U.S. House of Representatives (1929–35)
In 1928, when Republican congressman
Martin B. Madden died, Mayor Thompson selected De Priest to replace him on the ballot. He was the first African American elected to Congress outside the South and the first to be elected in the 20th century. He represented the
1st Congressional District of Illinois (which included
The Loop and part of the
South Side of Chicago) as a
Republican. During De Priest's three consecutive terms (1929–1935), he was the only black representative in Congress. He introduced several anti-discrimination bills during these years of the
Great Depression. DePriest's 1933 amendment barring discrimination in the
Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a program of the New Deal to employ people across the country in building infrastructure, was passed by the
Senate and signed into law by President
Franklin D. Roosevelt. His anti-
lynching bill (House Joint Resolution 171, in 1933) failed due to opposition by the white Democrats of the
Solid South, although it would not have made lynching a federal crime. (Previous anti-lynching bills had also failed to pass the Senate, which was dominated by the South since its disenfranchisement of blacks at the turn of the century.) He presented the legislation with a long and detailed speech in which he read newspaper reports and legal opinions: he included the names of victims of lynchings from 1927 on, and provided graphic details of these murders. De Priest defended the right of students of
Howard University, a
historically black college in Washington, D.C., to eat in the public section of the House restaurant and not be restricted to a section in the basement near the kitchen, used mostly by black employees and visitors. He took this issue of discrimination against the students (and other black visitors) to a special bipartisan House committee. In a three-month-long heated debate, the Republican political minority argued that the restaurant's discriminatory practice violated
Fourteenth Amendment rights to equal access. The
Democratic majority skirted the issue by claiming that the restaurant was a private facility and not open to the public. The House restaurant remained
segregated through much of the 1940s and maybe as late as 1952. De Priest appointed
Benjamin O. Davis Jr. to the
United States Military Academy at a time when the only African-American line officer in the Army was Davis's
father. By the early 1930s, De Priest's popularity waned because he continued to oppose higher taxes on the rich and fought
Depression-era federal relief programs under President Roosevelt. De Priest was defeated in the
1934 United States House of Representatives elections by Republican-turned-Democrat African-American
Arthur W. Mitchell, who campaigned on support for the New Deal. After returning to his businesses and political life in Chicago, De Priest was elected again to the Chicago City Council in 1943 as alderman of the 3rd Ward, serving until 1947. He died in Chicago at 80 and is buried in
Graceland Cemetery. ==Personal life==