Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,782

This is the grave of Oscar DePriest, as well as his wife Jessie DePriest.

Born in 1871 in Florence, Alabama, DePriest grew up, like most Black kids of that time, in a family where his parents were former slaves. His mother worked as a laundress and his father was a teamster. But the family also got involved in the Exoduster movement of the late 1870s, when Black families gave up on the South entirely and moved to western Kansas, recently cleared of the Tribes thanks to the American Genocide, and they moved out there in 1878. This move was sped up by expediency; his father had helped save some men from lynching and thus was threatened himself. They lived near the town of Salina, Kansas and that’s where DePriest went to school and grew up.

As soon as he could, DePriest followed many people, regardless of race, and got the hell out of Kansas. He moved to Chicago in 1889 and worked whatever jobs he could find. But he had a good education for his time and place and the family had some money to help out and he soon became a contractor and real estate broker in the Black community. He invested his money wisely in stocks, got lucky that none of them really went belly up, and became a rich man by 1900, a leader of the Black community. One of his specialties was in opening up previously white neighborhoods to Blacks. There is a long historical literature about this process. What I know is mostly post-war than pre, but basically the way it tended to work is that Black families would pay a lot of money for a house to a white family that really didn’t care one way or another about who they sold to, it was kept under wraps until the deal was done, and then the rest of the neighborhood would find out and sell cheap. At this time, these were mostly Irish neighborhoods.

Well, DePriest certainly had ambition and one of them was for politics. He became a member of the Cook County Board of Commissioners in 1904 and remained there for four years. Then he was elected to the City Council in 1914 and was the first Black alderman in the city’s history. He was indicted for graft in 1917, which may have been a racist setup. He resigned in protest and then hired Clarence Darrow to take the case. Darrow was happy to do so, thinking again that it was bullshit. Darrow won that case too. None of that hurt DePriest in his community. He built up the People’s Movement Club, the first major Black political organization in the city and that forced people to respect him. Simply put, he could deliver a lot of votes and that became a lot more votes in the World War I Great Migration and its aftermath.

In 1928, Martin Madden, who represented that neighborhood of Chicago in Congress, died. DePriest was named his replacement because of his local power. He became the only Black representative in Congress for the next three terms. DePriest was a very solid Republican at a weird time for it. In some ways, he was a very good congressman. He fought hard on racial issues, including sponsoring anti-lynching legislation. He tried to get that through on a bill around the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933. He also tried to have racial discrimination barred in the CCC and an amendment to allow a person to have a court case moved to a new jurisdiction if they couldn’t get justice at home, i.e, they were likely to be lynched either way. The white South wasn’t having it and filibustered the bill until it was dropped, which FDR didn’t really care about anyway. He was great on throwing it the faces of southern whites, such as when an Alabama senator who wanted to keep the Senate restaurant segregated that, nope, that wasn’t going to happen and good luck stopping him from eating there (quite a few white congressmen started dining in the Senate room to not have to eat with DePriest; his response was to bring racially mixed groups of guests). He’d go to the South and give speeches too.

But DePriest was terrible on economic issues. He was basically a Gilded Age Republican, like the rest of the Republicans in the early 30s. He didn’t think government should help out his district, even as Black Americans suffered from the Depression even more than whites. So he defended the rich at every measure, voted against tax increases on wealthy Americans, and voted against nearly every New Deal program. He thought FDR was basically the antichrist. He was a huge redbaiter and wanted federal investigations of the Communist Party, which was growing pretty rapidly in the Black community in the early 30s. Basically, other than the issue of racial segregation, DePriest was a right-winger aligned with the worst people in this nation. He might have had a political machine, but if that machine doesn’t deliver, it isn’t going to get voted back in and that’s what happened to DePriest in 1934. He was defeated by the Democrat Arthur Mitchell, himself a former Republican who saw DePriest as a man unwilling to exist in the real world.

However, to leave it at this would undermine the most talked about moment DePriest was involved in, or more specifically, his wife. Jessie Williams DePriest was born in 1870 in Rockford, Illinois. She was a music teacher in Rockford when she met DePriest and they married. When she went to Washington, it caused a conundrum among the elites. Congressional wives were treated with respect and there were parties and such. No one expected Democrats to treat a Black woman with any respect, but Republicans at least still kinda pretended that they believed in Black rights.

So, in 1929, Lou Hoover, wife of President Herbert Hoover, invited her to a reception at the White House. This was as controversial as when Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to the White House over twenty years earlier, a decision it should be said that TR greatly regretted. Democrats were furious. Many Republicans weren’t thrilled either. For awhile Hoover got a lot of respect for this from those who believe in justice. Later, it came out that Hoover really didn’t want to do this. Normally, these receptions might have 100 wives of Washington insiders, mostly members of Congress. Not this one. Hoover chose about a dozen women who wouldn’t be offended by having tea with a Black women. But you know, it happened and good for Hoover. By all accounts Jessie DePriest handled it all with great grace, a characteristic people often used to describe her.

After DePriest lost his reelection bid in 1934, he went back to Chicago and his riches. He did manage to get reelected to the city council for awhile, dying in 1951, at the age of 80. Jessie lived until 1961.

Oscar DePriest is buried in Graceland Cemetery, Chicago, Illinois.

If you would like this series to visit other first Black members of Congress from a given state, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Incidentally, 18 states have never elected a Black person to Congress, including former slave states Kentucky and Arkansas. Katie Hall, the first Black representative from Indiana, is actually in Homewood, Illinois. Jefferson Long, the first Black representative from Georgia, is in Macon. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.