thousands of workers in factories across the nation, but most employers still relegated Black workers to the lowest-paid positions, if they hired them at all. In 1941, A. Philip Randolph, the longtime labor activist and head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, called for African Americans to march on Washington to demand an end to the discriminatory hiring practices in those federally funded defense production industries.⁴²

To forestall a mass protest in the capital during wartime, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 on June 25, 1941, which declared “full participation in the national defense program by all citizens of the United States, regardless of race, creed, color, or national origin,” based on “the firm belief that the democratic way of life within the Nation can be defended successfully only with the help and support of all groups within its borders.” The order required that the federal government, unions, and defense industries “provide for the full and equitable participation of all workers.” It also created the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to investigate complaints about discrimination in hiring.⁴³

While Black labor leaders forced the President’s hand on job discrimination, Representative Arthur Mitchell highlighted the ways discriminatory practices by the United States and its allies undermined the war effort. For example, in 1942, Representative Mitchell repeatedly linked wartime setbacks suffered by the British to their persistent bigotry. Mitchell noted that the colonial power failed in Singapore “due in part to its own discriminations.” He found potential similarities in his own country, where Black Americans suffered under Jim Crow and experienced unequal treatment in so many aspects of life. “America might suffer a like fate,” Mitchell warned, “if we insist upon destroying the morale of one-tenth of its fighting strength.” The American call to arms, Mitchell noted bitterly, “is for white people only, except where Negroes are needed to do the most menial service. Is this democracy?” To Mitchell, if the United States was going to assume a new role of global leadership, the nation must reflect on its shortcomings. “While we are adjusting affairs the world over,” he said, “we must not fail to adjust affairs in our own country and in our own hearts.”⁴⁴

Black lawmakers also couched their critique of disenfranchisement in this international perspective. In 1943, the House debated a bill to outlaw the poll tax. Although just a first-term legislator at the time, Representative William Dawson, who had succeeded Mitchell in the House, told his new colleagues that he knew “more about what is the real ground of this subject matter than any man in this assembly.” From his early life in Georgia, he had seen the restrictive effect of the poll tax, which he said violated “the true spirit of the Constitution of the United States.” Five months later, Dawson testified on the bill before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Again, he spoke of the constitutional right to vote withheld from African Americans, but this time he connected this situation to the significance of the concept of “democracy” around the globe. If the poll tax survived, Dawson warned, “our vaunted government of the people, by the people and for the people is a joke to the rest of the world,” as it will remain unable to guarantee all the people “their sacred right of franchise.” The 1944 Supreme Court decision in Smith v. Allwright outlawed the White primary, ending a key practice that had perpetuated the dominance of segregationists in the Democratic Party. Southern states remained highly capable of ensuring Black disenfranchisement, however, even as Black soldiers gave their lives for democracy.⁴⁵

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