Black Chicago's New Deal Congressmen: Migration, Ghettoization

BLACK CHICAGO’S NEW DEAL CONGRESSMEN: MIGRATION, GHETTOIZATION, AND THE ORIGINS OF CIVIL RIGHTS POLITICS

MICHAEL EDWARD BRANDON

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2015

To my courageous family of migrants and our dearly departed

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, I thank my Mom, Dad, Brother, and extended family for love and encouragement in the pursuit of all my dreams. I’m forever indebted to Charles

Irons, Watson Jennison, and William Link, whose confidence in a young historian made my academic career possible. At each major stage of my intellectual development, they’ve committed their time and hearts to my words and ideas. I also thank the Elon faculty, who ensured that I was a student and an athlete. In particular, Clyde Ellis, who guided me to a master’s program, and, John Sullivan, who taught me to “choose large mind.” Go Phoenix! In Greensboro, I was extremely fortunate to work with Charles

Bolton, Thomas Jackson, Jeff Jones, and Karl Schleunes, who taught an inexperienced historian a lot about civil rights, human rights, public policy, Soviet Communism, Nazi

Fascism.

In Gainesville, I’ve had the great fortune to work with Paul Ortiz and the Samuel

Proctor Oral History Program, which has impressed upon me a fundamental belief that academics have democratic commitments outside of the classroom. My graduate training at the University of Florida would not have been possible without a McKnight

Doctoral Fellowship and financial support from the Graduate School and the History

Department. The staff at the Chicago History Museum was incredibly welcoming and provided crucial assistance in the archives. My final research trip was enriched by conversations with Lorenzo, a local resident and unofficial historian, who recited gripping tales of South Side ghettoization with both candor and humor.

I’ll never forget good times at the Seventh Street compound with my roommates, our cats, and comrades. I would have never survived adolescence without the LTS, my

crew from NAPS, and P-104. Thanks for all the “kicks.” Last, I had the best teacher of all-time as a kid, Rodney Ortiz, my life’s inspiration. I miss you.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

ABSTRACT ...... 7

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION: BLACK REPRESENTATION & THE PARALYTIC ORIGINS OF CIVIL RIGHTS POLITICS ...... 9

2 THE “TALL SYCAMORE OF THE PRAIRIES”: OSCAR DEPRIEST’S GREAT MIGRATION TO THE LAND OF LINCOLN & SOUTH SIDE GHETTOIZATION .... 18

3 “LOOK OUT FOR YOURSELF… NO ONE ELSE WILL”: ARTHUR MITCHELL’S GREAT ESCAPE FROM THE JIM CROW SOUTH ...... 66

4 WHITE CITY, BLACK METROPOLIS: VIOLENCE, VICE, & POWER IN THE “ROARING TWENTIES” ...... 113

5 CONGRESSMAN DEPRIEST, RACE MAN: BLACK REPRESENTATION IN HERBERT HOOVER’S AMERICA ...... 168

6 CONGRESSMAN MITCHELL, “UNCLE TOM”: CHICAGO’S DEMOCRATIC MACHINE & THE RISE OF CIVIL RIGHTS POLITICS ...... 220

7 CONCLUSION: A CENTURY OF GHETTOIZATION & THE “LONG CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT” ...... 269

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 279

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 299

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

BLACK CHICAGO’S NEW DEAL CONGRESSMEN: MIGRATION, GHETTOIZATION, AND THE ORIGINS OF CIVIL RIGHTS POLITICS

Michael Edward Brandon

May 2015

Chair: William A. Link Cochair: Paul Ortiz Major: History

“Black Chicago’s New Deal Congressmen” examines the lives and careers of two forgotten politicians from the Great Migration-era South Side. Civil rights historians have emphasized World War II as the spark which began the definitive years of the black freedom struggle. However, this dissertation’s examination of Oscar S. DePriest

(1929-35) and Arthur W. Mitchell (1935-43), Alabama-born sons of slaves, demonstrates that the Great Migration was the foundation for both black political empowerment and effective civil rights politics. Republican DePriest, the first black member of the Chicago City Council (1915), served as the first black representative on

Capitol Hill since the Reconstruction era. Mitchell was the first black Democratic congressman in U.S. history, a beneficiary of Franklin Roosevelt’s coattails who aided the party’s machine in Chicago.

On one hand, the southern exodus to the Windy City produced a segregated

Bronzeville ghetto, whose residents faced discrimination in employment, education, and social services. On the other hand, Jim Crow refugees, enfranchised by their travels, formed a concentrated, organized bloc of voters that was courted and rewarded by

ruthless political machines and notorious mobsters. The South Side Congressmen – and Black America – gained political power as Dixie migrants poured into the urban

North and formed political leverage for direct action protests (among disfranchised southern voters) and Washington lobbying campaigns that restored Reconstruction’s legal legacy. Ghettoization was the paralytic political foundation for a civil rights movement that achieved its greatest aims amidst a new “urban crisis” and a Second

Great Migration.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: BLACK REPRESENTATION & THE PARALYTIC ORIGINS OF CIVIL RIGHTS POLITICS

In 1901, Congressman George White (R-NC), the final representative of the

Reconstruction era, departed Capitol Hill. White predicted that his departure was “the

Negroes’ temporary farewell to the American Congress… Phoenix-like he will rise up some day and come again.”1 Courageous Jim Crow refugees in the Yankee North assured White’s prediction with the elections of Oscar S. DePriest (1929-35) and Arthur

W. Mitchell (1935-43), Alabama-born sons of slaves. According to famed sociologists

Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake, “The story of how the black migrants of the South gathered their strength to fulfill George White’s prophesy is a story of machine politics –

Chicago style.” The Black Metropolis authors argue that White’s idealistic aspirations for the race’s “God-fearing people, faithful, industrious, and loyal people” had been

“yoked with the gamblers, prostitutes, and the demimonde.” Chicago’s black congressmen revealed “the relationship between democracy and political expediency,” a ghettoization process “led by forceful personalities to the conquest of political power.”2

Civil rights historians have overlooked the historic black politicians in a research field – and American popular culture – dominated by the postwar movement and the

Sixties. Republican DePriest, an “Exoduster,” became the first black member of the

Chicago City Council (1915) amidst the Great Migration. Mitchell, a Cotton Belt educator, rode Franklin Roosevelt’s coattails to become the nation’s first black

Democratic congressman. On one hand, DePriest, also known as the “Tall Sycamore

1Benjamin R. Justesen, George Henry White: An Even Chance in the Race of Life (Baton Rouge, 2001), 311.

2 Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (Chicago, 1993), 361.

of the Prairies,” was a popular Race Man and steadfast NAACP ally. On the other hand, Mitchell was a notorious Uncle Tom and token Democrat, a civil rights opportunist who red-baited the NAACP and obstructed antilynching legislation. Nevertheless, the

New Deal’s only black congressmen were both Alabama migrants who reached Capitol

Hill as capitalists and pragmatic politicians, not as fearless activists committed to the collective advancement of their people.

An examination of DePriest and Mitchell provides an alternative narrative for black political organizing, partisanship, and protest. “Blockbusting” real estate deals, machine politics, graft, blackmail, and racketeering drove the black congressmen to fame and fortune in Jim Crow America. Despite the absence of metropolitan ordinances, Chicago policy makers, bankers, real estate dealers, homeowners, and vice lords produced a segregated South Side ghetto. Black voters ultimately formed a concentrated, well-organized bloc vote, which was absorbed by Republican and

Democratic regimes as southern migrants poured into the Windy City. The power of the black bloc vote in obtaining high-level representation and patronage came at the expense of dilapidated dwellings, white clientage, corruption, and substandard public services on the South Side.

Congressmen DePriest and Mitchell were the fruits of longstanding demographic patterns. Their lives and political careers demonstrate the central role of the Great

Migration – and ghettoization – in creating a foundation for black capital accumulation and politicization. The southern migrants rose to power in a historic Bronzeville that once sheltered several stations on the Underground Railroad to Canada.3 According to

3 Christopher Robert Reed, Black Chicago’s First Century, Volume I: 1833-1900 (Columbia, Mo., 2005), 61-63.

Allan H. Spear, as early as 1850, 82 percent of Chicago’s small population of free blacks and refugee slaves lived within the geographic confines of what became known as the city’s “Black Belt.” “The residential confinement of blacks was nearly complete at the turn of the century,” Thomas Philpott argues, who agreed with Spear’s assertion that

“the physical ghetto had taken shape” well before the Great Migration.4

Reconstruction’s demise marked a tragic nadir in America’s democratic experiment.

Nonetheless, Jim Crow fostered a southern exodus that grew ghetto voting blocs and empowered Black America’s quest for racial justice.

DePriest and Mitchell are absent in contemporary civil rights studies, but they were important powerbrokers during transformative years in black politics. Their careers marked not only Black America’s farewell to the Party of Lincoln, but also the decline of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Machine and the rise of the NAACP, “New

Negroes,” and the Left. The nation’s segregated urban districts, enforced with race riots and vigilante violence, gave birth to a strident black pride that produced a thriving network of organizations for profit, pleasure, protest, and worship. Ghettoization produced a small class of metropolitan leaders, “Race Men,” who varied in character, motives, and influence. In the Great Migration era, Race Men dispersed across urban

America. However, Chicago’s Black Metropolis, a concentrated bloc of segregated voters, uniquely returned “Race Representation” to Capitol Hill.

Civil rights historians have produced revolutionary examinations of grassroots struggles and chronicled forgotten heroes of local movements, but a privileged class of

4 Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920 (Chicago, 1967), 11- 12; and Thomas L. Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto: Immigrants, Blacks, and Reformers in Chicago, 1880-1930 (Austin,1991), 120-121.

southern migrants and metropolitan leaders has been overlooked.5 Thomas Sugrue calls for civil rights scholars to revise the field’s standard narrative by incorporating the

North and interrogating the relationship between urban communities and southern organizing. Moreover, the noted urban scholar suggests that the civil rights movement’s origins are found in the diverse politics of the Great Migration era. Sugrue claims,

“Again and again, northern activism confounds the simple dichotomies between integrationism and black power that shape conventional narratives of the movement.”

The careers of Mitchell and DePriest confirm Sugrue’s contention that “ordinary blacks, as well as activists and political leaders, moved fluidly between strategies of race consciousness and interracialism.”6 The congressmen did the bidding of white political machines, “protected” South Side mobsters, and profited from segregated real estate markets, but they also gained the loyal support of black voters and civil rights activists.

Two Great Migrations, sparked by a pair of World Wars, formed the definitive experience for many twentieth-century black families. However, studies of the Great

Migration have been isolated from civil rights and political history as scholars have dissected varied pockets of a Black America’s multifaceted experiences. In the

5 There is no detailed biography on Oscar DePriest, but Arthur Mitchell has been chronicled. See Dennis S. Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman: A Life of Arthur Wergs Mitchell (Columbia, Mo., 1997). The most regarded and referenced grassroots studies include, William H. Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (New York, 1980); John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana, 1994); Greta de Jong, A Different Day: African American Struggles for Justice in Rural Louisiana, 1900-1970 (Chapel Hill, 2002); Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York, 2009); J. Todd Moye, Let the People Decide: Black Freedom and White Resistance in Sunflower County, Mississippi, 1945-1986 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004); Paul Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (Berkeley, 2005); Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley, 2007); and Nan Elizabeth Woodruff, American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta (Cambridge, Mass., 2003).

6 Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York, 2008), xxv.

cloistered corridors of major universities, the twentieth-century southern exodus and urban ghettos are specialized fields of inquiry in varied disciplines. Despite substantive works by historians, sociologists, and urban and black studies scholars, the Great

Migration and ghettoization process have been marginalized in mainstream media and political discourse. Consequently, contemporary debates concerning gentrification, prison privatization, police brutality, and white privilege obscure the historical reality of a two-party system and free markets enriched by racial discrimination. The 1970s “ghetto school” of urban scholars made the discriminatory metropolitan landscape a priority for an interdisciplinary audience until the Reagan Revolution. Since the 1990s, a new generation of urban scholars has revived the ghetto school with a focus on the prolonged “urban crisis” after World War II.7

7 Since the 1920s, studies of the Great Migration have been focused on the World War I era. Decades after World War II, cutting edge urban and social historians continued to emphasize the southern exodus from World War I through the 1920s. When a “ghetto school” of urban historians emerged in the late-Sixties and 1970s, their debates concerned a contemporary, “second ghetto” marked by the mixed legacy of the Great Society, a possible black “underclass,” and unquestioned black loyalty to a Democratic Party in retreat from Rooseveltian statecraft. According to Joe T. Darden, publications on American ghettos dropped from 138 during 1966 to 1970, to 112 between 1971 and 1975, to just 35 between 1976 and 1980. In 1989, James Grossman’s examination of southern black migration to Chicago characterized an important historiographic transition to works that interrogated the complete journey of Jim Crow refugees to northern ghettos, specifically Chicago’s South Side. Moreover, Arnold Hirsch’s examination of the post-World War II wave of black migration to Chicago revived the wisdom of the ghetto school with a new urban history that broadened ghettoization with an understanding of white homeowners’ politics. See William Cohen, At Freedom’s Edge: Black Mobility and the Southern White Quest for Racial Control, 1861-1915 (Baton Rouge, 1991); Joe T. Darden, Afro-Americans in Pittsburgh: The Residential Segregation of a People (Lexington, Mass., 1973), ed. Detroit, Race and Uneven Development (Philadelphia, 1987), The Ghetto: Readings with Interpretations (Port Washington, NY, 1981); David R. Goldfield, “The Black Ghetto: A Tragic Sameness,” Journal of Urban History, 3 (May 1977): 361-371; Peter Gottlieb, Making Their Own Way: Southern Blacks’ Migration to Pittsburgh, 1916- 30 (Urbana, 1987); James Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago, 1989); Black Exodus: The Great Migration from the American South, ed. Alferdteen Harrison (Jackson, 1991); Herbert Hill, “Demographic Change and Racial Ghetto: The Crisis of American Cities,” Journal of Urban Law, 44 (Winter 1966): 231-285; Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race & Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (New York, 1983); David M. Katzman, Before the Ghetto: Black Detroit in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana, 1973); Kenneth L. Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870-1930 (Urbana, 1973); Carole Marks, Farewell—We’re Good and Gone: The Great Black Migration (Bloomington, Ind., 1989); August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, From Plantation to Ghetto (New York: 1970); Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto (New York, 1966); Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto; Spear, Black Chicago; Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and

Sugrue, a Detroit native, was heavily influenced by Chicago historians, Allan

Spear and Arnold Hirsch, whose pioneering works defined the Windy City’s “first” and

“second” ghettos.8 Black historian Christopher Robert Reed has produced work which marries cultural, political, and urban history in local studies that deeply interrogate the interwar years. Most recently, Reed has echoed Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake by suggesting the South Side’s Black Metropolis was a segregated substitute for the

“American Dream.”9 Though Reed has produced definitive work on the South Side, the noted historian does not place the Great-Migration-era Black Metropolis in the broader context of the civil rights movement. This dissertation aims supplement Black

Metropolis, Spear, Hirsch, and Reed with a specific focus on the enduring relationship between migration, ghettoization, and black political empowerment.

Urban history has formed a crucial component for scholars examining both civil rights activism and modern conservatism as ghettoization and suburbanization collided for racial conflicts in the postwar West, Rust Belt, Northeast, and New South.10

Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: 1996); and Joe William Trotter, Jr., Coal, Class, and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915-32 (Urbana, 1990), Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-45 (Urbana, 1985), ed. The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender (Bloomington, Ind., 1991).

8 See Spear, Black Chicago, Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto; and Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis; and The New African American Urban History, ed. Kenneth Goings and Raymond A. Mohl (Thousand Oaks, CA, 1996).

9 See Christopher Robert Reed, Black Chicago’s First Century; The Chicago NAACP and the Rise of Professional Black Leadership, 1910-1966 (Bloomington, Ind., 1997), Knock at the Door of Opportunity: Black Migration to Chicago, 1900-1919 (Carbondale, Ill., 2014); and The Rise of Chicago’s Black Metropolis, 1920-1929 (Urbana, 2011).

10 See Curtis J. Austin, Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party (Fayetteville, Ark., 2008); Matthew J. Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 2007); Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton, 2007); Ronald P. Formisano, Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill, 1991); Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, 2006); Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, 2006); Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New

Though contemporary civil rights scholarship shrewdly examines the relationship between urbanization, activism, and politics, the field’s emphasis on the postwar movement obscures historic demographic and political patterns that structured the civil rights struggle.11 An examination of Arthur Mitchell and Oscar DePriest provides a new and important frame for the origins of civil rights politics, a path cleared by ghettoization’s new opportunities and tragic, long-term limitations. The 1934 contest between the Alabama-born rivals for Illinois’s First Congressional District is an important, but overlooked moment in Black America’s political empowerment and partisan realignment. Black Chicago’s New Deal congressmen linked the South Side’s future to pragmatic metropolitan machines under both major parties that willfully benefited from ghettoization. In the end, a postwar crusade to decimate Jim Crow – dominated by disfranchised southerners and fueled by civil disobedience – relied upon ghetto bloc votes to lobby for landmark legislation that restored the legitimacy of

Reconstruction-era constitutional amendments.

“Black Chicago’s New Deal Congressmen” begins with the Great Migrations of

Oscar DePriest and Arthur Mitchell, examined in Chapters 2 and 3, respectively.

Although both congressmen were sons of Alabama slaves, DePriest escaped Jim Crow subjection with “Exoduster” parents that migrated to Kansas. The Republican Race

Man was a privileged, late-nineteenth century migrant to Chicago. By 1915, DePriest

American Right (Princeton, 2005); Becky Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working- Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965 (Chicago, 2002); Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, 2005); and Thomas J. Sugrue, “Crabgrass-Roots Politics: Race, Rights, and the Reaction against Liberalism in the Urban North,” Journal of American History, 82 (Sep. 1995): 551-578.

11 A notable exception in terms of periodization is Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, To Place Our Deeds: The African American Community in Richmond, California, 1910-1963 (Berkeley, 2000).

operated a thriving real estate company and reached City Council as an ally of Mayor

“Big Bill” Thompson’s infamous metropolitan machine. Congressman Mitchell survived a tragic youth in Dixie and escaped a fraudulent past before he migrated to the South

Side. Chapter 3 examines Mitchell’s brief tenure at Tuskegee Institute and his pre-

World War I career as a vocational educator and charlatan. The future congressman aided white planters in schemes that lured black sharecroppers into debt with false promises of education and economic mobility. A duplicitous Principal Mitchell, founder of West Alabama Institute, even extorted Booker T. Washington.

Chapter 4 explores the “Roaring Twenties,” when Chicago’s Black Metropolis realized the late George White’s political prophesy. DePriest reached Capitol Hill as the crooked liaison between South Side mobster, Daniel “The Embalmer” Jackson, and

Mayor Thompson’s City Hall. The Republican congressman survived prohibition-era indictments, “blockbusting” real estate practices, and miraculously won a post-

Depression reelection bid. Mitchell, a Republican lawyer and veritable unknown, relied upon white patronage from Congressman John McDuffie (D-AL) and a frayed Tuskegee

Machine for a swift political ascent. By 1930, a propitious party swap and a move to

Chicago positioned the former principal on a path toward power. Chapter 5 is a detailed examination of Oscar DePriest’s historic, but forgotten tenure on Capitol Hill, which frustrated Herbert Hoover’s “lily-white” southern strategy and engendered a demagogic backlash among Dixie Democrats. Chapter 6 interrogates the New Deal-era rivalry between DePriest and Mitchell, political contests the latter won on Roosevelt’s coattails as an ally of Chicago’s Democratic machine. In conclusion, a final chapter places the

forgotten congressmen in a historiographic context – at the paralyzing structural origins of both modern ghettoization and the civil rights movement.

CHAPTER 2 THE “TALL SYCAMORE OF THE PRAIRIES”: OSCAR DEPRIEST’S GREAT MIGRATION TO THE LAND OF LINCOLN & SOUTH SIDE GHETTOIZATION

The reign of terror that gripped the Jim Crow South cruelly codified white supremacy and stole black lives, but Bourbon Democrats did not steal former slaves’ commitment to liberation. In the nineteenth century, Chicago was a City of Refuge for runaway slaves, and it remained a Land of Hope for their Jim Crow-era descendants.

Alderman Oscar DePriest, an Alabama-born son of plantation slaves and Kansas

“Exodusters,” was a symbol of black empowerment – by way of migration – during Jim

Crow’s so-called “nadir.” The “Tall Sycamore of the Prairies” represented hope to black

Chicagoans residing in segregated Bronzeville. However, DePriest profited from South

Side ghettoization as a “blockbuster,” and he accumulated municipal power as a machine politician. White businessmen, politicians, and homeowners propelled the ghettoization of Industrial America, but they were joined by pragmatic “Race Men” who helped erect the twentieth-century color line. In 1915, the Chicago Defender announced that “hearts will be gladdened from Plymouth Rock to Golden Gate” with

Alderman DePriest’s election as the first black member of the Chicago City Council.

The Defender emphasized the cultural and strategic power of DePriest’s personal triumph “as a beacon of light and precedent” for black communities “to unite upon one race leader.”1

“No other city in America had ever grown so large so quickly,” historian William

Cronon remarks of Chicago’s industrialization, “none had so rapidly overwhelmed the

1 “Vote for DePriest,” Chicago Defender, April 3, 1915, p. 8.

countryside around it to create so urban a world.”2 Capitalism’s steady conquest of

Chicagoland’s physical environment produced not only skyscrapers, steel mills, stockyards, breweries, and factories, but also a racialized geography which debased democracy. After Reconstruction, black political strength reemerged in northern cities where the urban districts established by freemen, fugitive slaves, and white abolitionists became segregated ghettos rooted in partisan clientage and underworld corruption.

Chicago’s black population grew from less than 15,000 to over 50,000 between 1890 and 1915, a period which solidified a segregated South Side bound to the cold calculations of machines and mobsters.3

Reconstruction’s failure led to sustainable structural and ideological forces, chiefly ghettoization and an evolving racial ideology, which both constrained and catalyzed urban black politics. In Black Reconstruction, W. E. B. Du Bois argues that the transition from slavery to freedom occurred amidst a vaster transformation of the

American political economy. The NAACP co-founder suggests that racism thwarted freedpeople’s capital accumulation and guaranteed the exploitation of black laborers.

Du Bois claims that early white unions preserved caste and racial privilege, cashed in a

“psychological wage,” and tossed black workingmen “into the hands of the capitalists” as “puppets and playthings of the idle rich.” White wealth and power was not shared equitably between classes, but racial ideology was a powerful adhesive for blue-collar laborers, small farmers, white-collar managers, and corporate bosses. “One reads the

2 William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991), 9.

3 Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920 (Chicago, 1967), 11.

truer deeper facts of Reconstruction with a great despair,” Du Bois laments, “it is at once so simple and human, yet so futile.”4

Du Bois found hope in the flight of southern blacks from Dixie. Black

Reconstruction emphasizes migration as a quest for liberation, a political protest, and a redress of labor conditions. Du Bois famously argues that the flight of Civil War-era slaves to freedom constituted a momentous “general strike” that transformed U.S. history. Thousands of runways – domestic servants, field hands, and industrial laborers

– disrupted the Confederate economy on northern trails that ultimately politicized Black

America.5 Migratory patterns – the Underground Railroad, wartime “general strike,”

Exodusters, and the World War-I-era southern exodus – birthed a modern landscape of black politics and civil rights activism. On one hand, blacks emerged from human bondage only to experience new forms of racial subjugation, namely sharecropping and ghettoization. On the other hand, a generation of black pioneers vigorously pursued the

“American Dream” in northern cities, as evidenced by Alderman DePriest’s path to

Chicago City Hall amidst racialized real estate markets, machine politics, urban vice, and organized crime syndicates.

Americans of all backgrounds prefer to view their political forbearers as self- made pioneers of democracy and capitalism. We seldom define successful modern politicians as effective manipulators of humans and markets. Despite open ties to notorious mobsters and well-publicized profits from “blockbusting,” Alderman DePriest was viewed as a genuine Horatio Alger of the Great Migration frontier. On March 9,

4 W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (New York, 1998), 728.

5 Ibid., 55-84.

1871, the future congressman was born to former slaves, Alexander and Mary DePriest, in Florence, Alabama. Oscar DePriest was born free, but his parents carried the physical, emotional, and mental scars of slavery into the Reconstruction era. Florence residents, including Congressman James T. Rapier, a family friend, possessed vivid memories of antebellum slavery and the sweet taste of newfound freedom. In the late

1870s, the DePriest family bore intimate witness to a violent “redemption” campaign that consecrated white supremacy and decimated Alabama’s Party of Lincoln.

Oscar’s father, Alexander DePriest was a small man, but he made up for his lack of stature with an independent spirit. In bondage, the future congressman’s pugnacious father pushed the limits of planter paternalism. “You’ll have to kill him if you whip him,” said DePriest’s master to a frustrated overseer, “and I don’t want him killed.” After emancipation, Alexander worked as a part-time farmer and teamster on the banks of the

Tennessee River, near Muscle Shoals.6 Similar to many adult freemen, DePriest’s father lacked a formal education, but his job as a teamster provided a steady income and access to the exchange of both goods and ideas. Oscar’s mother, Mary DePriest, contributed to the household income as a part-time laundress, but the bulk of her labor was raising six children and maintaining the family’s sustenance farm. The family’s economic security not only allowed Oscar DePriest to receive lessons at the local

Congregational Church, but also gave his father time for political activism.7

6 Howard Gosnell, Negro Politicians: The Rise of Negro Politicians in Chicago (Chicago, 1967), 164.

7 Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake, Black Metropolis: A Study of Life in a Northern City (Chicago, 1993), 361.

Alderman DePriest inherited his mother’s size and developed his father’s fervor for the Republican Party. In the early 1870s, Lauderdale County – and the city of

Florence – buzzed with Republican politics, emboldened by the presence of federal troops in the South and Yankee radicals on Capitol Hill. The future congressman’s hometown was a focal point of black political strength when America began its first sustained efforts to compensate for centuries of human bondage and trafficking, sexual exploitation, and torture. The structure of emancipated slaves’ survival, political empowerment, and socioeconomic opportunities were determined by two vital factors.

First, pre-and-postwar patterns of industrialization shaped market expansion and established employment prospects. Second, the presence of federal troops and the vitality of government officials structured black access to new civil and political rights.

Black politicization advanced far more rapidly in cities. Southern commercial centers were only rivaled by rural districts that were liberated and occupied by the Union Army during the Civil War. Overall, black political development occurred least in plantation- dominated counties with vulnerable freed families out of sight from federal troops and

Freedman’s Bureau officials – isolated regions where predatory planters and white vigilantes laid in wait to exterminate Reconstruction-era empowerment.8

When southern black men could vote without fear and coercion, they did so in large numbers, and they cast ballots as steadfast supporters of the party that liberated them. Though the Black Metropolis made Congressman Oscar DePriest a historic politician, it was in the shadows of Cotton Belt cabins and tenant farms where he received his first lessons in race and power. Congressman James T. Rapier of

8 Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (New York, 1988) 113-114.

Alabama’s Second District, a friend of his father, was an instrumental guide for

Florence-area freedpeople amidst historic opportunities. In the 1870s, blacks were well- represented in Alabama politics, as evidenced by 60 state legislators and four congressmen. Rapier, a committed grassroots organizer of Black Belt workers and voters, was in the vanguard of Reconstruction-era black politics. DePriest’s earliest years witnessed not only the day-to-day labors of his parents, but also Rapier’s courageous exertion of political power during an era of intense racial violence. Despite his elite position, Rapier organized the black masses and spoke with conviction on their behalf. Decades later, DePriest returned the spirit – if not always the substance – of

Reconstruction-era leadership to Capitol Hill.

In 1867, James Rapier attended the first Republican Party convention in state history. Rapier was also a delegate at Alabama’s constitutional convention, where he rallied white support for a constitution that ensured free speech, citizenship, and suffrage (for male citizens) regardless of race.9 Before he reached Capitol Hill, Rapier established the Republican Sentinel, the first black owned-and-edited periodical in

Alabama, received a federal appointment as assessor of internal revenue, and developed an early labor union of freedmen. Rapier developed a community activist’s sensibilities alongside his political ambition, evident in his Colored Labor Association’s core demands, which included: legislation that protected sharecroppers from predatory planters, federal aid for social welfare programs, state protection from vigilante violence,

9 On Congressman James Rapier, see Loren Schweninger, James T. Rapier and Reconstruction (Chicago, 1978); and Eugene Feldman, “James T. Rapier, Negro Congressman from Alabama,” Phylon Quarterly, 19 (4th Qtr. 1958): 417-423.

and the development of local banks in the black community.10 In 1872, James Rapier defeated a former Confederate colonel by nearly 3,000 votes and was elected to

Congress – in a class that included six other black representatives.11 Rapier and his black colleagues struggled against great odds – with ever fewer white allies – to provide full citizenship, equal justice and economic opportunity for freed families, like the

DePriests, who were undergoing a tumultuous transition from bondage to freedom in the Cotton Belt.

During his only term (1873 to 1875), Congressman Rapier not only proposed a

$5 million appropriation for southern education, but he also called for the creation of a federal land bureau tasked with the orderly distribution of western plots to freed families.12 In the ashes of the Freedman’s Bureau’s demise, Rapier’s call for increased federal efforts inspired few white colleagues. Nevertheless, black representatives, and their Radical Republican allies, successfully brokered the Civil Rights Act of 1875. At the national level, black political power reached its nineteenth-century zenith with voting and civil rights on the books and eight representatives from six different states in office.

However, black political empowerment was tenuous; and, ultimately, it proved short lived. Congressman Rapier and racial liberals in Washington did not consider the redistribution of wealth and power. On the Hill, the proverbial “forty acres and a mule,” which would have been a foundation for black capital accumulation, were firmly off-the-

10 Jacqueline L. Tobin, From Dawn to Midnight: The Last Tracks of the Underground Railroad (New York, 2008), 238; Feldman, “James T. Rapier, Negro Congressman from Alabama,” 418-420.

11 Stephen Middleton, Black Congressmen During Reconstruction: A Documentary Sourcebook (Westport, 2002), 310.

12 Foner, Reconstruction, 441, 452; Middleton, Black Congressmen During Reconstruction, 313. Rapier successfully lobbied President Grant to make Montgomery a federal port of delivery in 1874. He also worked to obtain federal funds to dredge Alabama’s rivers, improve postal services, and repair federal buildings.

table. Eric Foner notes that the Alabama GOP was “controlled by white party leaders” by 1875, bigots who nominated an all-white state ticket, defeated an attempt to endorse the Civil Rights Act, and already campaigned for Jim Crow segregation and disfranchisement.13

In national, state, and local politics, black officeholders were forced to accommodate their agenda to the limits of partisan affiliation in the two-party system.

They pragmatically pursued racial justice in view of a mainstream politics that was stabilized by White America’s commitment to the expansion of racialized markets.

Reconstruction-era black politicians varied in character, intellect, and motives, but they salvaged what political gains they could before Yankee Republicans cruelly left freedpeople at the mercy of Klansmen, planters, and industrialists. James Rapier was first targeted by Redeemer Democrats in 1868, at an Alabama rally on behalf of General

Ulysses S. Grant. An incensed mob of 150 whites went on a rampage – they whipped, burned, and shot blacks in horrific hunt for Rapier, or, the “nigger carpetbagger from

Canada.” Rapier escaped, but three black Republicans were lynched.14

Redeemers, who relied upon intimidation, violence, and fraud, produced an increasingly familiar, tragic narrative across the Jim Crow South. In 1874, Rapier’s failed re-election campaign was marred by the Democrats’ demagogic appeals to white supremacy and violence. After the passage of the congressional civil rights legislation,

Rapier cheated death again – an impromptu black guard engaged in a deadly shootout with KKK assassins.15 The Party of Lincoln ultimately bargained black lives, labor, and

13 Foner, Reconstruction, 538, 552.

14 Patricia Cline Cohen et al., The American Promise, Vol. 1 (New York, 2012), 499.

15 Feldman, “James T. Rapier, Negro Congressman from Alabama,” 422.

constitutional rights away to Bourbon Democrats, who terrorized black communities as they fashioned a New South with antebellum barbarity and nineteenth-century racial ideology.

Congressman Rapier, at great risk to his personal safety, fought redemption with the hope of resurrecting his political career. In 1876, Rapier moved to Lowndes County,

Alabama, future birthplace of the first twentieth-century Black Panther Party, where he lost another congressional race. Although he never returned to Capitol Hill, Rapier remained a passionate community activist and Republican loyalist. In 1878, Rapier received a GOP patronage position as internal revenue collector for Alabama’s Second

District.16 The former congressman was a high-profile target for white vigilantes at a time when all politically active blacks – and white Republicans – were subjected to intimidation and vigilante attacks. Florence Klansmen seethed at Rapier’s appointment, a rage which trickled down to rank-and-file black activists and political allies, including

Alexander DePriest. In 1878, he was targeted on the street by a redeemer politico that demanded his support for the Democratic ticket in the next election. DePriest’s father initially refused, but the Bourbon Democrat threatened the teamster’s hauling business on the Tennessee River. The family man cut a humbling deal. He did not threaten the physical and economic security of his wife and kids, especially a healthy, vibrant son,

Oscar, just emerging from his toddler years.17

16 Middleton, Black Congressman During Reconstruction, 117. Rapier’s candidacy actually facilitated split the GOP base, damaged the prospects of the black incumbent, and facilitated the election of a white Democrat, Charles Shelley, with a plurality of just 38%. It should be noted that Shelley was a black officeholder who supported amnesty for former Confederates, urged freedmen to oppose Grant’s re-election, and pursued independent politics unaffiliated with local Republicans.

17 Gosnell, Negro Politicians, 165.

In the summer of 1878, Alexander DePriest was on his way home from the

Muscle Shoals docks and overheard racist mutterings that precipitated a mob intent on

James Rapier’s violent abduction and murder. DePriest hurried home, where he found the former congressman, sitting in a chair in his living room, and secluded in darkness.

Outside the DePriest residence, a group of armed blacks kept an indiscreet guard as a villainous white mob demanded to know Rapier’s whereabouts. Though Rapier survived, Reconstruction-era interracial democracy in Alabama did not – and its fate was clearly evident after November’s elections. Democrats carried all of Alabama’s congressional districts in Washington, and only one black representative remained of the eight Republicans left in the state legislature. In the autumn of 1878, two white men were lynched around the corner from the DePriest’s Florence home; and, a third man, who briefly escaped, was shot to death on the city street. The day after the triple murder, young Oscar DePriest and his siblings discovered the sun-dried bloodstains where the last victim of redeemer justice lost his life.18

Congressman Rapier lived to see both emancipation and effective interracial democracy, but he died watching black empowerment strangled to death by Jim Crow oppression, facilitated by both Solid South Democrats and spineless Republicans. The former congressman spent his final days working as a political advocate, lawyer, labor organizer, and civil rights activist. Most importantly, Rapier devoted a portion of his last energies – and a substantial amount of his estate – to the Exoduster movement of

Alabama blacks, including the DePriests, who chased the “American Dream” to the

18 Ibid., 165.

Kansas prairies.19 Sharecropping and the redeemer political mandate, by force and coercion, produced a grassroots emigrationist movement throughout the Cotton Belt.

In late-1878, the violent face of political exclusion in the New South drove the DePriests to resettle in Salina, Kansas. The following year, the Black Belt outbreak of “Kansas

Fever” grew to 60,000 migrants who resettled on the plains and in industrial cities.20

Eric Foner suggests that “none of Reconstruction’s black officials created a family political dynasty,” a powerful indication of how redemption aborted freedpeople’s politicization. In many ways, Oscar DePriest, an Exoduster whose childhood home shielded James Rapier from seething white supremacists, was the late congressman’s political progeny. Although portions of Rapier’s estate went to black schools and churches, a hefty amount was contributed to the development of an Exoduster community in Wabaunsee County, Kansas, roughly eighty miles from the DePriest family’s new home in Salina.21

Mary and Alexander DePriest, who developed a stable, two-income household after emancipation, carried a veritable death sentence as Rapier’s friends and political allies. Nell Irvin Painter argues that black southerners engaged in armed resistance, but still “fell prey to nightriders,” picked off “one by one if they appeared concerned with the well-being of their people.” From rank-and-file party members to former congressmen, black Republicans “stood out as especial targets of these terrorists, who

19 Foner, Reconstruction, 608.

20 Matthew Lynch, Before Obama: A Reappraisal of Black Reconstruction Era Politicians (Santa Barbara, 2012), 169.

21 Foner, Reconstruction, 608.

also silenced and drove away” any display of white racial liberalism.22 The initial Jim

Crow-era exodus of southern blacks portended a potential crisis in the Cotton Belt economy, a concern which gripped Dixie planters and was investigated by the U.S.

Senate. On January 19, 1880, the Senate Emigration Committee, which included three

Democrats and two Republicans, began their probe into the emerging flight of freed families and sharecroppers.

An aging James Rapier joined Benjamin Singleton, Henry Adams, and 153 other emigrationists who testified before the Senate Emigration Committee. “There are several reasons why the colored people desire to emigrate from Alabama,” Rapier testified, but chief among them was the reality that “a [black] man cannot make a decent living.” The Alabamian also reiterated his longstanding demand for federal spending and guarantees for black education. Most importantly, Rapier argued that the vast majority of southern blacks “believe that they cannot any longer get justice in the courts” operated by Bourbon Democrats. The former congressman sardonically postulated that if southern blacks “were to stand up and assert their rights, and fight to preserve them, more men from the North, both Democrats and Republicans, would go South to suppress them than went to the first Bull Run Battle.” In response, North Carolina

Senator Zebulon B. Vance, a former Confederate colonel and governor, told the black politico to reconsider his allegiance to the Party of Lincoln. “They are the best of a bad

22 Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (New York, 1992), 10.

lot,” Rapier replied to Vance, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Emigration

Committee.23

On May 31, 1883, James Rapier died of pulmonary tuberculosis, but his

Reconstruction-era hopes did not die alongside him. Today, Rapier’s grave is unmarked in St. Louis, while Oscar DePriest, a fellow Florence native, lies for posterity in Chicago’s famed Graceland Cemetery. Despite Rapier’s tenure at the apex of nineteenth-century black political power, and Congressman DePriest’s Jim Crow-era return of “race representation” to Washington, neither man has been given due consideration in popular memory. Rapier’s crusade for racial justice – and the DePriest family’s escape from southern redemption – highlights the importance of mobility and capital accumulation to black politicization in the transition from chattel slavery to a tenuous freedom.

Since the Antebellum era, freedpeople thrived when given nothing more than physical mobility, property rights, access to education, and gainful employment.

Congressman Rapier’s path to Capitol Hill truly began with his parents. Susan Rapier was a free-born mulatto from Baltimore, while the politician’s father, John, owned and operated Florence’s most successful black barbershop. Amidst the sectional crisis, the

Rapiers provided their son with educational opportunities in Canada and Scotland as black masses toiled in cotton fields. James Rapier returned to Dixie with the ability to build upon his parent’s wealth, as evidenced by land purchases and sales in Tennessee

23 Damani Davis, “The 1880 Senate Investigation of the Beginnings of the African American Migration from the South,” Prologue Magazine, 40 (Summer 2008). Accessed on July 30, 2014 from: http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2008/summer/exodus.html; quotation from Report and Testimony of the Select Committee of the United States to Investigate the Cause of the Removal of the Negroes from the Southern States to the Northern States, 46th Cong., 2nd sess., 1880.

and Alabama.24 Rapier witnessed not only Reconstruction’s brutal demise, but also the rise of a sharecropping economy that stunted successive generations of black capital accumulation. Despite Rapier’s best efforts, major party politicians ensured that the opportunities afforded to him – namely higher education and capital accumulation – would remain privileges for select blacks and denied to masses of freedpeople and their descendents.

James T. Rapier never lost faith in American democracy, and he believed the privileges which shaped his life would be available to Black Belt refugees outside of

Alabama. Rapier spent his last breaths and dollars committed to the belief that interracial democracy and black socioeconomic mobility would be resurrected on the

Kansas prairies. The DePriests were among Cotton Belt blacks who possessed both the motives and the means to leave Dixie behind immediately after the Compromise of

1877. Mary DePriest’s work as a laundress and on the family’s small farm, in addition to her husband’s labor on the Tennessee River docks, facilitated their status as

Exodusters.25 Oscar DePriest’s parents were not wealthy, but they found economic security in the Reconstruction years. However, Alexander and Mary DePriest were willing to forfeit hard won sustenance for an unknown future on the frontier, driven by the certainty that they did not want their children to have their lives defined by Jim Crow

24 Lynch, Before Obama, 160; Middleton, Black Congressmen During Reconstruction, 309-310. Rapier attended Montreal College and the University of Glasgow before returning to the American South. During the Civil War, he became a successful planter in Maury County, Tennessee, where he rented over 200 acres. In 1866, Rapier returned to Alabama to care for his aging, ill father. He used his earnings from Tennessee to purchase 550 acres in Alabama’s Tennessee Valley. Congressman Rapier’s approximate annual income was $7,000 at the height of his political power and financial success in the Reconstruction- era.

25 Gosnell, Negro Politicians, 164.

– where their dreams would be illuminated by burning crosses, their ambitions policed at the butt of Klansmen’s rifles.

The triple-lynching near the DePriest’s home was part of a broader white supremacy campaign, which aimed to politically subjugate black bodies and exploit black labor with antebellum-era vigor.26 White employers, planters, political officials, and vigilantes in Alabama were committed to the elimination of black migration – by means of persuasion, intimidation, paramilitary violence, and every resource of state power at their disposal. Exoduster gatherings were broken up and movement leaders were arrested for violating coerced labor contacts. Moreover, armed bands of whites patrolled rural districts and viciously dispersed migration parties that approached railroad stations and ports.27 The DePriests were among the earliest and most fortunate families who not only escaped Jim Crow unscathed, but also managed to establish a better life on the Great Plains.

Redemption did not mark a full-scale retreat in black politics, no grim resignation in the face of bitter oppression. Jim Crow disfranchisement and segregation ensured that migration emerged as the most militant response to second-class citizenship because relocation produced varied routes to socioeconomic mobility, institutional development, and political empowerment. According to James Grossman, the earliest waves of the Great Migration represented “a new strategy in the struggle for full rights of

American citizenship, including the right to equality of opportunity.”28 Oscar DePriest’s

26 Ibid., 165.

27 Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 356.

28 James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago, 1989), 37.

return of black representation to Capitol Hill was born of the last, best hope for the descendents of slaves in the New South – migration elsewhere. The Exoduster movement drew its strength from grassroots organizing, accumulated black capital, and

Kansas’s rich history of abolitionism. The DePriests were among hundreds of Black

Belt families who aimed to fulfill the original intent of Kansas settlers who spilled blood and sacrificed lives to begin the ending of American slavery. Exodusters arrived on the prairies as determined refugees of Democratic terrorism, black voters abandoned by a

Party of Lincoln that rescinded the Great Emancipator’s promise of a “new birth of freedom.”

Oscar DePriest matured outside of Jim Crow’s cruel clutches. As a child of the

Exoduster movement, the future congressman came of age in Salina, Kansas with distinct privileges. The future congressmen thrived as most black lives were increasingly delineated by oppression, debt, and stifled professional ambitions. In 1870, only six blacks inhabited Saline County, but in the decade after the DePriests arrived,

Exoduster families arrived in droves.29 Steven Hahn notes that Exodusters created communities in which “collections of families could find and farm land independently,” where blacks could govern their own communities with their own institutions. The

Chicago congressman was later known for his bombastic racial pride, which was a byproduct of his maturation in a community where black families gained access to

29 Historical Census Browser, accessed on October 12, 2013 from the University of Virginia, Geospatial and Statistical Data Center: http://mapserver.lib.virginia.edu/. Saline County’s black population grew from 280 in 1880, to 460 in 1890, and hovered near a half-thousand during the Great Migration of the World War I era.

education and economic security; and, they could reasonably expect wealth to persist and increase with successive generations.30

The DePriests were among the first black families to leave Jim Crow behind and resettle in Salina, evidenced by the fact that eight-year-old Oscar DePriest was likely the only black student in his elementary school. Howard Gosnell suggests that

Alderman DePriest was the first black person many of his second-grade classmates had ever seen. The six DePriest children’s racial appearance and identity was a source of white ridicule in Salina schools. Oscar, the youngest, was particularly targeted by white bullies because of his light-skin, sandy hair, blue eyes, and long legs. Nonetheless, the fiery future congressman was an eager provocateur who earned the nickname

“Meddlesome Bunk” for verbally and physically challenging white bullies.31 The chastisement of his white peers – and the wherewithal to confront bullies in defense of his personal integrity and racial identity – taught young DePriest about the contours of race on a relatively equitable terrain. In Kansas, DePriest was spared of the psychological trauma of a Jim Crow childhood.

The DePriests were not well-off, but secure, and their youngest worked for spending money and to augment the family income, as did his five siblings. The future

“blockbusting” real estate dealer and machine politician demonstrated an early ability to profit from the manipulation of his peers. DePriest frequently sought chores and odd jobs around the neighborhood and secured a steady number of loyal employers; then, he used his initial capital to subcontract labor to other boys at bargain rates. Thus,

30 Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet, 334.

31 Gosnell, Negro Politicians, 166.

while his peers labored for pennies, DePriest collected a majority of the profits, just for providing their meager opportunities.32

Kansas instilled core values in Oscar DePriest, chief among them were racial pride, self-confidence, and an entrepreneurial spirit. The future congressman did not receive a rigorous public education beyond elementary school. In his teenage years,

DePriest took formal courses in business and bookkeeping. Yet, as Gosnell has noted,

DePriest “was not a man who relied heavily on book knowledge.” The Chicago politician made grammatical mistakes and mispronounced words throughout his career,

“but he proceeded directly to his point and was rarely misunderstood.” Despite his parent’s provision of shelter, financial security, and education, a teenage DePriest was dissatisfied with the monotony of the prairies and enchanted by big city dreams. The mere absence of Jim Crow did not make Salina attractive to DePriest in his adolescent years – he could not treasure it like his parents, former slaves who lived to see full citizenship come and pass in less than a generation. In 1888, Oscar DePriest, just seventeen-years-old, intrepidly left his family behind and hit the road with two white friends. They settled in Dayton, Ohio for a year, where DePriest “passed” in order to secure employment. By 1889, the future congressmen left his white buddies behind and settled in the Land of Lincoln.33

DePriest arrived in Chicago over two decades before the first waves of the Great

Migration. The Kansas migrant possessed discernible personal advantages, some of which were accidents of fate, such as his gender, light skin, and physical stature. Race,

32 Ibid., 166.

33 Ibid., 166-167.

gender, and class are mutually constitutive in shaping an individual’s self-concept and their relationship to specific contexts in the external word. In other words, a black migrant’s opportunities for financial and social success were shaped by their personal characteristics in relation to specific political economies. DePriest inherited a light complexion, six-foot frame, and Y chromosome from his parents, but he also inculcated their political courage and pioneer souls. Before the first waves of the “southern negro exodus” reached Bronzeville, the first black alderman in Chicago history mastered his relationship to urban machine politics, real estate markets, organized crime, and vice.

Oscar DePriest’s election as alderman for the South Side’s Second Ward in 1915 is usually framed by the World War I-era exodus of black migrants to the North. Yet, the first Jim Crow-era black congressman was a product of deeper migration patterns. The

Exoduster movement was vital to DePriest’s personal maturation, but his district came of age by way of the Underground Railroad. White abolitionists and antebellum-era black migrants – manumitted, self-emancipated, and fugitive slaves – established the early South Side. On one hand, Chicago was a “City of Refuge” for freedpeople and runaway slaves, where, unlike New York, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati, an interracial, motley crew protested and evaded the fugitive slave act.34 On the other hand, most

Illinois whites viewed Chicago as “a sinkhole of abolition.”35

The Windy City’s native white population was joined by ethnic immigrants in tossing slurs, fists, and projectiles at free blacks and white abolitionists. The geographic boundaries of the South Side ghetto emerged with the Civil War, when eight-two

34 Christopher Robert Reed, Black Chicago’s First Century (Columbia, Mo, 2005), 98.

35 Cayton and Drake, Black Metropolis, 32-33.

percent of black Chicagoans already lived in an area bounded by the Chicago River on the north and west, Sixteenth Street on the south, and Lake Michigan on the east – the

Black Belt. In 1870, one thousand blacks resided in Chicago, which was just one percent of the city’s overall population, but still enough to rally whites for the preservation of urban racial privileges.36

In The Strange Career of Jim Crow, C. Vann Woodward argues that segregation emerged in the North during the Great Migration of the World War I era. However,

Woodward, subsequent historians, and urban studies scholars have underestimated the long-term impact of antebellum northern jurisprudence, such as the Illinois Black Laws

(1819-1865).37 The Black Laws, which disfranchised free blacks, and required them to pay a hefty bond and carry a certificate of freedom at all times, set a discriminatory template for the preservation of white privilege in post-Civil War Chicago. Despite

Downstate complaints that Chicago was a “nigger-loving town,” the Black Laws prohibited blacks from making contracts, filing law suits, testifying in court, and receiving a public education. Chicago freemen could not vote until 1870, when they received suffrage alongside southern black men with the passage of the 15th Amendment. Illinois forbade official segregation in public schools in 1874, but the Land of Lincoln did not pass a largely unenforced civil rights bill until 1885.38

Thomas Philpott argues that late-nineteenth century racial attitudes and structural arrangements were the foundation for over a hundred years of residential segregation and economic dislocation on Chicago’s South Side – a twentieth-century

36 Spear, Black Chicago, 111.

37 C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York, 2002), 113-115.

38 Spear, Black Chicago, 5, 12.

ghettoization process that swallowed Reconstruction-era hopes of equitable democracy.

Despite remedial legislation at the federal, state, and local levels, white Chicagoans aimed “to keep blacks at a distance socially,” Philpott claims, so they “segregated them spatially” for the benefit of municipal officeholders, real estate dealers, industrialists, and white homeowners.39 Between 1870 and 1890, Chicago’s black population grew from

4,000 to 15,000, which intensified a ghettoization process that paradoxically propelled

Oscar DePriest to City Hall and Capitol Hill.40

Black Chicagoans, many of whom were fortunate to escape southern sharecropping, did not achieve secure or equitable footing in the city’s rapidly maturing industrial economy – they were largely confined to menial labor, service-sector employment, and unskilled, dangerous industrial jobs. Promises of northern “free labor” gave way to the gross marginalization of black workers. For example, southern migrants were frequently exploited as “scabs” for industrialists combating white laborers’

(native-born and immigrant) strikes against damnable wages and working conditions.

For Philpott, the difference between Chicago’s immigrant slums and ghettos was as simple in 1880 as it was in 1980. European-Americans and their descendents increasingly escaped the slums while black ghettos remained “largely a slum, still officially sustained, still for blacks only.”41

Philpott’s landmark study of the early South Side demonstrates that “the extent of black segregation was extraordinary by 1900… no white ethnic group experienced

39 Thomas Lee Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto: Immigrants, Blacks, and Reformers in Chicago, 1880-1920 (Austin, 1991), 120.

40 Spear, Black Chicago, 6.

41 Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto, xvi.

anything comparable.”42 Before Oscar DePriest left Kansas behind, blacks were still few in number, “viewed as neither a threat to the city’s well-being nor as an integral part of the city’s social structure.” However, the decade of Oscar DePriest’s arrival doubled

Chicago’s black population, which reached 30,000, and solidified both virulent white prejudice and the Black Belt ghetto.43 The “Tall Sycamore of the Prairies” made a rapid ascent as South Side ghettoization solidified and created the segregated bloc vote that propelled his political career. Tailors, waiters, porters, and barbers were at the top of the South Side occupational ladder when DePriest arrived in Chicago. The Kansas migrant possessed limited professional training, but he did have rudimentary trade skills, cultivated on the prairie alongside his father and uncles. Similar to most migrants,

DePriest struggled to establish steady employment upon arrival. However, the future congressman’s ability to “pass” allowed him to secure positions as a day laborer.

DePriest was usually fired upon discovery of his “true” racial identity, but light-skin thoroughly helped the Exoduster make ends meet.44

At the turn-of-the-century, DePriest secured steady employment as a painter for a white patron. The entrepreneurial migrant parlayed his savings as a painter into a contracting business, a seedbed of capital for his own real estate management firm, the

DePriest Realty Company. “Blockbusting” drove the plot in DePriest’s Horatio Alger narrative. The pioneering politician was a beneficiary of racialized markets in one of the

42 Ibid., 135.

43 Spear, Black Chicago, 7-8.

44 Cayton and Drake, Black Metropolis, 361; Gosnell, Negro Politicians, 167.

nation’s most notoriously segregated ghettos.45 By 1910, seventy-eight percent of black

Chicagoans lived on the South Side, confined to the Black Belt. Restrictive covenants, discriminatory real estate markets and credit-lenders, and the intimidation tactics of white homeowners effectively segregated Chicago’s housing market.46 As the trickle of migration to the Windy City became a flood, DePriest leased whole buildings in transitional white districts at the edges of the South Side ghetto, where he doubled the rent for incoming black residents.47

By World War I, Richard Moore, Caribbean migrant and early black communist, remarked that an interracial class of real estate dealers seized upon residential segregation to “squeeze the last nickel out of the Negro working class who are penned into the ‘black ghetto.’” In the Roaring Twenties, Moore observed that “rents in Negro

Harlem are already often double and sometimes triple those in other sections of the city.”48 Neither Chicago, nor Oscar DePriest, revolutionized the urban real estate business amidst black migration and industrialization. The southern migrant merely followed market logic instead of moral conscience in response to profitable new opportunities premised on systemic discrimination. White real estate agents in Chicago first “busted” the white periphery on the growing Black Belt by charging between ten- and-fifteen percent higher rents for minority tenants. Sophonisba Breckinridge, a veteran of Hull House and co-founder of the NAACP (and its Chicago branch),

45 Program from a “DePriest Testimonial Celebration,” May 21, 1923, in Oscar S. DePriest Papers, Chicago Historical Society (Chicago, IL), Box 2. Hereafter, OD Papers.

46 Grossman, Land of Hope, 123.

47 Gosnell, Negro Politicians, 169.

48 Richard Moore, Daily Worker, April 15, 1929.

estimated that a black family “pays $12.50 for the same accommodations the Jew in the

Ghetto received for $9 and the immigrant for $8.” “Even the North, where the city administration does not recognize a ‘Ghetto’ or ‘pale,’” Breckinridge observed that municipal officials in Chicago were “able to enforce one in practice.”49

The core of the Black Belt was a slum of one-and-two-story frame houses, usually dilapidated and structurally supported by boarded-up porches and wooden walks. Inflated rents often forced black families to take in borders, which produced increasingly close confines in rooms and buildings on an overcrowded South Side.

Despite drab dwellings, the most striking feature of early South Side ghettoization was the difficulty middle-class blacks faced in locating suitable homes within their means.

White real estate agents and credit lenders, whose focus was race, not class, did not preserve apartment buildings and residential blocks for black professionals and denied middle-class minorities access to white working-class neighborhoods and suburbs.

Racialized markets and racist whites ensured that most blacks, regardless of means, were forced to rent, at higher rates, substandard lodging that was surrounded by pimps, prostitutes, gamblers, and hustlers of all hues.50 Philpott notes that black real estate dealers “did not resort to all the crude tactics of the white operators,” but managed

49 Sophonisba Breckinridge, “The Color Line,” 575-576 in Spear, Black Chicago, 26. In 1912, a survey of 1,775 South Side blacks reported that 542, or 31%, lived as lodgers in the homes of others. Breckinridge’s survey also concluded that in a four-block area of the South Side, only 26% of the dwellings were in good repair – dismal when compared to similar samples of other ethnic enclaves. For example, 71% of Polish homes and 57% of residences in the ethnically mixed Stockyards were deemed adequate.

50 Spear, Black Chicago, 24-26. Early black working- and-middle-class enclaves in Hyde Park, Englewood, and Morgan Park (white districts) gave way to police white boundaries and the expanding Black Belt in the World War I years.

“slum properties, where they charged all the traffic would bear” in transitional districts amidst southern migration.51

The DePriest Realty Company grew into an empire of personal wealth in the

World War I-era, and the Kansas migrant amassed sizable stock investments during the

Roaring Twenties. In 1922, the Chicago Defender boasted that the annual turnover of

DePriest’s business was more than $225,000, while the total value of his real estate holdings surpassed a million dollars.52 Urban historians have properly demonstrated how the political and spatial development of the South Side resulted from market forces and discriminatory public policy – that the ghettoization process was not a just matter of poverty, or a mere consequence of personal preferences regarding residence. Yet, black historians and civil rights scholars have not adequately investigated the historical importance of black real-estate dealers turned politicians. Oscar DePriest and his

South Side successor in Congress, Arthur Mitchell, paradoxically facilitated, profited from, and amassed political power through the ghettoization process.

The “Tall Sycamore of the Prairies” was an eager “blockbuster.” DePriest benefited from racialized markets and white antipathies. However, he also manipulated

Bronzeville’s strident racial pride – born of geographic concentration and segregated institutional development – for personal profit, social stature and political power.

Despite rising white animus, Black Chicago’s “Old Settlers” favored an integrated fight for racial equality out of fear that segregated institutions gave implicit sanction to formal

51 Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto, 151.

52 “Binga State Bank Celebrates its 1st Anniversary Aided Business,” Chicago Defender, Jan. 7, 1922, p. 3. Though nearly all of the congressman’s financial records are absent from his manuscript collection, one listing of DePriest’s investments from the twenties shows sizable shares of U.S. Agency Company, A. E. Barlow, Inc., Middle West Utilities, Central Gas, and Binga State Bank. “List of Stocks,” OD Papers, Box 1.

apartheid. Old Settlers, some of whom had fought alongside white abolitionists to liberate their people, were usually businessmen with white clientele; or, professionals whose financial standing was tied to their reputation among pale-faced colleagues and supervisors. The Old Settler elite’s integrationism ultimately diminished with Jim Crow’s conquest of the South and the Great Migration of the “Talented Tenth” to Chicago.53

By the 1890s, ambitious Old Settlers and striving southern migrants took new cultural, ideological, and institutional approaches to racial justice and community empowerment. A new generation of Bronzeville leaders dramatically expanded segregated institutions and trumpeted the Race’s accomplishments in a rapidly developing black press. Early Jim Crow refugees, including Oscar DePriest, gained economic security and professional success before World War I, and their careers blossomed with the first waves of the Great Migration.54 “The emergence of the physical ghetto coincided with widening racial discrimination in Chicago and other northern cities,” James Grossman notes, and “increasing separation opened new opportunities for business, professional, religious, and political leadership.”55

In response to scientific racism, employment discrimination, white violence, and residential segregation, the founding fathers of the “Black Metropolis” produced a northern variation of Tuskegee ideology. Black Chicago’s “Race Men” did not aim to end ghettoization. Instead, DePriest’s generation of South Side leaders endeavored not only to acquire political representation and patronage, but also to provide modern luxuries in their portion of an increasingly segregated city. In the 1890s, Bronzeville

53 Grossman, Land of Hope, 129.

54 Spear, Black Chicago, 53-54.

55 Grossman, Land of Hope, 129.

elites envisioned the Black Metropolis of the Roaring Twenties, a beacon of racial empowerment promoted in Georgia-born Robert S. Abbott’s Chicago Defender (1905).

Chicago’s black leaders did not abandon the philosophical goal of integration, but most

South Side professionals pragmatically recognized the benefits – material, cultural, and psychological – of a negotiated accommodation with second-class citizenship in urban ghettos. The key architects of the Black Metropolis relegated integration to the background well before the Great War, but they also developed an attractive Great

Migration-era destination – Bronzeville’s cutting-edge entertainment and rich institutional network of civic clubs, churches, fraternal orders, activist organizations, and professional associations.56

In the decade before World War I, the South Side’s black leaders emphasized loyalty to the Party of Lincoln, Race Pride, and the value of urban clientage. Republican

“Race Men” were of varying character, training, means, and motives. Nevertheless, ghettoization gave Bronzeville capitalists, machine politicians, and racketeers the opportunity to develop fiefdoms among isolated black consumers and voters. By the turn of the century, Chicago was a “wide open” town whose libertine policies came at the expense of black communities – and compromised the integrity of municipal government for all residents. White politicians and property owners claimed the outright suppression of gambling and prostitution was impossible. Yet, Windy City public officials confined vice to a well-defined area where it could be closely monitored and profited from – where interracial, intra-class carousing would not damage the reputations and property values of white businessmen and homeowners. The Near

56 Cayton and Drake, Black Metropolis, 52.

South Side, a “black-and-tan” border region between the Loop and Bronzeville, emerged as the core of downtown vice, known as the Levee district.57 Illinois’s First

Congressional District, which elected the New Deal-era’s only black congressmen, was the historic home of Windy City organized crime. In the end, both Oscar DePriest and

Arthur Mitchell were indebted to organized criminals, crooked city officials, and machine politicians en route to Capitol Hill.

“Chicago-style” politics of vice and corruption was entrenched by the time

DePriest arrived, well before the future congressman established a successful career in real estate and politics. Michael Cassius McDonald, the “Gambler King of Clark Street,” was the late-nineteenth century architect of Windy City organized crime. In the ashes of the city’s great fire (1871), McDonald built a criminal empire in collusion with Loop-and-

Levee vice proprietors, police, and politicians.58 In addition to gambling houses and saloons, some of which featured prostitution, McDonald’s late-nineteenth century bookmaking syndicate and racetrack operations boasted annual turnovers of $800,000.

In 1945, a noted criminologist noted that, “McDonald ruled the city with an iron hand for over two decades. This was not democracy. It was criminal despotism.”59 Aldermen

“Bathhouse” John Coughlin and Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna inherited McDonald’s backroom labors, a marriage of political organization and illicit activities on turf bordering the city’s most profitable commercial district. In 1893, Coughlin and Kenna

57 Spear, Black Chicago, 25.

58 See Richard C. Lindberg, The Gambler King of Clark Street: Michael C. McDonald and the Rise of Chicago’s Democratic Machine (Carbondale, Ill., 2009).

59 Virgil W. Peterson, “Chicago’s Crime Problem,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology,” 35 (May-June 1945): 3-15, quotation on 4.

created the First Ward Democratic Organization, a well-oiled political machine that the

Irish-Catholic politicians operated for over two decades.60

After a series of costly police raids, partially caused by petty personal and political squabbles, these “Lords of the Levee” used their formal political power and underworld connections to organize municipal graft and “protection” for those vice proprietors who paid up – and voted – for the Democratic Organization. In congressional testimony, Virgil W. Peterson, an FBI veteran and director of the Chicago

Crime Commission, testified that the early “gamblers, procurers, and thugs of the First

Ward were enabled to operate with complete immunity.”61 Shortly after Mississippi-born

Ida B. Wells arrived in Chicago, by way of Memphis and New York City, the NAACP co- founder lamented that southern migrants were lured by urban vice. Despite the activist’s exhortations, many recent arrivals were enamored by the State Street “Stroll” and the Levee district, where “not a single uplifting influence” resided.62 Kenna and

Coughlin maintained an iron fist on vice in a First Ward dominated by native-whites and

Irish-Americans; thus, the “Lords of the Levee” did not encourage blacks, Republican voters, to develop their own illicit enterprises due south in the Second Ward.

60 Virgil W. Peterson, “Chicago: Shades of Capone,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 347 (May 1963): 30-39. Coughlin was a garrulous and uncouth man who operated a bathhouse patronized by gamblers, “slumming” professionals, hustlers, and “johns.” He was elected First Ward alderman in 1892 and retained the seat until his death in 1938, as ghettoization survived New Deal reform. Kenna, longtime First Ward Alderman (1897-1923) committeeman (1923-1946) began as the owner of a saloon that boasted an upstairs gambling parlor.

61 Ibid., 31.

62 Grossman, Land of Hope, 145.

Nevertheless, Bronzeville organized crime – black operated and financed – was birthed as young Oscar DePriest came of age on the Kansas prairies.63

John “Mushmouth” Johnson (so-nicknamed for his prolific us of profanity) began his career as a porter for a gambling house in the Levee district, but emerged as a key architect of black organized crime on the South Side. Johnson worked his way up from porter to collecting “protection” payments with Tom McGinnis, the First Ward

Organization’s chief gambling coordinator. The underworld pair’s collection route included the largest black policy gambling syndicate in the city (on State Street from 31st to 39th Streets). 64 A striving Johnson was not content to merely collect payments for a white syndicate – he saved his earnings, capital toward his own gambling house and bar, the Emporium Saloon (464 South State Street). Mushmouth’s saloon grew into an empire characterized by not only gambling houses, saloons, and cabarets, but also real estate investments in a growing Bronzeville.65

According to Davarian Baldwin, Mushmouth’s criminal syndicate brought modern mass entertainment to the South Side by developing Bronzeville’s largest policy syndicate, or “numbers” operation. The “numbers,” a popular lottery system, thrived among patrons with both deep and shallow pockets. One South Side resident remarked, “Where else could a country boy go just ten days out of Georgia and feel like a big time gambler for only a nickel?” The many “fronts” for Johnson’s racket were owned by both struggling and secure black entrepreneurs facing a discriminatory

63 Mark H. Haller, “Policy Gambling, Entertainment, and the Emergence of Black Politics: Chicago from 1900 to 1940,” Journal of Social History, 24 (Summer 1991): 719-739.

64 Ibid., 722.

65 Davarian Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill, 2007), 46-47

economic landscape. South Side business owners were happy, even proud to whet the black community’s appetite to play the numbers.66 Oscar DePriest inherited

Mushmouth’s clientele, a nascent political base accustomed to the numbers and popular entertainment as vital features of daily life. In the two decades before the Great

Migration, machine operations that “protected” underworld vice industries were normalized on a residentially segregated South Side.

The First Ward Democratic Organization was the early South Side’s major conduit to organized crime and formal politics, but Republicans in Bronzeville’s Second

Ward gained electoral strength with the first arrivals of black southerners. In 1900,

William Hale “Big Bill” Thompson was elected alderman of a Second Ward that included a majority of Chicago’s black voters at the core of the city’s expanding Black Belt. In

1915, the black bloc vote in the Second Ward not only propelled “Big Bill” to a notorious tenure as mayor, but it also made Oscar DePriest the first black alderman in Chicago history. Thompson, a Republican scion of the Gilded Age aristocracy, was known for his flare and wit. However, these charismatic traits were often marshaled toward self- serving embellishment, obnoxious behavior, and wild accusations – at the McCormick family, Irish Democrats, the press, teetotalers, Eastern European immigrants, and even

King George V of England. Big Bill was in many was a demagogue, but he was also an astute modern politician that was adept at Chicago-style politics. Thompson presciently recognized how national demographic trends and metropolitan ghettoization produced a

66Ibid., 46-47.

new bloc vote that could offset the strength of Irish Democrats, if only organized by the discipline of machine politics.67

“Big Bill” Thompson cultivated a Bronzeville elite, including Oscar DePriest, as vital allies en route to two shameful, scandal-ridden tenures as mayor. Thompson’s political career was rooted in graft, nativism, and his ability to coerce, compliment, and reward segregated Second-Ward voters with party patronage, “protection” of black gambling and entertainment, and integrationist rhetoric. DePriest began his political career as a precinct-level worker and campaign organizer, but he ultimately worked his way to City Hall as Thompson’s chief liaison to black gambling syndicates on the South

Side.68 Ultimately, the early ghettoization process brought prosperity to the DePriest

Realty Company – and the ideological and structural circumstances that propelled the future congressman’s political ascent.

Big Bill was a striving white alderman in the increasingly black Second Ward when Oscar DePriest, on a whim, entered politics. A friend asked DePriest a simple question that changed his life, “Come to a meeting with me?” The Kansas migrant’s first political engagement was an election to determine Republican precinct captains.

The final vote tallied at an even twenty between rivaling candidates. “I saw right away that a deal could be made,” DePriest later recalled, and he made an offer to both men.

“Now you’re the man who ought to be captain,” he told each candidate in confidence,

“I’ll give you two additional votes if you’ll make me secretary.” Though one candidate declined, a rival accepted the offer, which produced DePriest’s first taste of politics and

67 Despite family wealth, Big Bill Thompson became a rancher in Texas and New Mexico instead of attending college, and the future mayor played professional football before entering politics. See Douglas Bukowski, Big Bill Thompson, Chicago, and the Politics of Image (Urbana, 1998).

68 Haller, “Policy Gambling, Entertainment, and the Emergence of Black Politics,” 726-727.

party office in one fell swoop. “I kept at it because it was recreation to me,” the

Alabama-born politician admitted, “I always liked a good fight; the chance, the suspense, interested me. I never gambled, nor played cards so it was fun to me.”69

DePriest dissected modern municipal politics and quickly determined paths toward personal power by way of backroom deals and the Bronzeville bloc vote. “A man is a fool who has power and does not use it” Congressman DePriest told a journalist, years later, explaining his self-made rise to fame and fortune in Jim Crow America.70

DePriest’s position as secretary to a Second Ward precinct captain bore intimate witness to the ground-level operation of machines whose success resides in the ability of ward workers to command loyalty, dispense services, and deliver votes. The young politico soon understood that a disciplined group of precinct captains on the South Side could increasingly up the ante of urban clientage with sophisticated organization and population growth. According to Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake, Oscar DePriest accepted a set of immutable fact about South Side ghettoization – that Bronzeville’s most powerful institutions were dependent upon the machine in power and that it was expedient for low-income voters to maintain amicable relations with the machine.

DePriest learned the intricacies (and illegalities) of Chicago politics in the Second Ward, such as the evasion of zoning ordinances, cronyism in city contracting, and cash payments for machine “protection.”71

69 Gosnell, Negro Politicians, 167-168.

70 David S. Day, “Herbert Hoover and Racial Politics: The DePriest Incident,” Journal of Negro History, 65 (Winter 1980): 6-17, quotation on 12.

71 Cayton and Drake, Black Metropolis, 361-364. DePriest’s first meeting, a precinct election, was the base-level of Chicago politics, and captains dealt directly with a few hundred voters on city blocks. Precinct captains reported to ward committeemen, who dispensed campaign funds, provided by the city and county party organization that directed endorsements, nominations, appointments. Ward

On one hand, machine politicians were facilitators of integral community services, including hospital beds, jobs, meals, and entertainment. On the other hand, urban clientage ensured that partisan pragmatism and rampant corruption distorted black politicization on the South Side. DePriest proved an expert in the politics of goodwill that greases machine politics. He thrived in smoke-filled back rooms and intimate community gatherings, from outdoor rallies to Sunday church services. The southern-born politician distinguished himself among machine cronies through his ability to cultivate the respect and loyalty of Second Ward residents. Bronzeville voters cast ballots for the machine, but many also believed that they had a personal stake in

DePriest’s grand aspirations. In 1904, a thirty-three-year-old DePriest was nominated for the Cook County Board of Commissioners. He ultimately gained a nomination, and his first elected office, by assuring the Second Ward Committeeman of Bronzeville bloc votes, which the white party official needed for leverage at the forthcoming GOP county convention.72

Commissioner DePriest served two-terms (1904-1908) and worked to appoint and employ blacks in path-breaking positions, including recorder, sheriff, treasurer, and at the juvenile court. Black appointees from DePriest’s tenure remained in city employment as late as 1923.73 DePriest did not run for a third-term on the county commission because he was dropped from the party ticket. In 1908, the Kansas migrant’s swift rise was curtailed by falling on the wrong side of a (white) GOP skirmish committeemen were usually the real authority at the neighborhood-level, but they were accountable to party bosses on the county central committee – and state-level officials – who expected consistent results.

72 Gosnell, Negro Politicians, 168-169.

73 Program from a “DePriest Testimonial Celebration,” May 21, 1923, OD Papers, Box 2.

between the Second Ward committeeman and South Side State Senator.74

Nevertheless, the future congressman focused on his booming real estate business and developed important connections in Bronzeville politics and organized crime. In the decade before the Great Migration, Oscar DePriest, Edward H. Wright, and Daniel “The

Embalmer” Jackson laid the groundwork for black political empowerment in Big Bill

Thompson’s Second Ward.

In 1864, Ed Wright was born in New York City, where he attended public schools and graduated from City College (at just seventeen years old). In 1885, Wright migrated to Chicago and established himself as a respected Bronzeville attorney and

Republican official. Wright’s public service began in the city’s real estate and post office departments, but his career was propelled by a Springfield position as bookkeeper and railroad clerk in the Secretary of State’s office. From 1896 to 1900, Wright served two terms on the Cook County Board of Commissioners, but he was popularly known as the founder of Bronzeville’s famed Appomattox Club for “Race Men” politicians, businessmen, and professionals. In 1920, the Great Migration, a rapid influx of

Republican voters, elected Wright the first black Ward Committeeman in Chicago history.75

When Mayor Thompson was Second Ward alderman, he quickly recognized

Wright’s strength and potential utility as a black leader, but the detached lawyer was private, independent-minded, and favored “clean” politics. However, DePriest thrived at rallies, protests, churches, cabarets, gambling houses, and sporting events – the places

74 Gosnell, Negro Politicians, 169.

75 Ibid., 153-54.

where neighbors bond and become communities. Big Bill sought a Bronzeville personality, Oscar DePriest, a wealthy, ambitious, charismatic, and unscrupulous man, who could harness black gambling and entertainment into a Republican racket. In the decade before the Great Migration, Daniel “The Embalmer” Jackson inherited and expanded upon “Mushmouth” Johnson’s underworld enterprises – under terms negotiated by DePriest and “protection” provided by the Thompson regime. According to Mark Haller, the importance of “the numbers” and nightlife to the South Side’s socioeconomic life meant that “successful black politicians were necessarily involved in mediating between those institutions and the criminal justice system.”76

Oscar DePriest did not have a reputation as a gambler, but he shrewdly recognized that the facilitation of gambling and entertainment not only provided potential risks, but also carried immense political opportunities. DePriest campaigned for

Thompson, organized Bronzeville voting precincts, and coordinated “protection” with white law enforcement officials and politicians. Meanwhile, Jackson’s syndicate distributed bribes to local officials, collected payoffs from saloons, gambling houses, cabarets, and “fronts” for the largest “numbers” syndicate in the Black Belt. The

“Embalmer” possessed the ability to orchestrate police raids on stubborn Second Ward vice proprietors who did not fall in line with Big Bill’s wishes. By 1915, Big Bill

Thompson, Dan Jackson, and Oscar DePriest developed a “Second Ward Syndicate” that was aggrandized by southern migration. Although the Second Ward Syndicate sent DePriest to City Hall and Congress, it paralyzed Black Chicago’s political development. DePriest and Jackson, political allies and personal friends, differed in

76 Haller, “Policy Gambling, Entertainment, and the Emergence of Black Politics,” 724-725.

character and upbringing, but each Race Man seized upon the forces driving South

Side ghettoization to realize their “American Dreams.”77

The “Embalmer” did not gain his intimidating nickname as a hard-scrabble youth, or murderous man, like most of the Windy City’s criminal icons. Jackson was a trained mortician, heir his father’s undertaking company, one of Bronzeville’s oldest black- owned businesses. The Jackson Undertaking Company was established in the

Reconstruction-era and grew into a profitable enterprise after the turn of the century.

The Defender effusively praised the company at a time when “race enterprises” were few – when “a dependent people were subjected to exorbitant prices and had to await the convenience of white undertakers when their loved ones were to be buried.”

Despite the economic constraints of high rental rates and employment discrimination,

Emmanuel Jackson built a thriving community enterprise for a marginalized clientele by allowing churches, lodges, and clubs to act as credit-lenders and co-signers. “Whether on cash or on credit,” the Defender claimed Jackson’s enterprise was a “House of

Quality.” In 1910, Emmanuel Jackson retired to a potato farm in rural Michigan. He left the family business in the capable hands of his eldest son, an embalming specialist and expert businessman. Within three years, Dan “The Embalmer” Jackson adopted new techniques in mortuary sciences and marketing, reorganized the company, named himself president, and had the business incorporated by the State of Illinois.78

77 Ibid., 724-726.

78 “Undertaking Concern Established in 1865 Still in Lead,” Chicago Defender, Nov. 14, 1914, p. 1; “Emanuel Jackson Turns Farmer,” Chicago Defender, Nov. 18, 1911, p. 7. Emanuel Jackson used his facilities as a training facility through a makeshift apprenticeship program in the interest of South Side residents largely denied access to skilled trades. There was a basic structure to the apprenticeship program – as one generation was trained in mortuary sciences, they successfully passed the examination boards and started into business themselves, while sharing professional expertise with newcomers. Though rooted on the South Side, Dan Jackson initiated a modern marketing campaign advertising the

By World War I, Dan Jackson harnessed the social stature and capital afforded by his undertaking company to become Bronzeville’s gambler king on South State

Street from 27th to 36th Streets.79 In 1911, the Embalmer married Lucy Lindsey, sister of the deceased Robert T. Motts, a longtime associate of “Mushmouth” Johnson. Motts operated the iconic Pekin Theatre in the heart of Bronzeville (at 2700 South State

Street), which was next door to the Jackson Undertaking Company. Jackson acquired

Mott’s money, gambling connections in the Second Ward, and the Pekin Theatre through his marriage to Lindsey. According to Davarian Baldwin, the Pekin Theatre

“served as a key place for social gathering and political organizing,” witnessing events from Ida B. Wells speeches to iconic jazz and blues performances. Across the street from the Pekin stood the Dreamland Café (at 3618 South State Street), which was operated by Mushmouth’s brother, Elijah Johnson.80 Oscar DePriest’s prosperous realty company, and his role between Thompson’s Republican faction and the Jackson syndicate, made the future congressman a key member of the Bronzeville elite that facilitated community politics, business, and entertainment.

For example, DePriest’s political associate, the “Embalmer,” was close friends with Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion of the world. In 1910, Jackson was on Johnson’s private train car to Reno for the “Fight of the Century,” and he sat

company’s ability “to make calls to any part of the city or suburbs,” which would “be answered promptly at any time, day or night” with “perfect equipment for all services.”

79 Haller, “Policy Gambling, Entertainment, and the Emergence of Black Politics,” 725-726.

80 Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes, 47. The Pekin, built in 1892, began as a beer garden, became a gambling hall and nightclub, and was finally converted into a theater in 1906 under Mott’s ownership. In the 1890s, Mott’s opened a gambling house (on South Clark Street) in the Levee district, which financed a Black Belt saloon, with backroom gambling, in 1903 (at 2700 South State Street). Jackson ultimately married into accumulated underworld influence and wealth acquired by both Motts and Mushmouth Johnson.

ringside when the iconic pugilist defeated Jim Jeffries, the “Hope of the White Race.”81

In 1912, Edward Wright was part of Jack Johnson’s legal defense team when the champ faced Mann Act charges.82 Julian Black, Joe Louis’s manager, received mortician training through Daniel Jackson’s makeshift apprentice program. Black, a migrant from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, did not pursue a career with the dead, but joined

Jackson’s syndicate instead, which helped finance the second black heavyweight champion’s boxing career. By the 1920s, Black was a successful “numbers” operator and owned Elite No. 2, a cabaret where Bronzeville’s fashionable elite and pleasure seekers congregated. Future owner of the Dreamland Café, William Bottoms, was the

Brown Bomber’s personal dietician, but he first worked as a bartender at Jack

Johnson’s Café de Champion (on West 31st Street).83

The Bronzeville elite achieved wealth, social stature, and political patronage, but high-level elected office remained off-limits, prohibited by the Thompson regime, rival

Republicans, and Democratic leaders. Yet, black leaders and Bronzeville residents grew restless with token rhetoric and clientage that did not alter ghettoization – they demanded “race representation,” especially a seat on the Chicago City Council. Black demands were emboldened and made a reality on the South Side by residential segregation and geographic concentration amidst the first waves of the Great Migration.

The election of a black alderman in the Second Ward was perceived as a milestone

81 “Johnson is Off for Reno – Negro Concludes Stay at San Francisco Chatting with Undertaker,” The Oregonian (Portland, OR), June 24, 1910, p. 8; “Johnson Has Talk with Undertaker – Mortuary Expert is Expected to be at Ringside,” Duluth News Tribune, June 24, 1910, p. 6.

82 Cary B. Lewis, “Jack Johnson Acquitted – Victory for Colored Lawyers,” Washington Bee, Nov. 23, 1912, p. 1.

83 Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes, 48-49.

marking the race’s power alongside Chicago’s diverse ethnic enclaves. “For the sake of the race of which you are a part,” Ed Wright implored, “arise from your slumber… the

Poles, the Jews, and all the other nationalities are insisting on adequate representation in public affairs.” In 1910, Wright ran a failed bid for alderman at a time when blacks composed just 25% of the Second Ward population. Wright, one of four candidates in the Republican primary, finished third with just 18% of the vote.84

Thompson did not support Wright’s aldermanic bid in 1910, and Big Bill did not endorse the black politician’s 1914 race, either. However, the Second Ward shifted from twenty-five to fifty percent black between 1910 and 1914, which demonstrated to

Republican leaders that Bronzeville demands for representation would be supported with strong organization and inevitable demographic trends. Big Bill, State Senator

George Harding, and First District Congressman Martin B. Madden pragmatically recognized a black city councilman as both a modern reality and a new opportunity with a growing voting bloc. In late 1914, DePriest, a Thompson-loyalist strengthened by prior party positions, elected office, and a private fortune, organized rallies and solicited endorsements toward a city council bid the following year.85

Oscar DePriest confirmed his utility to Thompson Republicans with a commanding set of endorsements: thirty-eight precinct captains, the Hotel Waiters’

Association, the Chicago Colored Barbers’ Association, ministers of Chicago’s

Methodist and Baptist churches, several women’s church clubs, and associations of doctors, dentists, and pharmacists. The Thompson regime was impressed by

84 Spear, Black Chicago, 122-123.

85 Ibid., 123-124.

DePriest’s organizational prowess and endorsed his primary candidacy under the banner of the regular Republican organization. DePriest’s Thompson-backed, largely self-financed campaign was so effective that he won a plurality of 11,000 in a field of four primary opponents who competed for 20,000 votes.86 “The excitement was at a fever heat,” the Defender said of a Second Ward that anxiously awaited the general election. “The cherished wish is in sight,” the Defender exclaimed with DePriest’s primary victory, “let the rallying cry from this point on be ‘Unity.’”87

In 1915, Alderman Oscar DePriest, the first black citizen on the Chicago City

Council, rode into historic office on the corrupt coattails of Mayor William Hale

Thompson. Despite residential segregation and graft-laden machine politics, the

Defender rejoiced in victory for the Race. The historic occasion was not perceived as a moment to reflect on the crippling realities undergirding Bronzeville’s political empowerment. The Defender lamented that it spent much of the campaign refuting “the time-worn statement that the race could not be loyal to each other,” that the black vote

“could be purchased for a few paltry dollars or a glass of liquor.” “Self preservation is the first law of nature,” the Defender admitted, a hard lesson learned from “bitter experience in trusting our fortunes to members of the other race.” The Defender’s strident racial pride was a functional response to ghettoization, sociologically speaking, which formed powerful bonds of solidarity in the face of gendered differences and class fragmentation. Nevertheless, racial pride obscured a deeper evaluation of Oscar

DePriest’s historic achievement, and the path by which he reached fortune, fame, and

86 Ibid., 123-124.

87“DePriest is Winner,” Chicago Defender, Feb. 27,1915, p. 1.

political power. “Since the winner is a member of our own race,” the Defender argued,

“all differences must be brushed aside… our united strength from now on cast in favor of Mr. DePriest.”88

In November 1915, the Defender’s pre-election “advice to mothers, fathers, brothers, and churches is that they see that every race-loving voter cast his vote… for

William Hale Thompson and Hon. Oscar DePriest.”89 The construction of a collective racial identity, buoyed by white hostility and residential segregation, spawned strong bonds of racial solidarity and a myriad of Bronzeville social clubs, businesses, and church congregations. Yet, as Barbara Fields and Joan Scott argue, race and gender are ideological, subjective concepts – their modern existence is rooted in the layered, sometimes contradictory, ways they are employed by elites and marginalized populations. Race-and-gender-based ideologies, though malleable, are stabilized by white citizens and heterosexual men who have used them to maintain a hierarchical socioeconomic order.90 Bronzeville’s cultural pride accommodated the ghettoization process and celebrated “Race Men” that prospered from systematic suffering, a response that marginalized the particular travails black women faced in the Great

Migration era. “The Defender first, last and all time stands as its name implies, a

88 “For Alderman, Oscar DePriest,” Chicago Defender, Feb. 27, 1915, p. 4.

89 Ibid., 4.

90 On modern racial ideology, see: Barbara J. Fields, “Ideology and Race in American History,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, (New York, 1982), 143-177, and “Whiteness, Racism, and Identity,” International Labor and Working-Class History, 60 (Fall 2001): 48-56; Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91 (Dec. 1986): 1053-1075; and Tommie Shelby, “Foundations of Black Solidarity: Collective Identity or Common Oppression?,” Ethics 112 (Jan. 2001): 231-266.

defender of the race, the Bronzeville paper boasted on the eve of DePriest’s election,

“the success of any individual is the success of every individual.”91

Mayor Thompson’s first tenure (1915-1923) paradoxically catalyzed ghettoization and black politicization. Despite political gains, Black Belt dwellers were still second- class citizens who benefited from patronage, not genuine political empowerment.

Nevertheless, the Defender optimistically envisioned a prosperous and progressive future under Thompson, an age when “the Race would be recognized to a greater degree in the city hall than it has ever been.” “Prosperity is here” the Defender boasted upon inaugural festivities in 1915, when a “prosperity parade” of 300,000 Chicagoans of

“multi-colors, tongues, and costumes” all vied for Big Bill’s attention. Thompson’s proud black constituents took center stage amidst the merriment. The Defender reported that

“the entire section of Afro-Americans was unique, and regarded by many as being the most imposing part of the parade.” The most prominent black float in the inaugural parade contained a life-size statue of Abraham Lincoln and “a chorus of Afro-American singers who sang plantations melodies over the entire route.”92

Thompson’s inaugural parade included a twenty-car procession of Bronzeville’s leading Race Men, including Dan Jackson and Ed Wright, but the Defender noted that

“the cynosure of all eyes during the inauguration ceremonies” was Alderman Oscar

DePriest.93 In order to sustain racial goodwill and black bloc votes, Thompson appointed striving Bronzeville professionals to city positions and endorsed their

91 “For Alderman, Oscar DePriest,” Chicago Defender, Feb. 27, 1915, p. 4; “On and Off the Stroll,” Chicago Defender, March 27, 1915, p. 4.

92 “Thompson Inaugurated: All Nations Hail William Hale Thompson – ‘Birth of Nation’ Will Not Be Shown in Chicago,” Chicago Defender, May 1, 1915, p. 1.

93 Ibid., 1.

candidacies for party offices. Mayor Thompson not only endorsed DePriest’s candidacy, but also appointed Ed Wright and Louis B. Anderson as city lawyers in the corporation counsel’s office. The new mayor also made Rev. Archibald J. Carey an investigator in the city law department. Three black appointees in one city agency barely raised the

Defender’s skepticism. “The more the better, Mr. Thompson,” the Defender claimed, but “please remember that there are other departments besides the City Law

Department.”94

In 1915, Oscar DePriest, a member of the “Second Ward Syndicate,” became one of the first black city councilmen in a major industrial center, the initial step in a long, marred path that returned “race representation” to Capitol Hill. “In every city where the race vote is of any considerable size, there should be a united effort on the part of our workers to get some of the spoils,” the Defender remarked, black voters would now “help those and only those who give something in return.”95 Bronzeville’s beloved paper lionized Oscar DePriest and presciently recognized in his election an urban model for black politicization. Northern black voters, many of whom had escaped the Jim Crow South to gain suffrage, had learned “the folly of dividing their interest and thereby losing every change of victory, which means representation and race aggrandizement.”96

Despite his corrupt position between Big Bill Thompson’s political regime and

Dan Jackson’s criminal empire, Alderman Oscar DePriest reached the apex of black

94 “E. H. Wright Gets $5,000 Position: Former County Commissioner Named Corporation Counsel Aid,” Chicago Defender, July, 24, 1915, p. 1.

95 “Protecting Our Interests,” Chicago Defender, March 6, 1915, p. 8.

96 “Vote for DePriest,” Chicago Defender, April 3, 1915, p. 8.

power in the Land of Lincoln’s modern metropolis. Yet, the Alabama-born politician’s path to power raised the ire of white politicians and attracted the scrutiny of local prosecutors. In 1917, DePriest faced a series of criminal indictments related to the operation of the Second Ward Syndicate. Less than a year into his second term, the historic city councilman was indicted by a Special Grand Jury on several state charges, including the collection of graft, bribery of law enforcement officials, and the operation of brothels and gambling houses. The state’s graft charge was backed by Henry Jones’s sworn testimony. The state’s witness allegedly paid DePriest $3,150 during last year’s campaign, which the alderman pocketed as personal income. Open ties to organized criminals did not deter the future congressman’s adamant denials of ever receiving “any amount of money whatever from the said Henry Jones for my personal use.”97

As a matter of race pride, Bronzeville and the Defender rallied behind the embattled black alderman in the face of multiple indictments. During the trial, the state’s attorney, Edward Wilson, referred to the Second Ward as “Crapville” and “the height of niggerism.” The white prosecutor demonstrated the base level of racism evident in the city’s power structure, which only strengthened DePriest’s support in Bronzeville. The

Defender believed “at no time during the trial did the state’s attorney prove” that

DePriest “had protected either gambling, houses [of ill] repute or anything else… in order that a few crook men might get leniency” the prosecution forwarded dubious charges. The southern migrant was ultimately vindicated by the legendary Clarence

Darrow, an early and high-profile NAACP advocate. The clever defense attorney diverted the attention of the judge, jury and press from machine politics and vice.

97 Oscar S. DePriest to Commissioner of the Department of Internal Revenue, 26 July 1917. OD Papers, Box 1.

Instead, Darrow instructed the all-white Yankee jury to “not let prejudice creep [into their] hearts, but to decide [the verdict on] merits.”98

In June 1917, Oscar DePriest was cleared of all charges with a not guilty verdict, but he was forced to sacrifice his political office. News of DePriest’s acquittal spread quickly across Black Chicago and the exonerated Race Man was “besieged with telephone calls and telegrams of congratulations.”99 The Defender praised the verdict as a great victory for the “entire population of the ward, as well as hundreds of thousands of citizens throughout the city and country.” The assault on the upstanding

Race Man emerged from white contempt for a black politician’s success and was in no way a by-product of machine racketeering and corruption. The popular alderman was prosecuted because he fought “for principles which the constitution gave his Race – men were born and created equal.”100

Through the fall of 1917, the state’s attorney’s office and chief justice of the criminal court continued, unsuccessfully, to pin criminal charges on the deposed

Second Ward alderman.101 DePriest lost his elected office, but returned to his profitable real estate company and was perceived as a victim of white racism, a hero to Black

America. Privately, DePriest’s true intent, money and power, were revealed. Once vindicated, the future congressman wrote to an Internal Revenue Service official who aimed to collect taxes on the alleged graft in his corruption charges. DePriest told the

IRS agent that he “was very greatly surprised” to find that he “had encouched $3,150

98 “Oscar DePriest Set Free,” Chicago Defender, June 16, 1917, p. 1.

99 Ibid.

100 Ibid.

101 “Demands Trial For DePriest,” Chicago Defender, Oct. 6, 1917, p. 6.

against my income.” The former alderman admitted that Henry Jones contributed his election fund of 1916, “either $900 or $950, which was used in said campaign.”

Naturally, DePriest thought it seemed unfair to expect him to pay taxes on a campaign donation, especially after he was acquitted of all charges.102

In the decade before the Great Migration, Oscar DePriest became not only a

“blockbusting” real-estate tycoon who advanced ghettoization, but also a Republican operative and officeholder that rooted black empowerment in the criminal underworld and crooked Thompson regime. DePriest was a child of relative privilege when Jim

Crow cast a permanent shadow over the dreams of his many contemporaries, by virtue of a two-parent income that financed migration from the Cotton Belt to the Kansas prairies. Congressman DePriest’s Exoduster adolescence was the essential difference between the Republican and his Democratic successor, Arthur Mitchell, who experienced family tragedy and rural poverty in the Alabama Black Belt. Oscar

DePriest’s role in the “Second Ward Syndicate” and his historic election to the Chicago

City Council demonstrates both Reconstruction’s failure (north and south) and the structure of a black politicization through migration and residential segregation.

In Black Reconstruction, W. E. B. Du Bois acknowledges that serfdom was abolished in nineteenth-century England, France, Germany, Italy, and Russia. “Only the American Negro slave was emancipated… without rights,” he remarked, “and in the end this spelled doom for him and the continuation of slavery.”103 In the furtherance of white privilege and power, Chicago machine politicians created a segregated ghetto and

102 Oscar S. DePriest to Commissioner of the Department of Internal Revenue, July 26, 1917. OS Papers, Box 1.

103 Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 611.

a concentrated black voting bloc – a swing demographic that proved capable of extracting the spoils of patronage and the democratic right to representation. Jim Crow refugees did not find a “Land of Hope” in Chicago, but they catalyzed the politicization of

Black America by electing Oscar DePriest to City Hall and returning “race representation” to Capitol Hill.

CHAPTER 3 “LOOK OUT FOR YOURSELF… NO ONE ELSE WILL”: ARTHUR MITCHELL’S GREAT ESCAPE FROM THE JIM CROW SOUTH

In 1901, Booker T. Washington famously dined with President Theodore

Roosevelt at the White House, while an obscure Arthur Mitchell, the first black representative in Democratic Party history, enrolled at Tuskegee. Mitchell, nearly twelve years younger than his Republican rival, Oscar DePriest, was not an Exoduster who escaped the Jim Crow South. The New Deal Democrat came of age amidst family tragedy, racial repression, and economic destitution in the Alabama Black Belt that the

DePriests left behind. Limited opportunities for social mobility and capital accumulation ultimately pushed the ambitious son of slaves toward fraud, blackmail, and embezzlement to finance an “American Dream” beyond the Mason-Dixon Line.

Arthur Mitchell’s professional career truly began as an employee in Washington’s

Tuskegee office, where he first recognized that vocational education was a route to power and distinction in an era of segregation and disfranchisement. Although Booker

T. Washington insisted that blacks “cast down their buckets” in the Jim Crow South, the educator’s advocacy of racial accommodation was a tactical retreat – the Tuskegee leader also promoted an end to lynching and segregated institutional development in business, media, and politics. In the early twentieth century, Washington was heralded by white progressives as the Moses of his people, and a majority of black Americans agreed, until a southern exodus was politicized by the Great Migration. Arthur Mitchell fashioned his persona and career in Washington’s formidable image, but he criminally paled in comparison.

Between 1903 and 1915, Principal Mitchell established West Alabama Institute, a self-styled Tuskegee offshoot, in Greensboro (1903-08), Panola (1908-11), and Geiger

(1912-15). West Alabama Institute relied upon the land and financial support of Black

Belt planters, John Rodgers and John Pinson, and was largely a sharecropping scheme catalyzed by Mitchell’s ability to recruit tenants, solicit white donors, and mushroom property values by selling plantation labor as vocational education. Washington’s endorsement eluded Mitchell, but the ambitious principal infiltrated Tuskegee’s network of allies and sympathizers, including as Emmett J. Scott, Washington’s secretary, Fred

Moore of the New York Age, and Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. of Harlem’s Abyssinian

Baptist Church.

Cotton Belt blacks ultimately recognized the mercenary intent of Principal

Mitchell’s educational regime, which solidified sharecropping and accelerated indebtedness. Yet, the future congressman’s ability to command Tuskegeean rhetoric for philanthropists and mass media allowed West Alabama to survive in the face discontented black sharecroppers. To finance an escape from the Jim Crow South, a craven Mitchell torched two of his own schools for insurance profits and embezzled nearly all of Armstrong Agricultural Institute’s assets. In 1912, Arthur Mitchell even blackmailed Booker T. Washington when the iconic leader’s private investigation discovered false endorsements, fictitious credentials, and the promotion of field labor over lessons. Despite humble origins, family tragedy, and rural poverty, the pioneering

Democrat blazed a deceitful and largely forgotten path from the Alabama Black Belt to the nation’s capitol.

On December 22, 1883, Arthur Mitchell was born in a one-room cabin on a tenant farm in Chambers County, Alabama. After Reconstruction, Taylor Mitchell and

Ammar Patterson, former slaves and first-time parents, expected their son to fulfill the

race’s deferred aspirations. The proud parents named the eldest of their six children after President Chester A. Arthur, but they preferred to call him “Beauty,” or “Beaut.”

Despite southern redemption, the Mitchell household was relatively blessed among

Black Belt tenant farmers. The entire family farmed rented land during springs and summers, while Taylor Mitchell logged timber between autumn harvest and spring planting season. The family’s patriarch also grew cotton for cash and planted corn and sweet potatoes for sustenance.1 The Mitchells did not own their own land, but they subsisted outside of the crop-lien system, which stabilized Beaut’s youth in a Cotton

Kingdom where disfranchisement, debt peonage, and lynching reigned. Nearly a thousand black Americans were lynched during the future congressman’s first decade breathing the crisp, new air of American intolerance.2

Although the specter of Jim Crow haunted the South, Beaut’s childhood included personal testimonials that marked a persistent legacy of black resistance to white supremacy. Ammar Mitchell, a stern matriarch with very light skin – with an alleged white father – was a proud descendent of field hands from nearby Patterson plantation.

Principal Mitchell later recalled his slave mother’s failed attempt to flee northward after

“imposing acts,” or, sexual advances, by the plantation’s overseer. Mitchell’s clever pitches to Yankee philanthropists also noted the cruel punishment meted out whenever his mother was found with a book (given by the master’s children who took pleasure in helping her learn to read).3 The future congressman possessed intimate knowledge of

1 Dennis S. Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman: A Life of Arthur Wergs Mitchell (Columbia, Mo, 1997), 1-2.

2 Tuskegee University Lynching Statistics. Accessed on June 28, 2013 from: http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/lynchingsstate.html

3 Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman, 3.

plantation life, but this knowledge did not produce a lasting sensitivity to the plight of rural black farmers. Rather, Mitchell’s keen awareness southern black vulnerability – the fundamental exploitation of black bodies, labor, and culture – bred a cold ambition to escape Dixie at any cost, even if that meant duping and defrauding former slaves like his own parents.

The pioneering Democrat came of age on the Cotton Belt frontier between southeast Alabama and southwest Georgia, a region extensively researched by historian Susan O’Donovan. In Becoming Free in the Cotton South, O’Donovan argues that antebellum white yeoman and planters quickly and effectively exported white supremacy and the plantation system to the Deep South. Chambers County, where the

Mitchell family traversed a tumultuous transformation from bondage to freedom, was settled by land-hungry white farmers seeking slaves and upward mobility on virgin Black

Belt soil. Despite a civil war that emancipated slaves, southern white capitalists ferociously maintained a profitable, racialized socioeconomic order. After the

Compromise of 1877, public declarations of racial equality dissipated near the Alabama-

Georgia border, silenced by white planters and vigilantes who facilitated the Cotton

Belt’s rapid descent into the sharecropping system.4

4 Susan Eva O’Donovan, Becoming Free in the Cotton South (Cambridge, Mass., 2007), 271; Historical Census Browser, accessed on June 28, 2013 from the University of Virginia, Geospatial and Statistical Data Center: http://mapserver.lib.virginia.edu/. Hereafter, UVA Census Browser. Unlike the early development of eastern port cities, the beneficiaries of the vast cotton plantations on the hinterlands, areas which boasted black majorities, the cotton frontier in Chambers County was a community with widespread slave ownership, and a balanced white/black ratio. In 1850, slaves were 47% of the county’s population, and ten years later, they made up just over half, 51%. In 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, 88% of Chambers County slaveholders owned less than 20 slaves, and 54% possessed between one and five bonded laborers; only 24 of the county’s 1,298 slaveholders owned more than 50 slaves.

Arthur Mitchell was reared amidst rigid racial repression as his future rival, Oscar

DePriest, traversed the prairies and profited in Black Chicago. Chambers County was second in the state of Alabama in the number of farms rented for shares of products when Mitchell was born. However, the textile industry emerged when Beaut came age, which absorbed dispossessed white tenant farmers and marginalized black workers.

The southern textile industry thrived on race-and-gender-based forms of discrimination that limited blacks to menial, non-factory work and notoriously exploited white women and children. The development of Chambers County’s textile industry further embedded blacks in the sharecropping economy. In 1910, black farmers owned just three percent of the county’s farms. A decade later, seventy percent of all Chambers

County farms were operated by tenants.5

Despite youths constrained by slavery and adulthoods inhibited by Jim Crow,

Ammar and Taylor Mitchell stretched the family’s modest means to provide a better future for their eldest son. Arthur Mitchell received a rudimentary formal education, which was typical of black youth’s in the Jim Crow era. Yet, the future congressman’s illiterate father pursued every available opportunity to advance Beaut’s professional prospects. Taylor Mitchell moved the family five miles from home, within walking distance of a new black school, when his eldest son was six-years-old. Though the

Mitchells resided in a one-room cabin on abandoned, overgrown land, Beaut gained access to at least four three-month school terms. Young Mitchell was studious when he was not helping his father clear, plant, and harvest the homestead. Taylor Mitchell

5 Ibid. In 1870, Chambers County had fourteen manufacturing facilities with 27 employees. In 1890, the area boasted 34 manufacturing establishments, which grew to 96 a decade later, with a capital investment of over $2 million. The development of the white textile industry accelerated black tenant farming. By 1910, sixty-two percent of black farmers in the county were tenants.

eventually discovered that his bright son’s intellectual prowess bested the fifty-year-old, self-taught black man commanding the classroom. The devoted father then acquired the services of a sympathetic white neighbor to give his son private, night lessons (after work on the farm).6

Young Mitchell demonstrated many of the personality traits that defined his political career: a fierce independence, a penchant for manipulation, an entrepreneurial spirit, and relentless ambition. On a day trip to the Chambers County Courthouse with his father, the two Mitchell men (presumably from the colored section) observed an agenda of legal proceedings. Beaut, impressed by the power and attention attorneys commanded, subsequently resolved to study the law – a dream he later fulfilled in the nation’s capitol. Mitchell chipped wood for charcoal (sold at five cents per bushel) to buy books, which were rarely available en masse for rural, black youths. Furthermore, the budding entrepreneur took great pleasure in purchasing penknives and other items from mail-order catalogs for eventual re-sales (with mark-ups) to other boys – when he was not providing haircuts and shaves (at twenty-five cents a head). Mitchell’s biographer notes that the future congressman developed “a sense of superiority” as a child, which grew into a fundamental desire to gain “an upper hand in every situation before him.”7

6 Ibid., 3. Little is known of Taylor Mitchell’s family background. Arthur’s father was born and reared in the Cusseta community near Columbus, Georgia – the same town as the future congressman’s first wife, Eula Mae King. Exactly how Taylor Mitchell met Arthur’s mother cannot be verified. In speeches, Arthur Mitchell mentioned his father’s enslavement, but few facts and details exist about the man.

7 Ibid., 3. Black access to education was limited in Dixie, whose governments appropriated little funding for education in general, and what little blacks received after discriminatory measures, was paltry. Many black schools were community products, the result of pooled efforts, finances, and resources by families, clergy, and teachers. Though the Rosenwald Fund (1917), among other philanthropic institutions would lead to the proliferation of black schools in the South, these institutions were ideologically committed to industrial education and racial accommodation.

In 1897, Beaut’s future promise was nearly derailed by family tragedy. Typhoid fever, carried into the Mitchell home by contaminated water, claimed the lives of

Mitchell’s father and two sisters. Medical bills left the remaining Mitchells destitute. The doctor seized everything, which included the family’s homestead and un-harvested crops. Ammar Mitchell, an unsuspecting widow, was forced to steal nightly from the family’s old plot in order to feed her four remaining children. Taylor Mitchell’s death,

Arthur’s status as the eldest son, and the financial strain on the family, catalyzed

Beaut’s rapid maturation. The adolescent was expected to farm and raise a family – to become the Mitchell family patriarch. Although his mother pressured him to propose to his girlfriend in his late-teens, Arthur Mitchell developed ambitions that stretched beyond his father’s example – a man of character who chartered a route to sustenance in a vicious regional economy.

Congressman Mitchell later put a positive spin on his tragic teens as a struggle for education, aided by cooperative whites. However, Chambers County sharecropping left Mitchell little reason to envision a fulfilling life spent toiling on tenant farms, an existence marked by the perpetual fear of entrapment by the crop-lien system. At a life crossroads, Mitchell’s uncle, a Macon County resident, sent him glowing reports of

Tuskegee Institute. Arthur Mitchell was eight years removed from formal education when he decided to attend Booker T. Washington’s hallowed institute. At seventeen, he left home with all his possessions – a dress-suit case, an extra pair of trousers, one suit of underwear, and a few shirts – and traveled sixty-five miles (mostly on foot) to

Tuskegee, Alabama.

Mitchell possessed just fifteen cents when he arrived in Tuskegee. He presumed, by way of rumor, that the Institute’s mission was to educate penniless black youths. Mitchell received a stern rebuke from Tuskegee’s long-time registrar, John H.

Palmer, who informed him of the two-dollar admission fee. The aspiring student lodged with his uncle and washed dishes at a local restaurant until he saved enough money for admission. In September 1901, the first black congressman in Democratic Party history was formally enrolled at Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute.8 Mitchell sought special treatment upon arrival. In an intrepid letter to the Tuskegee board, he confidently professed, “I believe I can be a great man in the future.”9 Just weeks into his first term, Mitchell petitioned the school’s board for permission to attend night classes and to reside at his uncle’s home. Mitchell also felt demeaned by employment at the Institute’s tailor shop. The future congressman ultimately desired to discuss his frustrations directly with Booker T. Washington. Mitchell’s protests – and financial need

– won admission to Tuskegee’s night program, but he was forced to board on campus.

Most importantly, the future congressman was employed in the principal’s office, or, at the feet of the most powerful leader in Black America.

Most students would shirk from such proximity to power, especially teenagers eager to engage in a long list of banned activities (smoking, sexual liaisons, drinking, and gambling) that were policed with late-Victorian zeal by Tuskegee administrators.

Yet, Mitchell’s humble, tragic youth sparked an unquenchable hunger for social status, economic wealth, and political power. He reveled in proximity to Washington. Mitchell’s

8 Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman, 5.

9 Ibid., 6; quotation from Mitchell to Tuskegee Board of Trustees, October 13, 1901.

biographer argues that working in Washington’s office was a turning point in the politician’s life. He “learned much from Washington about running a private school” and mastered basic lessons in operational management and publicity. Most importantly,

Mitchell observed the Tuskegee educator’s “manipulations of whites for the achievement of goals.” Arthur Mitchell learned not only what could be accomplished

“through accommodation to another race’s terms and standards,” but also witnessed

Washington’s pragmatic dispensation of centralized black power in American politics.10

According to Louis Harlan, Booker T. Washington was a pragmatic materialist whose Jim Crow-era accommodation advanced “a triple alliance” between Yankee capitalists, New South boosters, and black professionals. Harlan argues that

Washington’s bargain with White America traded black second-class citizenship in return for “the swollen fortunes of American industrialization and financial capitalism.”

Washington understood the limits of northern racial attitudes, and he personally witnessed the cruel realities of southern mining, sharecropping, and vigilante violence.

The rigidity of American racism inspired Washington to salvage material gains – political patronage, government spending, and white philanthropy – for himself, Tuskegee, and his people. Instead of castigating the racial prejudice of Gilded Age aristocrats and

Yankee progressives, Washington “flattered and cajoled the very rich and never challenged the appropriateness of their status at the peak of the American success pyramid.”11 James Anderson’s meticulous study of early twentieth-century black education demonstrates that northern philanthropists were the coercive financiers of a

10 Ibid., 5-6.

11 Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington, The Wizard of Tuskegee: 1901-1915 (New York, 1983), 142.

vocational education system which catered to Jim Crow-era politics and exploited racialized markets.12

Booker T. Washington maintained close ties with an impressive coterie of Gilded

Age elites such as, Theodore Roosevelt, William H. Taft, Andrew Carnegie, John D.

Rockefeller, Anna T. Jeanes, and Julius Rosenwald, an early and substantial contributor to both Tuskegee and the NAACP. Through the aid of northern allies, the Tuskegee educator created what was derisively known as the “Tuskegee Machine,” which Harlan argues exerted “an all-pervasive control of every avenue of black life.”13 On October 16,

1901, just over a month into Mitchell’s first semester at Tuskegee, Washington famously

(or, notoriously) dined at the White House with President Theodore Roosevelt – the first black citizen so honored. Washington and Roosevelt “began a close collaboration in black patronage politics,” which further aggrandized the Tuskegee leader’s national influence. Harlan’s portrayal of Washington as the “Wizard of Tuskegee,” a chieftain of racial accommodation through political clientage and industrial education, remains the standard interpretation of the legendary race leader.14

Young Mitchell worked for the most powerful man in black politics since

Frederick Douglass. The future congressman was well-schooled in Tuskegeean

12 See James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (Chapel Hill, 1988).

13 Harlan, Booker T. Washington, The Wizard of Tuskegee, viii.

14 No historian has truly disputed Washington’s coercive control over access to much-needed northern philanthropy, GOP patronage, and his towering role in black institutional development in education, politics, media, and business. Robert Norrell has recently challenged left-liberal collective memories of Washington as an “Uncle Tom,” and how such attitudes have shaped post-civil rights scholarship on the Tuskegee leader. He does not dispute Washington’s power; rather, Norrell argues that liberal historians, black and white, have falsely demonized the Jim Crow-era accommodation for contemporary, ideological purposes. See Robert J. Norrell, Up From History: The Life of Booker T. Washington (Cambridge, Mass., 2009). Norrell suggests that black and civil rights historians emphasize the danger of demanding suffrage and defying Jim Crow segregation, the practicality of Tuskegee training, and the historic role of its auxiliary institutions.

philosophy, rooted in both white philanthropy and the insatiable desire of Black Belt parents to educate their children. Disfranchisement and the crop-lien system made vocational education the fundamental avenue most black southerners traveled to skilled trades and professional positions. Washington’s national power emanated from his potent endorsement, which directed philanthropic funds to Machine allies (and diverted resources away from potential enemies). Arthur Mitchell gained suitable campus employment, and achieved distinction with the Willing Workers Debating Club.

However, for unspecified reasons, he left Tuskegee midway through his second year.

In 1903, Mitchell graduated from Snow Hill Institute, a grammar and secondary school in Wilcox County, Alabama (near Selma).15

Despite a precipitous exit, the future congressman referred to himself as a

“Tuskegee Man” for the rest of his life. Mitchell certainly mastered Tuskegeean rhetoric and Washington’s educational model. Principal Mitchell later mythologized his brief tenure at the famed institute in the Christian Science Monitor. Mitchell said he “went a period of as much as three months without even a two-cent stamp” with which to write his mother. He also claimed to only possess one suit of clothes and underwear, provided “from the barrels sent to the school by sympathetic northern friends.” Every day, Mitchell did his own laundry in his room. He dried his clothes at night and wore them the next day.16 During hours of “struggle and seeming despair,” Mitchell prayed:

[I] promise[d] the Lord that if he would stand by me so that I might finish with credit the curriculum of that institution [Tuskegee] that after getting out into the world, I would not forget His goodness to me, but would

15 Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman, 9.

16 “Negroes Eager for Schooling in West Alabama Community,” Christian Science Monitor, April 2, 1912. Arthur W. Mitchell Collection, Chicago Historical Society, (Chicago, IL), Box 1. Hereafter, AM Papers.

endeavor to do all in my power to help poor, worthy, struggling boys and girls… that they, as I have done, will be able to ‘scholarship’ themselves.

After graduation from Snow Hill, Mitchell began a craven path to match, even surpass

Booker T. Washington’s status in black life and national politics.

Mitchell may have transferred from Tuskegee, but he married an alumnus, Eula

Mae King, who was reared in Cusseta, Georgia, or, about fifty miles away from his boyhood home in east Alabama. Mitchell’s educational career began in King’s hometown, but he soon took an administrative role in Greensboro, Alabama, where his wife taught at his side. In 1905, the young couple had their first and only son, Arthur

Wergs Mitchell, Jr. According to his biographer, Mitchell was committed to “tangible and impersonal goals” and “always too self-centered to be an attentive family man.”

The future congressman “sought wealth and fame, not love and devotion.” Mitchell’s marriage – and his son’s birth – did not slow the would-be black leader’s development of failed Tuskegee-modeled institutes. In 1903, the Tuskegee transfer, naively expecting clientage, first wrote to Booker T. Washington. Mitchell was disappointed when he finally received the famed educator’s delayed response. Washington said he would not take a seat on any school board and that any official endorsement would be withheld until Mitchell’s institution proved functional and credible.

In the summer of 1903, Principal Mitchell persisted, without Washington’s support or northern philanthropy, and offered his first (meagerly attended) classes in the fall. The future congressman chose a Tuskegeean name, the West Alabama Normal and Industrial Institute, and he coined a regal school motto, “Bend to the oar tho the tide be against us.” Principal Mitchell echoed Washington’s philosophy, but West Alabama did not replicate the quality of Tuskegee’s education. In 1905, he assured Greensboro

residents that West Alabama Institute devoted “a good deal of our time to the trades… especially agriculture… instead of putting so much stress upon the teaching of higher sciences.” The self-fashioned community leader made an earnest plea to both races in furtherance of his institute, because the fate of white and black southerners was “so interwoven that one cannot be helped without effecting [sic] the other.”17

Mitchell successfully mimicked Tuskegeean messaging, but his rhetoric did not secure much material gain. The principal was quickly bleeding funds and Washington still withheld an endorsement. In 1908, Mitchell’s first West Alabama Institute failed as a result of financial constrains and stagnation in student recruitment. 18 In addition to the absence of Tuskegee-based patronage and northern financing, the institute closed because of the black community’s relative economic strength. In 1910, blacks owned twelve percent of Hale County farms, and nearly half of black farmers remained cash tenants who had not been completely subjugated by the crop-lien system.19 Black farmers, as owners and cash-tenants, could afford to send children to well-established institutions with much better faculty and facilities than anything Mitchell ever provided.20

17 Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman, 9; quotation from Greensboro Record, January 12, 1905.

18 Ibid., 7-9; See Mitchell to Booker T. Washington, June 20 and 30, 1903; and Greensboro Record, January 12, 1905.

19 Hale County, located in west-central Alabama on the Black Belt frontier, was established in 1867. In 1900, blacks operated 75% of all the county’s farms, and 59% did so as cash tenants, not sharecroppers. See UVA Census Browser. This data supports Susan O’Donovan’s case that blacks on the cotton frontier renegotiated the terms of their labor during Reconstruction – even as they were violently subjugated by Jim Crow repression. See O’Donovan, Becoming Free in the Cotton South, 266- 267.

20 Black Alabamians with the means to afford higher education and professional training could send their loved ones to many schools, which included: Alabama State University (1856), Talladega College (1867), Tougaloo College (1869), Alabama Agricultural & Mechanical Institute (1873), and, Tuskegee (1881).

Mitchell closed the institute, resigned from his steady job as principal of

Greensboro’s Tullibody Academy, and moved to Birmingham. Although he lacked formal training, Mitchell entered the real estate business, an experience that proved essential in his family’s financial security. As the “Great Migration of the Talented

Tenth” took flight to northern cities, many black southerners, including Mitchell, traveled from sleepy towns and tenant farms to New South cities. As Steven Hahn notes, black migration to southern cities – sometimes temporary, sometimes permanent – was already a substantial trend by the late-nineteenth century.21 The former principal sought planter patronage and financial opportunities while the masses of his brethren labored in lumber yards, turpentine camps, sawmills, coalmines, and white homes.

Arthur Mitchell formed a business partnership with John A. Rodgers, a white planter from Gainesville, Alabama, less than a year after the Greensboro institute shut its doors. The New South entrepreneurs developed a business model that used the purchase of cheap lands – and the false promise of Tuskegee-style education – to lure black southerners into sharecropping and debt. In Panola, Rodgers purchased eighty acres of prime timberland for sale to local blacks, and he donated a substantial plot to

Principal Mitchell for a new West Alabama Institute. There was no black school in the area at the time; thus, the speculators expected to attract striving parents, or, future tenants of Rodgers’s Fair Oaks Plantation. “Once unsuspecting settlers were on the land and in debt, they would be trapped, unable to leave because of unfavorable credit terms,” Dennis Nordin notes.

21 Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 466.

Panola, located in Sumter County, placed Principal Mitchell’s new Institute in the heart of the Black Belt, an area where three-quarters of the population were chattel slaves on the eve of the Civil War. Sumter County’s slave majority produced a large class of free laborers in the Reconstruction years, seventy-eight percent of the population, who were gradually swept into the new shackles of sharecropping.

Although Sumter County was dominated by tenant farmers, some still possessed a modicum of cash (and independence).22 Rodgers quickly appraised Mitchell as an opportunist who was willing to market sharecropping by cruelly manipulating black parents’ thirst for education. Nordin claims that Mitchell saw “no linkages between education and peonage” in the pair’s business model. However, the future congressman was not an unwitting tool of the white planter’s interests.23

Arthur Mitchell was an eager collaborator in the solidification of the Jim Crow socioeconomic order, a profiteer from (and victim of) racial subjection. Principal Mitchell possessed intimate knowledge of the Tuskegee model and he used his experience to benefit from white control over black education, credit, labor, and lives. The daily routine at the new West Alabama was focused on hard labor, which was sparingly supplemented by reading, writing, and arithmetic. There were fields to plow, plant, and harvest, and much of the institute remained surrounded by profitable forests which needed to be cleared. Mitchell was a virtual oligarch at the profit-driven Panola institute.

The principal scoffed at the negative reactions of indebted parents bound to the land –

22 In 1840, Sumter County’s first reported census, there was a black majority (53%). Moreover, Sumter County was the most populous in Alabama, and only two other counties had more slaves. By 1900, blacks operated 81% of all Sumter County farms, but they only owned 6% of those farms, while 62% worked as cash tenants. When West Alabama Institute opened, the number of share tenants in the county was 14%. See UVA Census Browser.

23 Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressmen, 9.

he answered only to Rodgers, whose chief concern was profit margins, not literacy rates.

In the years before the Rosenwald Fund invested in southern, black education,

Mitchell’s institute was the only black school in northern Sumter County. West

Alabama’s night classes for adult literacy also provided a vital community service. In

1910, West Alabama boasted a three-floor, twenty-five room wooden structure, a chapel, a workshop (for blacksmiths and woodworking), and Mitchell’s principal’s cottage. The agricultural program boasted two mules, a horse, two cows, five hogs, chickens, turkeys, and assorted farm tools.24 Yet, West Alabama’s “agricultural program” was profit-driven for Mitchell and Rodgers, not a concerted attempt to elevate the students’ minds, bodies, and spirits. Years later, Fanoy Little, a former student, remembered Principal Mitchell as a “money man” who “worked the devil out of his students.”25

James Anderson has observed that Jim Crow-era black parents fought tenaciously to provide an education for their children. Since education was the fundamental route to political redress and empowerment, black communities were challenged by both scant state funding and fervent white hostility. Nonetheless, black communities pooled labor and resources to augment public schools; and, when necessary, they organized private facilities and provided informal instruction.

Anderson’s work suggests that southern black parents of means and ambition perceived and opposed Mitchell’s shoddy educational regime. If profitable time was to

24 “The Struggle of the Negro for Self Improvement: The West Alabama Normal Industrial Institute and Its Accomplishments,” Promotional Pamphlet, 1910. AM Papers, Box 1.

25 Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman, 11.

be spent in school – hours of labor that did not supplement the household income – aspiring black parents preferred an education that facilitated class advancement and economic security – not training in aging trades for a journeyman’s life at home.26

Panola blacks discovered Mitchell’s true character, faced debt, and ferociously gossiped about the principal’s private life. Observant neighbors never recalled seeing

Mitchell’s wife in town. False rumors even circulated that Principal Mitchell was locking

Eula Mae inside their home. Despite salacious allegations, their fundamental lack of public affection was obvious. In 1910, a twenty-two-year-old Eula Mae suddenly died of pellagra amidst speculation that Mitchell starved his wife to death. “You know how women are,” an indifferent Mitchell responded to public scorn, “they won’t half eat anyway!” He remarried within a year, but their only son, Wergs, was traumatized by the loss of his mother.27 Local hostility, and the loss of his first wife, only fueled Mitchell’s ambition. In Panola, Principal Mitchell gained the financial footing his Greensboro institute lacked. Most importantly, the future congressman developed a national profile and infiltrated the Tuskegee Machine.

In April 1910, Principal Mitchell wrote to Emmett J. Scott, Booker T.

Washington’s chief assistant, and secured a promotional article in Tuskegee’s monthly publication, Southern Letter. The new institute’s propaganda improved Mitchell’s expertise in Tuskegeean rhetoric and enhanced his self-serving manipulations of racial ideology. Mitchell’s Southern Letter article, an open note to Washington, mythically

26 See Eric Anderson and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., Dangerous Donations: Northern Philanthropy and Southern Black Education, 1902-1930 (Columbia, Mo., 1999); and Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935.

27 Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman, 9-10, quotations on 10, 291. Wergs spent the majority of his adult life estranged from his father and institutionalized in Elgin, Illinois. For correspondence chronicling his mental illness, see AM Papers, Boxes 41, 42, 47, and 68-71.

remarked that West Alabama began with the principal, three pupils, and one teacher in a borrowed church and a log-cabin. Because of John Rodgers, “a very strong and good white man,” West Alabama gained “the cooperation and good will of about all the white and colored people in the neighborhood.”28 Mitchell shrewdly deployed a white planter’s endorsement for his largest audience to date, an effort designed to attract more attention than a standard, humble plea for donations.

John A. Rodgers’s endorsement remarked that the principal, upon acquiring the school grounds, “went into the woods with an axe, and with his own hands felled the trees” for the school’s early log cabin. “Better than his energy and ability,” Rodgers professed, Mitchell “has shown a spirit of morality and good citizenship which has had its effect on his people.”29 The Black Belt planter’s final appeal was a call for national and racial reconciliation. “I am myself an Alabamian,” the white benefactor claimed,

“the descendent of slave owners since the foundation of our government… largely responsible for the Negroes’ presence in America.” Rodgers claimed it was his duty “to help the weak… to put these negroes in the way to earning an honest living, which must come through a training of their hands, their minds and their hearts.”30

Principal Mitchell lacked a degree from Tuskegee, but he acquired vital political, cultural, and financial lessons from Washington’s famed institute; and, he learned from his failure in Greensboro. In addition to Rodgers’ land, money, and endorsement,

Mitchell understood that northern philanthropists and progressives would be financially

28 Open Letter, Arthur Mitchell to Booker T. Washington (March 15, 1915), Southern Letter, April 1910. AM Papers, Box 1.

29 Open Letter, John A. Rodgers, “Donation of the Land to the West Alabama Institute” (March 6, 1910), Southern Letter, April 1910. AM Papers, Box 1.

30 Ibid.

crucial to West Alabama’s future growth. The aspiring black leader resolved not only to infiltrate Tuskegee media, but also to raise his public profile among northern philanthropists with cleverly calculated appeals. Moreover, Mitchell was prepared to lie and obfuscate his way to success. The principal promoted Jim Crow customs and appealed to middle-and-upper class, northern mores of Christian charity and late-

Victorian respectability. Mitchell pleased the patrician sensibilities of Yankees without sacrificing a conciliatory discourse toward Dixie whites – an ideological talent rooted in the traditional concepts of noblesse oblige and southern paternalism. The conniving young principal ultimately previewed both the public savvy and private impropriety that later characterized his role in the rise of Chicago’s Democratic Machine.

Principal Mitchell engaged in a two-prong fundraising approach – northeastern fundraising tours supported by the regular solicitation of local blacks, chiefly personal appearances at black churches and recreational activities hosted on Institute grounds.

In March 1911, Mitchell’s typical use of respectability rhetoric was exemplified before black congregants at Geiger’s A.M.E. Church. “Have your boys stop carrying pistols” the principal exclaimed; instead, “teach them the use of the Bible, song books, newspapers, magazines, plows, shovels, wagons and mules.” “Stop allowing your boys, girls and wives to go to town on Saturdays or any other times unless they have business there,” Mitchell exclaimed, “the white man doesn’t want to give us up.”31 The self-made community leader failed to smooth the sharp edges of middle-class respectability with infrequent baseball games, foot races, literary meetings, and fairs.

31 Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman, 11-13; quotation from Geiger Times, March 23, 1911. Mitchell claimed, southern whites are “our friend… he wants better results from the soil than ignorance and methods of fifty years ago.”

Mitchell never won over the hearts and minds of local blacks because his main priority was personal advancement.32

Southern Letter and local solicitation prepared Mitchell for major fundraising efforts in the Northeast. In the winter of 1910-1911, the Black Belt principal embarked on a tour of churches, YMCAs, and civic clubs in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New

York. Yankees were generous with their donations and effusive in their praise of the visiting educator’s oratorical talents. The future congressman relied on vivid detail and personal experience to rouse audiences, but he also lied about his educational experience and professional record. Arthur Mitchell nonchalantly trumpeted false endorsements with a straight face and sincere voice.33 As the first ghettos developed in neighborhoods like Chicago’s Bronzeville, the southern principal told northern philanthropists exactly what they wished to hear – the “Negro problem” was and would remain a southern plight, so long as they freed their minds, opened their hearts, and reached into their wallets.

Principal Mitchell’s appearance in Palmer, Massachusetts was emblematic of his successful first tour. A large group gathered to hear his initial address, a prelude to further appearances and more contributions from three churches, a YMCA, and a businessmen’s club. New England whites were comforted by Mitchell’s promise “to remain in the South and to encourage others of his race to remain there to help work

32 Handbills, “A Gala Day for the Negroes of West Alabama!,” West Alabama Normal and Industrial Institute, Panola, AL, Feb. 16, 1910, “Big Industrial FAIR For Negroes,” West Alabama Normal and Industrial Institute, Panola, AL, Nov. 5, 1910; “Big Celebration and Farmers Conference at West Alabama Agricultural Institute,” Geiger, AL, Feb. 6, 1914; and “The Fifty-Third Emancipation Celebration of The Negroes of Choctaw County – at the Court House,” Butler, AL, January 1, 1916. AM Papers, Box 1.

33 Nordin , The New Deal’s Black Congressman, 14. Nordin claims that a tactic Mitchell used on several occasions, in court or on the stump, was to reach into his breast pocket while speaking, purporting to reveal a document of immense importance or false endorsements.

out the problems of getting an education and buying homes, living upright lives and making good citizens.”34 For most northern progressives and philanthropists, West

Alabama only existed in Mitchell’s presentation, cleverly pitched as a beacon of racial harmony in an otherwise ominous Cotton Belt. In successive fundraising trips, Mitchell netted more dollars and produced additional invitations for speaking engagements.

Nevertheless, Principal Mitchell walked a Jim Crow-era tight rope. On one hand, his reputation among white elites (north and south) was imperative to West Alabama’s financial future. On the other hand, Mitchell’s close association with white financial interests naturally raised the anxieties of local black tenant farmers.

During West Alabama’s first semester in Panola, Mitchell gained a reputation as aloof when he oversaw timber-clearing and construction projects with an iron fist. The principal’s elitism advanced suspicions about his character that were raised by rumors of neglecting his wife, and her sudden death. Furthermore, Mitchell exaggerated several stereotypes, from idleness to illiteracy, to conciliate resilient white fears that black education was subversive to the southern racial order. Mitchell told white reporters that idleness grew crime and he aimed “to teach the negro to love all honorable work however humble.” The principal believed southern blacks owed whites,

“who have always trusted us… a great debt of gratitude for having been so patient with us in our weakness.”35

Arthur Mitchell callously exploited the modern truth that racial ideology’s utility resides in the fact that perception is reality. He understood that visits to West Alabama

34 Handbill, “Appeal for a Southern School,” 1911. AM Papers, Box 1.

35 Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman, 13; quotation from Geiger Times, Feb. 17, 1910. In the spirit of Tuskegeean racial accommodation, Mitchell assured white Alabamians that black citizens “cannot hope to do anything here without the co-operations of white people.”

by northern contributors could be staged; and, that the intensive field labor in his

“educational” regime could be managed in local, white-dominated media. Mitchell also recognized that professional attire and dignified speech ensured his credentials would never receive close scrutiny (especially from whites with hefty incomes, little concern for racial justice, and even less knowledge of southern black life). Northeastern fundraising trips improved Mitchell’s public speaking skills, honed his talents as a promoter and organizer, and provided the stature necessary to infiltrate the Tuskegee Machine. The striving principal even met his second-wife, Annie Cornelia Harris, while fundraising in her hometown of Watertown, Connecticut.36

In the summer of 1911, Arthur Mitchell organized his most prestigious northern appearance to date, a Sunday fundraiser on June 18 at New York City’s Salem AME

Church. The fundraiser was endorsed by the Tuskegee-subsidized New York Age, and the newspaper’s editor, Fred R. Moore, used his press to print handbills for Mitchell’s event. Roscoe Conklin Simmons, a noted journalist, orator, and Booker T.

Washington’s nephew, spoke on behalf of West Alabama Institute at the Salem fundraiser.37 Principal Mitchell organized not only a mass meeting, but also a Black Belt

36 Ibid., 14; Wedding Announcement. AM Papers, Box 1. Annie Harris, a teacher at Voorhees Industrial School in Denmark, South Carolina, gave speeches and solicited funds with her husband before tying the knot on Aug. 30, 1911. The young couple’s marriage lasted through Mitchell’s congressional career and ended with Annie’s untimely death in 1947.

37 Handbill, “Mass Meeting at the Salem M. E. Church – For the Interests of West Alabama Normal and Industrial Institute,” New York City, June 18, 1911. AM Papers, Box 1. At the height of Washington’s power, the Tuskegee Machine subsidized a number of black newspapers, including the Age, Boston Colored Citizen, and the Washington D.C.-based Colored American. Manning Marable argues that Tuskegee-backed newspaper editors, especially, Moore, “became strong polemical advocates of racial accommodation” and affluent businessmen.” See Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 146. Fred Moore became a key Tuskegee lieutenant in the Big Apple, a beneficiary of the Wizard’s patronage power in the GOP. The Age editor was an eleventh-hour Taft appointee as minister to Liberia, but Moore never took office under southern-born Woodrow Wilson. Washington’s other New York

Improvement Association which sought to raise money and collect material aid for his

Panola school.38 The future congressman also secured the high-profile support of

Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. Powell, a Tuskegee ally, was best known as pastor of

Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, which boasted one of the largest black congregations in the country.39

Northern fundraising trips established Mitchell’s professional credibility among white philanthropists and black professionals, a rising stature that the charlatan principal used to further his infiltration of the Tuskegee Machine. Mitchell did not secure an official endorsement, but the Black Belt educator penetrated Booker T. Washington’s inner-circle of confidants and administrators, which included Robert C. Bedford.

Bedford, a white Congregationalist pastor, was an early Tuskegee supporter when he migrated from Wisconsin to Montgomery, Alabama. The white cleric quickly gained

Washington’s trust as a member of Tuskegee’s Board of Trustees and through his field work as the Institute’s financial agent. In Up from Slavery, Washington honored

Bedford’s service and praised his character. The black leader declared, “In all my relations with him [Bedford] he has seemed to me to approach as nearly to the spirit of the Master [Christ] as almost any man I ever met.”40

lieutenants included Rev. Charles S. Morris, Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., and John B. Nail, father-in- law of NAACP leader, James Weldon Johnson. See Harlan, The Wizard of Tuskegee, 97, 321-24, 406.

38 Mitchell’s biographer claims that the future congressman fiendishly profited from apparel collection drives. The principal allegedly skimmed off the top through garment shops before what was left of much-needed northern aid reached Black Belt youths. See Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman, 15.

39 Handbill, “Mass Meeting at Salem M. E. Church,” Press of the New York Age, June 18, 1911. Rev. F. A. Cullen, pastor of Salem A. M. E. Church served as treasurer of the organization.

40 Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery: An Autobiography (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), 158.

Bedford, who gave eighteen years of valuable service to Washington’s educational mission, possessed Tuskegee’s best interests at heart. Nevertheless,

Reverend Bedford unwittingly supported Principal Mitchell’s shoddy, Tuskegee-modeled offshoot. In 1910, a West Alabama Institute promotional pamphlet, The Struggle of the

Negro for Self-Improvement, featured commentary on Bedford’s visit and his subsequent endorsement. Bedford had “rarely seen a more noble example of self- denial and devotion” than that of Principal Mitchell. The Tuskegee financial agent believed the shady educator’s “example had taken hold of the people,” who appeared motivated “to do better than they have ever done before.” “It will give me the greatest possible pleasure always to speak well of your work and to aid you in every possible way,” Reverend Bedford’s endorsement concluded.41

Despite Bedford’s endorsement, Booker T. Washington withheld public comment and remained privately skeptical about Mitchell’s upstart institute in West Alabama. On

April 3, 1911, Washington confided to former New York City Mayor Seth Low, Chairman of Tuskegee’s Board of Trustees, that Bedford was “a thoroughly good man” who

“straightens out a good many little tangles in communities where he goes, aside from collecting sums of money in the North.” “His weak point,” Washington professed, “is that you cannot depend upon his judgment regarding the condition of a school” because

“he always is inclined to see and report the bright side, leaving [out] the unpleasant things.” Despite Bedford’s gullibility, he was a valued ally who demonstrated a “great

41 Pamphlet, “The Struggle of the Negro for Self Improvement: The West Alabama Normal Industrial Institute and Its Accomplishments,” 1910. AM Papers, Box 1.

ability in getting among Southern white people and helping them to co-operate with

Northern white people and with colored people in school work.”42

Reverend Bedford’s short visit and endorsement furthered a West Alabama that valued profit over students’ academic instruction and pirated their parents’ economic security. The deterioration of Principal Mitchell’s reputation on Rodgers’s Fair Oaks

Plantation accelerated as he reached new heights of professional credibility. Panola blacks made quick, accurate, and negative assessments of Mitchell’s character. In late

1911, the principal’s status plummeted amidst racially tinged incidents at the Jim Crow institute. One altercation involved an armed father who stormed the school with lethal aims to resolve the alleged molestation of his daughter. Mitchell calmed the furious father, but another incident – between a black husband-wife teaching pair and a local white man – proved beyond the calculating educator’s control. A white Panola man’s unsolicited advances on a black instructor produced an exchange of insults, fists, and gunshots that left her chivalrous husband with a flesh wound.43

On October 29, 1911, the main hall of West Alabama Institute burned to the ground and the school’s credibility, along with the principal’s reputation, simmered in the flames. Rumors quickly surfaced that Mitchell was the arsonist, and this speculation is confirmed by the congressman’s biographer. The Panola inferno was the first of three fortuitous fires in which Mitchell claimed insurance money. A refashioned West

Alabama Institute soon met the same fate, and as a retired politician, Mitchell torched a

42 Booker T. Washington to Seth Low, 3 Apr. 1911, in The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol. 11 ed. Louis Harlan and Raymond Smock (Urbana, 1981), 75-76. Hereafter, BTW Papers, Vol. 11.

43 Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman, 15.

barn on his own Virginia estate as part of insurance fraud. 44 In Panola, the potential of racial violence and a declining reputation gave Mitchell strong motives for arson.

Mitchell was further emboldened by newfound national credibility in black and white professional circles, which circumstances at the Panola institute portended to derail.

Two days after the fire, Principal Mitchell released a “Special Appeal” that claimed

$8,000 in property losses and announced an ambitious goal of $10,000 in contributions by January 1, 1912.45

Before the fire, West Alabama had 320 students under the guidance of eight teachers. After the flames, most students were without board and five teachers were temporarily dismissed.” Mitchell believed the “tragic” circumstances made his $10,000 goal feasible by way of five-dollar contributions from two-thousand of the race’s

“friends.” Most importantly, the entrepreneurial principal recruited John H. Pinson of the

Pinson-Geiger Land Corporation. The interracial pair of New South pioneers plotted an improved institute eight-miles south of Panola in the Black Belt town of Geiger.

Pinson’s realty company subdivided idle plantation acreage into a sharecropping community that thrived on the lure of West Alabama Institute – to both attract black tenants and mushroom real estate values. Mitchell’s financial arrangement with Pinson included more than 400 acres for agriculture instruction and the firm support of local white press. The Geiger Times called upon both races to contribute to West Alabama because the institute was “productive of too much good to lay smoldering in ashes.”46

44 Ibid., 16, 21.

45 “A Special Appeal,” Nov. 1, 1911. AM Papers, Box 1.

46 “West Alabama Normal Institute Burns Down – Negro College is Totally Consumed Sunday,” Geiger Times, Nov. 3, 1911. AM Papers, Box 1.

In November 1911, Principal Mitchell used his relationship with Fred Moore’s

Tuskegee-backed New York Age to resurrect West Alabama Institute on white, corporate land. The Age suggested that Sumter County whites, unlike their Deep South neighbors, “expressed themselves as being heartily in favor of advancing the interests of the Negroes.” Moreover, the Age claimed John Pinson possessed pure motives and a “strong belief in the intelligent and progressive among Negroes.” Fred Moore promoted Pinson’s offer of 1,000 acres (valued at $50,000) adjoining Mitchell’s institute and he highlighted the white patrician’s initial pledge of $15,000 for a new school building. According to the New York Age, the generous Alabama planter only made one special request, a cornerstone, which read: “This building donated to the Negro Race by

Pinson and Geiger… who were friends of the Negroes as slaves and who are friends to them as freemen.”47

The Pinson-Geiger Land Corporation’s investors included the owners of the

Geiger Times and the proprietors of the local bank. Principal Mitchell’s incredulity was vital in their effort to claim a fiefdom of black sharecroppers in Sumter County.48 West

Alabama’s new promotional materials boldly asserted that Mitchell acquired thousands of dollars in donations and hundreds of acres to “build up a Negro colony around the school, doing some business and having its own municipal government.”49 During the final weeks of 1911, Principal Mitchell organized a northeastern trip, which was marked by a major fundraiser at St. Mark’s AME Church in New York. Mitchell’s deep ties to

47 “Negro Town Planned,” New York Age, Nov. 1911. AM Papers, Box 1.

48 Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman, 16-17.

49 Promotional Pamphlet, “Negroes Eager for Schooling in West Alabama Community – The Principal’s Story,” Press of the New York Age, 1911. AM Papers, Box 1.

New South investors, access to Yankee philanthropy, and budding credibility with the

Age and northeastern black professionals, raised the stakes for the duplicitous principal.

By any means necessary, the future congressman was determined to gain Booker T.

Washington’s lucrative endorsement for the new and improved institute. On December

15, 1911, two days before the St. Mark’s fundraiser, Principal Mitchell warned

Washington of illicit rumors circulating the northeast, damning accusations that may soil the venerated leader’s reputation among white progressives.50

Mitchell informed Washington that the president’s brother, Horace Taft, and “a large number of the white people of the State of Connecticut,” believed he “drank excessively.” “It has generally been circulated through the North that you are a hard drinker,” a memo attached to Mitchell’s letter read, “at times you would come to the

Manhattan Hotel and get broiling drunk.” “They are sick of Tuskegee and Booker

Washington leadership,” Mitchell exclaimed to the Tuskegee educator, and “the Negro ministers of the North… a large number of them, are using this as capital.” “If my life means anything at all in the way of helping our people I owe that impetus of feeling and inspiration to you,” Mitchell admitted. Washington was a paternal figure when Mitchell, fresh from Black Belt destitution, arrived at Tuskegee. The former pupil and office employee remarked, “I count it as a great pleasure to do or say anything that will in even the remotest way help Mother Tuskegee and help you, whom I esteem as a father.”51

50 Handbill, “Mass Meeting at St. Marks M. E. Church,” Dec. 17, 1911. AM Papers, Box 1.

51 Arthur Mitchell to Booker T. Washington, Dec. 15, 1917. BTW Papers, Vol. 11, 417-418.

Arthur Mitchell’s letter to Washington was both a calculated confession of loyalty and a veiled threat. The future congressman subtlety expressed both his devotion and his ability to profit from an opportunistic trade in salacious rumors. In March 1911, a vicious assault on the streets of New York City made Booker T. Washington’s character a matter of national debate – and grist for the rumor mill among striving black professionals. On Sunday, March 19, Washington was assaulted by Henry Albert

Ulrich, a German-American crook. The immigrant’s barbarity spawned a crippling cycle of speculation, editorials, and legal proceedings that physically traumatized and politically weakened the aging Washington.

Booker T. Washington’s spring weekend in the Big Apple was for business, not pleasure. He met with Fred Moore at the Age’s offices and conferred with Charles W.

Anderson, his most trusted lieutenant in the metropolitan area. On March 19, the black leader spoke at Manhattan’s Mount Olivet Church in the morning, addressed Brooklyn’s

Church of the Pilgrim in the afternoon, and then returned to midtown for an evening meeting with Tuskegee auditor, Daniel C. Smith. A prior letter from Tuskegee secretary, Emmett J. Scott, informed Washington that Smith could be reached at the home of an acquaintance (11½ West 63rd Street). However, after several knocks on the door, the visiting educator heard no response. By nine o’clock, Washington contemplated returning to his room at the Manhattan Hotel, but he milled around the residence hoping to complete his business in the city. “What are you doing here” was the short, unprovoked prelude to a frightening experience for Washington, who was immediately pummeled. The Tuskegee leader evaded Henry Ulrich and fled on foot

toward Carnegie Hall, but he collapsed near Central Park, where white bystanders punched and kicked him.52

Washington, surrounded by a white mob, was spared by the presence of Chester

A. Hagan, a plainclothes police officer, who dispersed the menacing crowd. Hagan detained both men at the nearby 68th Street Police Station, where the German-American concocted a story that disparaged Washington’s character in an effort to evade assault charges. Ulrich, a part-time carpenter and black-market dealer in stolen dogs, argued that Washington was not a victim – the bloody educator was actually a would-be intruder caught in the act. According to Ulrich, a drunken Booker T. Washington not only aimed to burglarize his apartment, but also designed to sexually assault his wife.

The German-American thug did not escape an assault booking, but the Tuskegee leader was charged with attempted burglary. Moreover, months of legal proceedings gave Ulrich a national platform to leverage modern perceptions of black criminality and licentiousness in his defense – the opportunity to frame Washington as bestial and brand himself a (white) hero.53

“As to my drinking,” Washington vehemently declared, “I have never been drunk in my life. Any man who looks at me ought to know that I’m not a drinking man.”54 In fact, Washington was an avowed supporter of prohibition, which he argued was “an intellectual awakening and a moral revolution” rooted in “a deep-seated desire to get rid

52 Willard B. Gatewood, “Booker T. Washington and the Ulrich Affair,” Journal of Negro History, 55 (Jan. 1970): 29-44.

53 Ibid., 29-31.

54 “Booker T. is Confused Regarding Encounter,” Washington Herald, March 22, 1911. BTW Papers, Vol. 11, 16-17.

of whiskey in the interest of both races.”55 Despite Washington’s support for prohibition and professions of innocence, the New York incident ultimately had legs in politics and the press, especially in the Jim Crow South. Virginia’s Lynchburg News admitted that it

“would furnish cause for genuine and profound regret” if the Ulrich attack hindered

Washington’s “usefulness as a conservative influence among negroes.” “But, this doesn’t mean that newspapers should be on the alert to white-wash the man,” argued the Lynchburg News.56

The Atlanta Constitution used the violent episode to expose Yankee hypocrisy.

According to the Constitution, the Ulrich assault “goes to show that human nature is pretty much the same the world over; red blood boils at the same affront – whether real or imaginary – in every part of the civilized world.” Jim Crow demagogues eagerly consumed the controversial assault for devilish designs. Georgia’s Tom Watson argued that the incident revealed Washington’s true character as “a commonplace schoolteacher, an ordinary lecturer, an inferior book-writer and a blundering [racial]

‘masher.’” “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman of South Carolina called Booker T. Washington “a humbug” who was justifiably assaulted because he “made goo-goo eyes” at Mrs. Ulrich.

In Mississippi, the incident provoked a lynching that invigorated James K. Vardman’s racist Senate campaign. The Ulrich assault – and ensuing southern white backlash – inspired black protest in northern communities. Monroe Trotter’s Boston Guardian was frequently critical of the Tuskegee Machine, but the progressive paper affirmed

Washington’s character and decried the ideological foundation of Ulrich’s charges.57

55 Harlan, Booker T. Washington, The Wizard of Tuskegee, 231-232.

56 Lynchburg News, March 21, 1911.

57 Gatewood, “Washington and the Ulrich Affair,” 36.

Furthermore, Tuskegee lieutenants organized mass meetings in black communities grown by the “Great Migration of the Talented Tenth.” In New York,

Charles Anderson organized a major rally that included Fred Moore, Reverdy Ransom,

Christian-Socialist leader of Bethel AME Church, and Adam Clayton Powell, Sr.58 On

March 22, three days after the assault, Reverend Powell privately confessed his loyalty to Washington: “I now wish to further express my absolute and unshaken confidence in your sterling character… to hereby pledge to you my support in your future endeavors as a leader and race builder.” According to Powell, the Ulrich assault would “serve to unite the race as no other single occurrence since Emancipation.”59

White politicians and philanthropists also rose to defend the embattled Tuskegee leader’s character, such as Seth Low, who paid Booker T. Washington’s bail. The former mayor was the first in a prestigious set of northern progressives who praised

Washington’s character and fervently dismissed Ulrich’s baseless charges. “I can never forget your own deep interest and personal kindness to me during this trying ordeal,”

Washington professed to Low, but “it is a matter of the deepest regret that the time and thought of men like yourself and others [which] should be given to the greater cause, should be taken up with matters regarding myself.”60 “I am sure you will sympathize with me in having to undergo the many and awful falsehoods,” Washington wrote in reply to Theodore Roosevelt, an old ally and veteran of public battles with the press.61

Two days after the assault, President William H. Taft personally expressed his hope that

58 Ibid., 36-37.

59 Adam Clayton Powell to Booker T. Washington, March 22, 1911. BTW Papers, Vol. 11, 23.

60 Booker T. Washington to Seth Low, April 19, 1911. BTW Papers, Vol. 11, 110-111.

61 Booker T. Washington to Theodore Roosevelt, April 19, 1911. BTW Papers, Vol. 11, 108.

the Tuskegee leader would “soon recover from the wounds inflicted by insane suspicion or viciousness.” Taft’s letter to Washington affirmed the president’s belief in the educator’s “integrity and morality of character.”62

“It would be a nation’s loss if this untoward incident in anyway impaired your great power for good in the solution of one the most difficult problems before us,” Taft confessed to Washington.63 On March 22, Taft, “full of sorrow over the outrageous attack,” wrote to Andrew Carnegie,” because “now is the time when he [Washington] really needs us.”64 Southern writer, Thomas Dixon, believed Henry Ulrich’s charges were “incredible,” but he was truly disgusted by the fact that President Taft would “rush off a letter to the Negro educator” before the trial – that the Republican chief executive would use “his mighty office to whitewash him [Washington].” The Clansman author mocked the Wizard’s ties to Yankee elites by suggesting that Ulrich, a (German-

American) white man, surely had “some rights in court… a Negro and his friends must respect.”65

Henry Ulrich’s credibility unfolded by the time the controversial assault case reached court. In the weeks after the assault, journalists revealed that the woman who bailed Ulrich out of jail, the purported damsel in distress, was not his wife, but Laura

Page Alvarez, his mistress. Mrs. Ulrich actually resided in New Jersey and was unable to locate her estranged husband before the publicity surrounding the case. On

November 6, 1911, Henry Ulrich’s trial was presided by a panel of three judges in a

62 Gatewood, “Washington and the Ulrich Affair,” 33.

63 Ibid., 33.

64 William Howard Taft to Andrew Carnegie, March 22, 1911. BTW Papers, Vol. 11, 25-26.

65 Gatewood, “Washington and the Ulrich Affair,” 36.

packed Manhattan courtroom. The key witnesses included Washington, Officer Hagan,

Ulrich’s wife, and the defendant’s mistress. Hagan testified that Henry Ulrich’s initial claim was that Washington “was after two young girls who live in the house.” The officer also recounted that Ulrich said he “would have knocked his black head off” if law enforcement had not arrived on the scene. Laura Alvarez told the judges that the iconic black leader “looked me right in the face, and said: Hello, sweetheart.”66

“I have never spoken to a strange woman in all my life,” Booker T. Washington rebutted in testimony. He said, an unprovoked assailant “ran into the hall where I was standing… caught me around the neck and choked me” while screaming, “You were trying to break into this house.” Washington continued:

He kept on striking me with his fists. In warding the blows I think I struck him once. I found he was getting too strong for me and pulled the street door open. He asked for some one to hand him a stick and began to beat me again. I told him not to strike me; that if I was violating the law he should send for an officer. But he kept on striking me.67

Despite Henry Ulrich’s open racism, public criminal history, and private philandering, the judges acquitted him after just five minutes of deliberations. The German-American thug sported a sickening smile as he hurried out of the courtroom toward freedom.

Kelly Miller, Dean of Howard University’s College of Arts & Sciences, argued that

Ulrich’s acquittal “has caused the entire race to put on sackcloth and ashes.” Miller found it unimaginable that Washington transformed overnight “into an insane libertine” who “addressed any woman on the streets of New York in terms of lustful endearment.”

It was utterly fantastic to believe that the Tuskegee leader was caught “peeking through

66 “Dr. Washington, Noted Negro, Fails to Prove Assault,” New York World, Nov. 7, 1911.

67 Ibid.

a keyhole in a cheap apartment house with lascivious intent.” According to Miller, the

Ulrich assault and acquittal were “the most tragic occurrence in our annals since the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.”68

Arthur Mitchell was on a northeastern fundraising tour in the weeks following the

Ulrich assault trial, when he became acquainted with the salacious rumors circulating about Washington. On December 15, 1911, the principal, pressured to deliver for the

Pinson-Geiger Land Corporation, solicited Washington, yet again. However, Mitchell raised the ante this time by preying on the Ulrich affair. Two days before a New York rally, one of his largest fundraisers to date, Principal Mitchell aimed to finally deliver

Booker T. Washington’s endorsement. Mitchell’s letter offered assistance, even fealty, to Washington in his time of need, in exchange for access to the Tuskegee Machine, of course. Mitchell also subtlety threatened the famed black educator by suggesting that some black professionals may use rumors of sex and booze “as capital” with white philanthropists and politicians.69

Arthur Mitchell did not gain Washington’s public support. Yet, the iconic black leader also did not deter Tuskegee allies, white press, and Yankee philanthropists from supporting West Alabama’s reconstruction plans in Geiger. On April 2, 1912, the future congressman’s ascent among progressive reformers was marked by a feature story in the Christian Science Monitor. “In line with the view that the Negro’s own efforts will do most to solve his problems,” the Monitor promoted Mitchell’s life story as the tale of a man “who has made the establishment and development of a school for people of his

68 Kelly Miller, “The Assault on Booker Washington,” Washington Star, Nov. 11, 1911.

69 Arthur Mitchell to Booker T. Washington, Dec. 15, 1917, BTW Papers, Vol. 11, 417-418; Handbill, “Mass Meeting at St. Marks M. E. Church,” Dec. 17, 1911. AM Papers, Box 1.

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race a life work.” The Monitor allowed Mitchell to author his own story for their national audience, which the periodical framed as “a chronicle of gratifying success achieved regardless of frequently discouraging odds.”70

The Monitor feature was an immense promotional opportunity. Mitchell tactically deployed respectability rhetoric, accommodationist discourse, and a regional reconciliation narrative for his largest mainstream audience to date. The Black Belt principal discussed his parents, former slaves, the one-room cabin of his youth, tenant farming in his early teens, and his fervent desire for education. Mitchell purposely omitted the brutal, intimate details of family tragedy, destitution, and Alabama racism.

Furthermore, the future congressman’s discussion of Tuskegee was replete with obfuscation. Mitchell described his “struggle and seeming despair” at Tuskegee, and implied that he was a graduate (by not mentioning his true alma mater, Snow Hill

Institute). The duplicitous principal’s Monitor piece even included a forged endorsement from Washington, allegedly drawn from the Tuskegee leader’s annual report (1910), which read: “I cannot better illustrate the far-reaching value of the work our graduates are doing in building up schools in the rural districts of the South than to refer to West

Alabama Institute, whose example indicates in a large degree the spirit of self-help.”71

Panola blacks discovered Principal Mitchell’s true character – a curriculum that flagrantly subordinated formal instruction for field labor, an institute that traded empowerment for the crop-lien and second-class citizenship. However, Mitchell’s

Monitor feature highlighted black youth’s trained in modern farming methods and

70 “Negroes Eager for Schooling in West Alabama Community,” Christian Science Monitor, April 2, 1912. AM Papers, Box 1.

71 Ibid.

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trumpeted adult literacy night classes. The future congressman’s access to mass media, and his command of it, was crucial in the furtherance of financing sharecropping institutes. “I believe with the best thinkers of the times,” the mercenary principal claimed, “that the commonwealth requires education of the people as a safeguard of order and liberty.” Mitchell told Monitor readers that he was not only fulfilled by his students’ development, but also immensely grateful for “the friendly relation which we have been able to establish between the two races.”72 The Christian Science Monitor became an unwitting pawn of Arthur Mitchell and a public advocate of the Pinson-

Geiger Land Corporation’s sharecropping institute. The entrepreneurial principal also used the Monitor feature in a new promotional pamphlet that was printed by the New

York Age press.73 The Monitor article was the highpoint of a successful fundraising trip across the northeast which netted thousands of dollars in donations. “Meritorious work!,” proclaimed the Boston Herald upon Principal Mitchell’s visit to the Twentieth

Century Club, “his appeal was of unusual interest.”74

In the Alabama Black Belt, the Geiger Times was owned by Pinson’s co- investors, while white journalists in Panola had little incentive to fact-check Mitchell’s background and reputation in the black community. Panola reporters not only claimed that Arthur Mitchell graduated from Tuskegee, but that he did so with “high honors.”

“Thousands of negroes in this section will be benefited,” local whites argued, even if

Mitchell’s institute “don’t do any more than teach them to hold a plow in the ground

72 Ibid.

73 Promotional Pamphlet, “Negroes Eager for Schooling in West Alabama Community – The Principal’s Story,” Press of the New York Age, 1911. AM Papers, Box 1.

74 “Meritorious Work!,” Boston Herald, April 10, 1912. AM Papers, Box 1.

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properly.” Black Belt whites directly linked West Alabama’s vocational education to a stable, bountiful Jim Crow order. As one Panola newspaper explicitly stated, “Give us better farmers, better mechanics, better maids, better cooks, teach the arts of all trades for which we are now dependent upon negro labor in the Black Belt and with our wealth of the world’s greatest soils we have solved the problem.”75

Mitchell presented himself to Black Belt whites as an ambassador of accommodation who could prove “that education along the right lines would not ‘ruin’ the Negro.”76 The future congressman produced a gripping, but dubious origin story for the new institute’s promotional materials. Mitchell claimed it was “unsafe for an educated Negro to spend even one night in this section of West Alabama” before he began his crusade to educate black sharecroppers. Mitchell purported that, four years earlier, a black Alabamian was lynched on what became school property, and his institute subsequently revolutionized local race relations. “Even the white men who constituted a mob and lynched a Negro… are now making small contributions,” West

Alabama’s promotional pamphlet’s alleged to would-be donors. Mitchell marketed the

Black Belt institute as “the only solution of the race problem and the crime of lynching.”77

Arthur Mitchell sold more than black vocational education to Dixie planters, New

South businessmen, and Yankee philanthropists. Instead of a national “Negro

Problem,” the charlatan principal promised racial peace, regional reconciliation, and southern black acquiescence. West Alabama’s new advertisements included a public

75 “Colored Institute to be Rebuilt”, June 12, 1912. AM Papers, Box 1.

76 Advertisement, “White Mob Lynched Negro on Suspicion; Afterwards Converted to Cause of Negro Education,” 1912. AM Papers, Box 1.

77 Ibid.

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letter from W. U. Lavender, Head Overseer for Pinson-Geiger Land Corporation, who was transformed by his experiences with Mitchell’s educational regime. “At first I did not like the idea of educating the negro laborers that would work under my supervision,”

Lavender admitted, because educated blacks “were more or less taken with the ‘big head’ and ‘stuck up.’” However, the corporate overseer “found the reverse to be true” about Mitchell educational model, which made local blacks “more efficient as laborers… better citizens… more law-abiding… moral and religious.”78

Mitchell’s propaganda tapped into Booker T. Washington’s “long effort to merge sectional and racial peace into a single cause of black progress.” As David Blight notes, the Tuskegee Machine represented Washington’s “deep investment in ‘progress’ rhetoric, patriotism, and an accommodationist approach to race relations.”79 Mitchell mastered a Tuskegeean discourse that deferred to southern paternalists and tugged at the heartstrings of northern philanthropists. He was also willing to propagate fictitious endorsements in Washington’s name. In the spring of 1912, the Tuskegee educator grew increasingly suspicious of the rival institute and its all-too ambitious principal.

West Alabama was not only emerging as a competitor for precious northern donations, but also threatened to sully Tuskegee’s reputation though false associations.

Arthur Mitchell was completing a fundraising trip when he learned from a Boston acquaintance that Booker T. Washington dispatched a private detective to investigate unsavory rumors about West Alabama Institute. By the time the principal returned to

Alabama, Washington discovered that Mitchell falsely claimed to be a Tuskegee

78 Advertisement, “White Mob Lynched Negro on Suspicion; Afterwards Converted to Cause of Negro Education,” Open Letter, W.L. Lavender to Arthur Mitchell, Aug. 8, 1912. AM Papers, Box 1.

79 David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 324-325.

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graduate, circulated sham endorsements, and provided an unsatisfactory education.

Washington immediately exacted retribution by advising loyal northern philanthropists to spurn Mitchell’s appeals and spread the truth about West Alabama to their deep- pocketed and warm-hearted white friends.80 Mitchell’s infiltration of the Tuskegee

Machine was essential to the Pinson-Geiger Land Corporation’s business model.

Washington’s action’s portended doom for a principal who had to answer to a widening set of investors and donors. In addition to Pinson’s contribution of 400 acres for a campus, and $15,000 for school facilities, Mitchell also secured $25,000 from northern philanthropists for construction projects and agricultural equipment.81

Washington’s sanctions threatened not only Mitchell’s prospects, but also the profits of white investors, who supported any means to silence the Tuskegee educator.

In the summer of 1912, Washington dispatched a personal emissary to Sumter County to negotiate the end of fraudulent endorsements. However, the Tuskegee diplomat returned with an ultimatum from Mitchell and Geiger’s white boosters – if he did not retreat, or, make a public declaration refuting disparaging remarks about West

Alabama, Washington would suffer the consequences. In a May 1912 letter to William

J. Edwards, his college mentor, Mitchell predicted that “Mr. Washington will be the sufferer.” The principal assured Edwards, a member of West Alabama’s Board of

Trustees, that “we have it within our power to strike him as he perhaps has not been

80 Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman, 17-18.

81 Advertisement, “White Mob Lynched Negro on Suspicion; Afterwards Converted to Cause of Negro Education,” 1912. AM Papers, Box 1. By 1912, West Alabama Institute’s trustees included Rev. Charles F. Dole and Pitt Dillingham of Boston, and Thomas P. Ivy of South Conway, NH, and John. H. Pinson. Mitchell also secured the cooperation of Rev. William T. Holmes of Watertown, CT, and William J. Edwards, his mentor and friend from Snow Hill Institute, as members of the Board of Trustees. See “School for Colored People, The West Alabama Institute – Arthur W. Mitchell Tells of Work for Negroes in the South.” AM Papers, Box 1.

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struck before.” Yet, Arthur Mitchell did not detail his dastardly plot to profit from the

Ulrich assault (and attendant rumors regarding intoxication and sexual impropriety).82

Dennis Nordin argues that Mitchell, a former Tuskegee office employee, “by a mix of cajolery and bribery… coaxed and induced a Tuskegee telegrapher to cooperate in a plot to spy on Washington.” Mitchell’s conspirator gathered several third copies of telegraph messages that Nordin suggests possessed illicit evidence of Washington’s private penchant for whiskey and white mistresses. These incriminating telegrams do not exist today (if they ever did at all) and Washington biographers have not broached the subject of Mitchell’s possible blackmail. According to Nordin, the late Arthur Mitchell did not even discuss the extortion of Booker T. Washington until forty years later, when he revealed the details to his third wife.83 On one hand, it is unlikely any historian will ever uncover a “smoking gun” in a century-old blackmail case. On the other hand, the available evidence provides a firm basis for Washington to fear the consequences of

Mitchell trafficking even fraudulent telegrams, especially after Ulrich’s acquittal.

In June 1912, Mitchell wrote to Edwards that he regretted dealing so harshly with

“Mr. Negro,” but it was a matter of survival. Booker T. Washington soon circulated a revised, positive evaluation of West Alabama and its ambitious principal. There is no proof that Mitchell extorted additional concessions from Washington, but evidence exists that confirms the Tuskegee leader sought the return of stolen messages.

Washington’s secretary, Emmett J. Scott, purported to obtain the missing telegrams, and Mitchell responded:

82 Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman, 18; quotation from Arthur Mitchell to William J. Edwards, May 21, 1912.

83 Ibid., 18, 20.

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I think you must be mistaken when you say you have secured some telegrams that were formerly in my possession. I am quite sure that the bundle referred to was either destroyed or is still in my possession, and I am equally sure that I have seen no others. So you must be mistaken when you say you have secured any that I have seen.

In the summer of 1914, an increasingly ill Washington finally pressed for a full investigation by the Postal Telegraph-Cable Company.84

W. C. Lloyd, the postal company’s district superintendent, interviewed every employee in the Tuskegee office and he discovered no leaks; thus, Mitchell’s conspirator was either no longer an employee, wisely remained silent, or never existed.

Despite his lack of hard evidence, Lloyd concluded “that these telegrams were gotten out of the office in an unscrupulous way through the man Mitchell and we think that he deserves punishment.” The accusations of Washington and Lloyd only strengthened

Mitchell’s denials. In the autumn of 1914, Principal Mitchell wrote to Washington’s secretary:

…the report that I have in my possession copies of telegrams sent out by officers of the Tuskegee Institute is not true. As I remember it there did come to us through the mails several months ago a badily [sic] mutilated package of what appeared to be old copies of telegrams. But as it was absolutely worthless in so far as we could see, no effort was made to preserve it… we have not the slightest idea who sent them or why they should have been sent to us.85

Arthur Mitchell manipulated, lied, and cleverly sold his path into mainstream progressive circles in the North, whether his possession of incriminating telegrams was genuine or purely an effective bluff.

84 Ibid., 18-19; quotations from Arthur Mitchell to William J. Edwards, June 7, 1912; Emmett J. Scott to Mitchell, July 22, 1914; and Mitchell to Scott, July 25, 1914.

85 Ibid., 19-20; For correspondence on the case, see Booker T. Washington-W.C. Lloyd (Postal Telegraph-Cable Company, District Superintendent) exchange, July 22, 24, and 27, Aug. 3, 6, 25, and 27, and Sep. 16, 1914.

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In 1912, the new and improved West Alabama Institute opened on schedule and

Principal Mitchell’s professional credibility grew among Yankee progressives and philanthropists. The Geiger institute consisted of a two-story structure that housed classrooms, dorms, and an auditorium. The student body of around 200 hundred students received rudimentary lessons in basic subjects, but they spent most of their time cultivating cash crops and sustenance items, including cane, alfalfa, peanuts, corn, potatoes, and, of course, cotton. In Geiger, as in Panola, Principal Mitchell stressed plantation labor over educational lessons, which solidified the sharecropping economy and stabilized the Jim Crow social order. Nevertheless, West Alabama impressed

Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of the Nation. In 1913, the patrician co-founder of the

NAACP hosted the institute’s trustees at his New York City office.86

Principal Mitchell’s growing professional credibility was also marked by the endorsement of Reverend William T. Holmes, President of Mississippi’s Tougaloo

College. In 1912, Holmes not only wrote editorials on behalf of West Alabama, but also accepted a trusteeship and made personal appearances in Geiger. On March 7, a

Holmes editorial in the New York Evening Post promoted the rural school, “situated in the heart of the Black Belt, where conditions approximate those of slavery, amid a population about eight-ninths negro.” Holmes promised that Mitchell, against great odds, would “make people self-supporting and prosperous who are now pitifully poor, though living on some of America’s richest soil.”87 “It was my privilege to visit the school last July,” Reverend Holmes assured Post readers, so, “I know of what I speak.”88

86 Ibid., 21-22.

87 William T. Holmes, “Another Worthy Southern School,” New York Evening Post, March 7, 1912.

88 “Dwellers in the Black Belt,” Montclair Times, Aug. 10, 1912.

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On August 10, 1912, Holmes trumpeted Principal Mitchell’s credentials and character in Connecticut’s Montclair Times. The college president’s talks “with white men of all sorts and conditions” confirmed “that Mr. Mitchell commanded unanimously their confidence, their enthusiasm – really, their pride.” “The Institute’s most valuable asset is the personality of its founder and principal,” Reverend Holmes professed, “the blend in him of white and black and Indian bloods” made him “the kind of man you simply can’t down.”89 Holmes was likely unaware that Mitchell’s fair-skinned mother had been sexually abused by her overseer (and was reputedly the progeny of an exploitative master-slave liaison). The college president gave the keynote address at West

Alabama’s opening festivities and returned for events at the conclusion of the Geiger institute’s first academic year. After closing ceremonies, Holmes agreed with Black Belt whites “that the school will grow as it never has before [in] the next year.”90

West Alabama experienced growth until the appearance of the boll weevil and the onset of World War I in Europe – the foreign export of cotton was curtailed, bans on foreign loans were enforced, and the price of the regional cash crop plummeted.91 In

1915, the economic devastation ravaging the Cotton Kingdom reached Sumter County.

However, Arthur Mitchell was more secure than his tenant farming neighbors, and he did not hesitate to demonstrate his financial comfort. Mitchell’s biographer asserts that the principal furthered his reputation for “dapperness and aloofness” by placing himself

89 Ibid.

90 “Negro Institute Closes With Credit,” 1912. AM Papers, Box 1. The graduation ceremonies included, according to white press, “the first time in the history of this [Sumter] county negro students ever attempted the white example on the [debate] platform.” In his two years at Tuskegee, Mitchell was an avid member of the debate club.

91 The number of farms in Sumter County fell from 5,140 to 3,747 between 1900 and 1920, a time when blacks grew to represent 93% of all tenant farmers. See UVA Census Browser.

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“so far above his African American neighbors that equal relationships were impossible.”

The principal purchased a Shetland pony for his son, and he used an elegant buggy, pulled by an exquisite team of horses, for errands in town. In a poverty-stricken region, where black men were lynched for false rumors and loose talk, Mitchell’s ostentatious displays irked poor tenant farmers of both races.92

The future black congressman was “too big for his britches,” as one local white overseer remarked. Nevertheless, Mitchell’s sense of superiority was emboldened by northern fundraising trips, cosmopolitan experiences, and influential contacts. The

Black Belt’s declining economy – and Principal Mitchell’s deteriorating reputation – ensured that the Geiger institute met the same fate as West Alabama in Panola. On

January 13, 1915, at dawn, an inferno engulfed West Alabama Institute’s main building, which was ultimately destroyed. Mitchell, trapped by flames on the second-floor, almost died, but he leaped through a window to safety. The principal arranged temporary boarding with local residents for pupils and staff, but his true focus was an insurance claim on the torched building worth $2,000. The Pinson-Geiger Land Corporation, whose profits decreased with the Cotton Belt economy’s decline, believed they were entitled to the insurance money because the school was on its property. However,

Mitchell also felt entitled to the claim because he paid the premiums.93

Arthur Mitchell fled with the money, sixty miles south, to West Butler, Alabama

(Choctaw County) when John Pinson escalated his demands for the insurance money.

Similar to Panola, there is no direct evidence to confirm arson, but the future

92 Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman, 21.

93 Ibid., 22-23.

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congressman financially benefited from the fire – at a time when the local economy was in decline and his reputation was once again tarnished. Furthermore, Mitchell established a new job in West Butler as principal of Armstrong Agricultural Institute before the Geiger institute was incinerated. In the face of possible ruin, Mitchell’s professional prospects were advanced by another white patron, John McDuffie, who delivered the principal’s position at Armstrong. In 1918, McDuffie, a land speculator and

Alabama politician, was elected to U.S. Congress; but, years earlier, the Bourbon

Democrat cultivated Mitchell’s clientage in Greensboro (Hale County).94

Armstrong Agricultural Institute provided a basic education to children who otherwise might not have received any instruction at all. The school was directed by trustees outside of Mitchell’s direct control, which spared West Butler students the West

Alabama educational model. Armstrong pupils fondly recalled their studies and did not recite tales of drudgery and field labor. Zola May remembered a trip to the principal’s office for a paddling, but she also recalled lessons in arithmetic, weaving, sewing, and cooking. Golden W. Chaney cherished memories of Saturday afternoon baseball games on the West Butler schoolyard. Arthur Mitchell remained at Armstrong

Agricultural Institute until his son’s pony, and the principal’s purchase of an expensive

Packard touring car (allegedly the first black-owned vehicle in the county) provoked the indignation of his white neighbors.95

In 1919, Mitchell gathered his wife and son, packed the notorious automobile full of the family’s possessions, and headed for the nation’s capital, where Congressman

94 Ibid., 24.

95 Ibid., 24.

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McDuffie’s political patronage awaited. The Armstrong principal established temporary residence for his family, but he returned to West Butler for a risky final score – an attempt to convert as much of the school’s assets into cash as possible before resettling in Washington D.C. Legal proceedings with Armstrong’s trustee’s lasted for almost two years, but Arthur Mitchell’s last fraud in the New South netted $10,000, a golden parachute for the American Dream amidst a black exodus to the nation’s capital.96

Before World War I, Principal Mitchell developed a professional profile and lined his pockets by promoting the virtue of vocational institutes that advanced the crop-lien system. The future congressman conspired with white planters, bamboozled Yankee philanthropists, befriended well-intentioned black professionals, and pirated his Cotton

Belt brethren; but, he never expressed remorse. In fact, Mitchell’s life motto reads,

“Look out for yourself. No one else will.” Arthur Mitchell was not responsible for the power of Bourbon Democrats in the Solid South, and the young principal cannot be held accountable for the region’s neglected black schools. The forgotten politician’s unscrupulous escape from the Jim Crow South highlights how post-Reconstruction white supremacy threatened black lives and placed dire constraints on capital accumulation in the Cotton Belt. Oscar DePriest escaped Alabama’s Black Belt as an

Exoduster, but dissatisfaction with Jim Crow bolstered his South Side constituency, numbers that included Mitchell, a merciless political operator who ultimately toppled the

“Tall Sycamore of the Prairies.”

96 Ibid., 26-27. Unlike Mitchell’s previous schemes, Armstrong trustee’s caught Mitchell in the act, fired him and began legal proceedings, which revealed the former principal had acquired deeds to hundred acres around the school. Board Members also legally aimed to recover funds Mitchell pocketed while purporting to fundraise for Armstrong after his termination. On May 9, 1921, Judge Ben D. Turner of Alabama’s First Judicial Circuit ruled in Mitchell’s favor.

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CHAPTER 4 WHITE CITY, BLACK METROPOLIS: VIOLENCE, VICE, & POWER IN THE “ROARING TWENTIES”

In 1929, Congressman Oscar DePriest, the nation’s lone black representative in

Washington, argued “that in 20 years the NAACP has achieved something like a revolution in public sentiment on race relations.”1 In the twenties, the NAACP stabilized its membership and grew in national stature with a legal strategy and lobbying techniques that gave birth to a new era in the black freedom struggle. However, the

NAACP’s Chicago branch was on the margins of South Side popular politics, where

Mayor William Hale Thompson’s Republican regime, Daniel Jackson’s underworld rackets, Robert Abbott’s Defender, Tuskegee auxiliaries, and the “Tall Sycamore of the

Prairies” reigned. The Great Migration catalyzed ghettoization patterns that preceded

World War I, expanded during the European conflict, and solidified amidst the “Roaring

Twenties.” Partisanship, metropolitan capitalism, and organized crime constructed a segregated market and bloc vote on the South Side that paralyzed Black Chicago’s political foundation.

Race Men of varying character, motives, and talents capitalized on the ghettoization process to advance their careers and deepen their pockets - only Oscar

DePriest and Arthur Mitchell traversed the Great Migration frontier from the Cotton Belt to Congress. The political ascent of the New Deal era’s only black congressmen has been ignored by historians of civil rights, cities, and black politics. Recent scholarship on Chicago’s South Side during the twenties and thirties affirms the ability of black

1 Notebook, Feb. 1929. Oscar S. DePriest Papers, Chicago Historical Society, (Chicago, IL), Box 2. Hereafter, OD Papers.

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citizens to harness modern forces for institutional, material, and cultural ends.2

However, ghettoization was a modern form of racial subjection that gripped urban space, mass media, free markets, expanding state services, and growing partisan operations. The hopes black southerners brought with them to the Yankee North slowly bled away during a long “Red Summer” after World War I. White vigilantes violently preserved “community integrity” and “turf” across urban America. Race riots gripped

East St. Louis, Washington, Chicago, and Tulsa, and a criminal underworld ruthlessly ruled vice districts in black ghettos.

Oscar DePriest and Arthur Mitchell built their careers on the manipulation of black bloc votes, steady gamblers, service sector workers, squeezed renters, and machine flunkies – a vulnerable population grown by two great migrations and generations of ghettoization. To deflect from elite privileges, material deprivation, craven business practices, and crooked politics, Race Men of the twenties manipulated the pride of segregated communities and published heroic accounts of their masculine courage in the face of white opposition. Nonetheless, cultural affirmation and political recognition did not pay bills, put meals on the table, open lines of credit, or improve basic city services. The forgotten Chicago congressmen were products of a new form of racial discrimination fit for an industrial nation. Ghettoization was a direct extension of modern forces, such as commodified space, zoning measures, metropolitan bureaucracy, interest-group politics, syndicated journalism, jazz, tommy guns, and narcotics. The emphasis of current scholarship on the resiliency of black Chicagoans to

2 See Davarian Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill, 2007); and Adam Green, Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago (Chicago, 2007).

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master modern forces for cultural affirmation is insightful. Yet, a neglected class of black leaders leveraged modern forces of ghettoization for the aggrandizement of their careers.

Chicago’s ghettoization process produced not only a rigidly segregated

Bronzeville, but also a beloved Black Metropolis that propelled Oscar DePriest to fortune, fame, and Congress. Principal Mitchell’s fraudulent escape from the Jim Crow

South was a prelude to the former educator pirating residential segregation in the nation’s capital. In 1920, Mitchell not only established Mutual Housing Company, but also boasted Congressman John McDuffie’s patronage, and advanced in a mainstream black politics free of Booker T. Washington. Mitchell spent the twenties on the make in

Washington, DePriest colluded and caroused with the Black Metropolis’s elite, and the

NAACP’s Chicago branch was on the margins of South Side politics. The venerated association was co-founded by the Windy City’s leading progressives, but its Bronzeville branch remained peripheral in popular politics when the First Congressional District returned race representation to Capitol Hill. The “Roaring Twenties” was marked by increased racial violence and profitable vice – the socioeconomic forces that emboldened black pride on a South Side where the NAACP’s integrationism and white leadership lacked both popularity and political power.

The NAACP’s crusade for equal justice faced not only southern lynching, disfranchisement, segregation, and sharecropping, but also Jim Crow’s Yankee cousins of restrictive covenants, race riots, menial labor, and machine clientage. The early association mounted an uphill battle on the shifting terrain of New South urbanization and northern industrialization. Yet, the NAACP developed a strategy of legal “test

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cases” and congressional lobbying tactics that ultimately redefined twentieth-century civil rights politics. Patricia Sullivan argues that the NAACP “made few excursions into the South” before World War I, based on the assumption that “southern blacks would be more inclined to follow Booker T. Washington’s program of accommodation rather than engage in the program of civil rights activism.”3 Instead, the Board of Directors focused the association’s resources in densely populated northern cities where black voters – and influential white progressives – exerted political pressure on discriminatory institutions and officeholders. NAACP leaders wisely targeted industrial cities, but the association’s progressive-era integrationism neither inspired loyal Thompson voters, nor penetrated Bronzeville’s deep racial consciousness.4

Chicago progressives, such as Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, Julius

Rosenwald, and Anita McCormick Blaine, were key figures in development of the

NAACP’s early infrastructure, integrationist agenda, and financial security. Windy City reformers and white patricians aimed to spark a neo-abolitionist movement, but they failed to galvanize black activists and voters. The Great Migration concreted a Black

Metropolis – segregated institutions for politics, pleasure, protest, profit, and worship – that marginalized the NAACP’s Chicago branch. According to Christopher Robert

Reed, the local association’s interracial elite avoided protest politics and promoted social equality in a city increasingly defined by segregation. In 1913, the Chicago chapter received an official national charter, but they lacked a permanent secretary and office until 1919. By the summer of 1920, the Board of Directors regarded the branch

3 Patricia Sullivan, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (New York, 2009), 41.

4 Christopher Robert Reed, “Organized Racial Reform in Chicago during the Progressive Era: The Chicago NAACP, 1910-1920,” Michigan Historical Review, 14 (Spring 1988), 75-99.

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as ostensibly dead and even considered revoking their charter. The South Side NAACP survived into the New Deal era, but it ended the twenties without any appreciable increase in its ranks.5

Chicago’s Black Metropolis marginalized the NAACP, but Florida-born James

Weldon Johnson’s steadfast leadership in New York produced new branches that raised the association’s national profile to new heights. In 1915, the NAACP engaged in antilynching demonstrations, defeated the “grandfather clause,” and began litigation in a long fight against restrictive covenants. Furthermore, the NAACP’s nationwide crusade against D. W. Griffith’s racist epic, The Birth of a Nation, sought cultural respect and raised the association’s status in urban black communities. The NAACP protested the film’s release, but they failed to censor its New York City premiere. In April 1915,

Griffith’s racist reconciliation drama was hailed by white audiences and film critics.

However, local authorities in Cleveland, Providence, Denver, Des Moines, and Gary, refused to grant permits to the film. Moreover, Boston, New Haven, San Francisco, St.

Paul, Oakland, and Milwaukee censored objectionable scenes. In Chicago, one of Big

Bill’s first acts in city hall was to refuse a permit for Griffith’s silent-era epic.6 NAACP activism did not inspire Mayor Thompson’s censor of the Hollywood blockbuster– it was a goodwill gesture to the segregated South Side that helped fuel his political career.7

Alderman Oscar DePriest, Edward “The Iron Master” Wright, and Daniel “The

Embalmer” Jackson dominated the Black Metropolis and the NAACP’s power paled in

5 Ibid., 89-93.

6 Sullivan, Lift Every Voice, 48-50.

7 “Thompson Inaugurated: All Nations Hail William Hale Thompson – ‘Birth of Nation’ Will Not Be Shown in Chicago,” Chicago Defender, May 1, 1915, 1.

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comparison to Mayor Thompson’s “Second Ward Syndicate.” Between 1910 and 1920,

Chicago’s black population grew from 44,103 to almost 110,000, an increase of 148 percent that expanded the Black Belt’s conquest of two city wards.8 In the Second and

Third Wards, a long “Red Summer” strengthened racial solidarity, deemphasized class- and-gender-based divisions, and solidified an overall aversion to white interference in community affairs. Furthermore, the Great Migration-era South Side offered a vibrant network of engaging alternatives to NAACP membership – black businesses, media, activist organizations, fraternal associations, women’s clubs, churches, gambling houses, athletic events, dancehalls, and cabarets.

Congressman Oscar DePriest’s financial wealth and political power resulted from urban segregation and vice, factors which accelerated ghettoization and facilitated material deprivation. Nevertheless, the Chicago Defender framed the real estate dealer’s business model as integration and portrayed his routine dispensation of political patronage as magnanimous. Most importantly, racial violence and opposition from white homeowners deflected the attention of Bronzeville voters and journalists from the former alderman’s “blockbusting,” racketeering, and graft. DePriest pioneered South

Side politics, but the Hyde Park Improvement Protective Club (1908) was in the vanguard of grassroots activism among white homeowners.

Before World War I, the Lake Avenue residences (near 55th Street) of domestic workers, hotel employees, and janitors, clustered on Hyde Park’s southeastern border, portended a “Negro Invasion” and spurred white defense of “community integrity.” Hyde

Park homeowners marshaled various tactics to preserve the Cottage Grove Avenue

8 Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake, Black Metropolis: A Study of Life in a Northern City (Chicago, 1993), 348.

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eastern border with the early Black Belt. The Protective Club demanded that blacks were fired and that whites, both native-born citizens and immigrants, be employed in their service-sector positions. Hyde Park homeowners also called for segregated playgrounds and schools near one of the nation’s leading progressive-era universities.

Moreover, the Protective Club implemented a boycott of merchants who sold goods to blacks in white neighborhoods, and developed a committee that purchased the rental property of black “blockbusters.” Hyde Park residents also used vandalism, burglary, physical assaults, arson, and bombings to forward their racist agenda. The Protective

Club maintained its Cottage Grove racial border for nearly a decade when the first waves of the Great Migration arrived, and Hyde Park residents preserved “community integrity” for another forty years.9

In addition to homeowners, white businessmen coordinated a well-financed defense of racialized real estate markets as a historic black exodus reached the city. In

April 1917, the Defender exposed the Chicago Real Estate Board’s efforts to both preserve and profit from segregation in Hyde Park and the South Loop. “Knowing full well the attitude of the white real estate dealers,” the Defender urged black Chicagoans to boycott the Board’s spring meeting; but, it did not advocate mass protest. The

Defender’s call was heeded by most Bronzeville residents, with the exception of Ida B.

Wells and a few allies, who were “hooted by the white women” in attendance.

According to the Defender, the Board recruited Eugene Manns, who knew “little about the real estate business,” and even less about race pride, as a token buyer of transitional properties. “He has, for personal gain,” the Defender charged, “wanted to

9 Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920 (Chicago, 1967), 21- 23.

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bring about this segregation idea because he figures he will be able to get hold of certain flat buildings now occupied by whites and make a few thousand dollars in rent.”10

Eugene Manns unscrupulously colluded with white businessmen and engaged in an unpardonable breach of racial loyalty. “A man that will cause his Race all this trouble… or even attempt to segregate them, for the mere sum of a dollar, needs to be run out of town, and any business house he is connected with should be shunned,” the

Defender editorialized. The Real Estate Board called DePriest’s office several times, and Defender readers delighted when informed that he gave powerful whites “the cold shoulder.” DePriest’s secretary told Bronzeville reporters that the former alderman would continue to honor the race by refusing the Board’s solicitations.11 DePriest’s prominence led black journalists to avoid tarnishing the future congressman’s character, which would add yet another blemish to the race’s perception in White America.

Moreover, Robert Abbott was a capitalist, not a muckraker. The Defender’s investment in the “Tall Sycamore of the Prairies” was culturally affirming for its racially ostracized readership, a myth perceived as more lucrative than exposing DePriest as a ghetto profiteer.

The Defender trumpeted the future congressman as “Oscar DePriest,

Commoner,” a generous patrician whose success set an example for other black citizens, especially Chicago’s growing number of Jim Crow refugees. In 1917,

DePriest’s acquittal on multiple criminal charges was perceived as a righteous

10 “Quit Real Estate Meeting in a Body,” Chicago Defender, April 21, 1917.

11 Ibid.

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vindication after a racist prosecution – it was not viewed as “equal justice” afforded to a

“blockbusting” member of the Bronzeville elite that was denied to most black

Chicagoans. DePriest, unlike Eugene Manns, was “honest in his convictions and not swayed by the jingle of the enemy’s coin.” The “man of the people” was “never too busy to see the little fellow who seeks advice or help,” the Defender professed. The former alderman’s “purse is the first opened to aid some deserving charity.” Politics was “not a profession” for the altruistic entrepreneur, but it was “a means to further the cause that is nearest to his heart – the eternal race issue.”12

Oscar DePriest benefited from every element of ghettoization, which included the notorious Chicago Race Riot (July 1919). On July 27, a black teenager, Eugene

Williams, drowned at the 25th Street beach, a Near South Side area of racial tension and neighborhood transition. The seventeen year old inadvertently swam across the unofficial barrier that segregated Lake Michigan. Williams was subsequently stoned by angry whites, whose flurry of rocks knocked him unconscious. Chicago police patrolled the scene, but they made no arrests. Williams died on the beach, and a white mob grew amidst mounting black tears and frustration. During “Red Summer,” Williams’s death was not unique, but it gave birth to unprecedented racial violence. A pitched racial battle spilled over from the 25th Street beach across the city. White mobs and

Irish gangs, assisted and abetted by police, prowled the streets for five days. Anglo-

Saxons indiscriminately attacked black citizens, who ultimately defended themselves

12 “Oscar DePriest, Commoner,” Chicago Defender, Nov. 20, 1920, 16.

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with lethal force. In the end, Chicago police killed seven black men, while vigilante violence took the lives of fifteen whites and sixteen blacks.13

After the carnage, Republican Governor, Frank Lowden, appointed a commission to assess the race riot’s origins. The commission’s report, The Negro in Chicago, was the product of two years of investigation, but it revealed no novel revelations about urban racism, and it proposed no alternatives to South Side ghettoization. According to

Allan Spear, the report documented “what any casual observer of city life could have seen… a sharply delineated Negro ghetto, separated from the white community by a high, unofficial wall of segregation and discrimination.”14 The DePriest Realty Company was among the beneficiaries of racialized markets that drove racialized violence. Yet, the future congressman, a “Commoner,” emerged as a race hero. The Defender reported that Oscar DePriest, driven by “race pride, loyalty, and devotion,” displayed

“unparalleled bravery and heroism” during the infamous race riot. The “Tall Sycamore of the Prairies” made “trip after trip into the Stock Yards and other places seething with racial violence and brought out Negroes who were marooned” among malevolent whites.15

Arthur Mitchell’s fraudulent escape from the Deep South financed a new life in a nation’s capitol when, four days before Chicago, the district exploded with racial violence. On July 20, 1919, a minor incident on Pennsylvania Avenue precipitated

Washington’s descent into a ten-day carnival of horrors. A marauding mob of white

13 William M. Tuttle, Jr., Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (New York, 1970), 3-10.

14 Spear, Black Chicago, vii.

15 A. N. Fields, “Sidelights on the Chicago Situation During Last Week,” Chicago Defender, Aug. 9, 1919, 1.

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soldiers, sailors, and marines spread from Pennsylvania Avenue and indiscriminately assaulted blacks across the city. The white servicemen hauled black citizens from streetcars and stores, chased them through back alleys, and beat them mercilessly on the streets. Secretary of War Newton D. Baker ordered two-thousand soldiers into the district to restore order, but when the violence finally subsided, six were dead and more than a hundred injured.16

According to William M. Tuttle, lurid tales of bestial black rapists proliferated in local press for weeks before the conflagration. In June and July, white journalists in the district area reported, without substantiating evidence, the sexual assault of seven white women by black men.17 The anxiety of white Washingtonians was tempered by the

Wilson administration’s embrace of Jim Crow segregation, but white fears grew with the city’s changing demographics. During World War I, the district’s black population experienced a sixteen percent increase. By 1920, over 15,000 migrants arrived in

Washington. Arthur Mitchell, a privileged Alabama migrant with political aspirations, profited from ghettoization. Similar to DePriest, Mitchell entered real estate, and he exploited Washington’s speculative, racialized housing market.18

In 1920, Mitchell formed the Mutual Housing Company, which preyed upon the vulnerability of black renters, limited by means, banned by restrictive covenants, and denied access to credit. The Black Belt principal recognized ghetto renters, pressed by racial discrimination, were as trapped as sharecroppers, but shackled to inflated rents

16 Tuttle, Race Riot, 30-31.

17 Ibid., 29.

18 Dennis S. Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman: A Life of Arthur Wergs Mitchell (Columbia, Mo., 1997), 29.

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and drab, poorly maintained residences. Mitchell and Mutual Housing Company did not pioneer the ghettoization process, but the future congressman and shareholders profited from residential segregation as it gripped the southeastern shadows of Capitol

Hill. In November 1920, Mutual opened its first building, the Luray Apartments, a successful investment which facilitated the construction of two more multiple-dwelling complexes in southeast Washington.19

Arthur Mitchell enjoyed a charmed existence as Jim Crow approached its so- called nadir in the twenties. The future congressman effectively manipulated the late

Booker T. Washington, colluded with white planters, befriended Yankee philanthropists, and callously exploited hundreds of earnest, but vulnerable black citizens. Mitchell’s relocation to Washington amidst the Great Migration produced unprecedented opportunities from an old white patron, Congressman John McDuffie. In March 1919, when McDuffie was inaugurated, his patron-client relationship with Mitchell was over fifteen years old. Congressman McDuffie not only orchestrated Arthur Mitchell’s final teaching position in Alabama, but he also secured employment for the former principal and his wife upon the family’s move to the district. Anna Harris Mitchell worked at the

Government Accounting Office, while her husband was employed at the Bureau of

Internal Revenue.20

Black citizens were on the margins of federal employment in the Jim Crow nation’s capital, limited to menial positions, small segregated departments, and barred from managerial positions. However, Congressman McDuffie’s patronage – and

19 Ibid., 32.

20 Ibid., 30, 32.

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Mitchell’s dutiful, token services – raised the former principal’s national professional profile. On September 5, 1919, Arthur Mitchell, who lacked any specific credentials, testified before the House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee. The

Committee was considering a controversial amendment to pending war demobilization legislation, inserted by Chicago Congressman Martin B. Madden. The Illinois representative’s measure aimed to make discrimination in interstate transit, “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” a federal crime.21

Madden, a Thompson ally, represented the Land of Lincoln’s First District, which elected the nation’s only New Deal-era’s only black congressmen, DePriest and

Mitchell. The Yankee congressman’s 1919 amendment was a doomed legislative measure, but it was a powerful gesture of racial goodwill to segregated voters on a

Second Ward grown by the Great Migration. Madden’s calculated showdown with

Southern Democrats drew polarizing lines between the major parties’ interpretations of a nation transformed by industrialization, war, and black migration. Congressman

Madden began the day’s testimony, followed by Arthur Mitchell, and Edwin B.

Henderson, secretary of the NAACP’s branch in Falls Church, Virginia.

Madden’s opening remarks trumpeted the racial liberalism of White Chicago’s

Republican organization for his black constituents and potential southern migrants. The

Illinois representative argued that every man should be able to traverse the entire union

“as he pleases in any coach that he has the money to pay for, provided he is a gentleman and behaves himself, no matter what his color may be.” After they shed blood for democracy abroad, Congressman Madden believed black veterans, their race,

21 Hearings Before the House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee, Sixty-Sixth Congress, First Session, H.R. 4378, Washington, D.C. Sep. 5, 1919.

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and families, had “a right to expect [America] to be sufficiently appreciative” of wartime sacrifices.22 However, the Chicago politician did not discuss the Thompson machine and the development of the South Side ghetto. Instead, the Yankee politician praised black progress, “the most marvelous advance of any people in all time under all circumstances.” “We who are in the majority in this country can afford to be just, after all,” Madden proclaimed to his southern white colleagues, but the Windy City’s tolerance was characterized by segregation, vice, and violence.23

Southern Democrats pounced on the hypocritical divide between Madden’s claims of northern tranquility and the reality of race riots. Congressman Jared Y.

Sanders, former governor of Louisiana, claimed blacks “are treated better in my section of the country” than they were in East St. Louis and Chicago. “Down here were we live,” Sanders retorted, “we think we know something about the Negro race, that they prefer separate accommodations.” “I deny that you understand the negro,” future

House speaker Sam Rayburn professed to his misguided northern colleague. “You want to force the negroes to ride in the cars with the white people when the negroes would rather ride in separate cars than to be mixed up with the white people,” the Texas congressman explained.24

“I favor equal opportunity for every citizen of the United States, under every law of the land,” the Yankee politician responded to Dixie critics, “I think every right accorded to one citizen under the law should be accorded to every other citizen.” The

Chicago congressman did not identify ghettoization as antidemocratic, but he indicted

22 See W.E. B. Du Bois, “Returning Soldiers,” The Crisis, (May 1919), 13.

23 Hearings Before the House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee, Sep. 5, 1919.

24 Ibid.

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southern white supremacy, which portended to “corrupt the pure stream of national life by the enactment of social theories.” Madden’s testimony ultimately scored a rhetorical blow against Jim Crow for his black constituents with the distinction between de jure and de facto segregation in Jim Crow America .25

After Madden, Arthur Mitchell made his Washington debut in a tense city still reeling from race riots. The future occupant of Congressman Madden’s seat proudly touted fourteen years of Tuskegeean labor and interstate travel as an educator of humble Alabama sharecroppers. McDuffie’s patronage, and Madden’s opportunistic hearing, provided a platform for the charlatan principal to refashion himself into a civil servant and black leader – an honest Race Man speaking on behalf of an oppressed people. “A race of people so industrious, even in the face of hate and prejudice” is

“entitled to more consideration than it now receives,” Mitchell testified. The black community did not request an end to the Jim Crow car “as a matter of charity,” he maintained, “but demands this as a right” because “the only way to have equal accommodations is to have the same accommodations for all.”26

Mitchell’s militant rhetoric was tempered by class distinctions. The future congressman argued that respectable blacks should not be subjected to “traveling in the smoker” and he detested “the custom to carry prisoners… in the colored coach.” Yet, he claimed that “the Jim Crow car” was “perhaps the greatest element” driving black masses out of Dixie. Mitchell quoted a Virginia newspaper article that claimed segregated travel “is worse than lynching; lynching occasionally kills one man,” but “the

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid.

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Jim Crow car perpetually tortures ten thousand.” Black journalism was a shrewd insertion by Mitchell, who used an unknown writer’s conscience as his mouthpiece. The article described “only straight-backed seats filled with the dust and grime of neglect,” and black soldiers forced to ride “for three nights and days without change of clothing or a bit of war food… good preparation for trench warfare.” White America would understand the Great Migration if they “could be on this… Jim Crow car, and share for one night the longing of these people to reach… the line that separates Dixie from the rest of creation,” Mitchell quoted. “I know the feeling of colored people,” the budding

Race Man concluded, “there is nothing that humiliates us more than the conditions we encounter” on the Jim Crow car.27

Arthur Mitchell’s testimony was followed by Edwin B. Henderson, secretary of the

NAACP’s branch in nearby Falls Church. “It is almost impossible for any self-respecting colored man” to travel on a Jim Crow car and “maintain the same attitude toward

America and American ideals that another citizen would,” the NAACP leader lamented.

Henderson was a daily passenger on the Washington & Virginia Railway, whose colored waiting rooms lacked fires in the winter, sometimes hosted “cattle, calves, chickens, pigs, and all sorts of livestock,” and were “a lounging place for all the workmen on the road, and all loafers around that part of town.” He testified that “the worst feature” of Jim Crow was “the mental side of it.” As the father of a newborn son

“who would sooner or later have to be told the lessons for not occupying seats that other boys of his age occupied,” the Virginia NAACP official could not articulate his rage and despair. Henderson knew he would inevitably explain to his son the Jim Crow rules

27 Ibid.

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of survival. “Well, I should not like to inform you of the feelings that came over me at that moment,” the proud father confessed, but “this is characteristic of colored men and women, who are beginning to think of these injustices now more than ever before.”28

The NAACP experienced its first years of sustained growth during the Great

Migration, but Arthur Mitchell neither joined the venerated organization, nor supported its objectives. According to his biographer, a striving Mitchell avoided civic organizations “whose courses of action revolved around change through legal challenge, protest, or arrest” because “he did not foresee any promise for personal gain from such associations.”29 Arthur Mitchell was a pragmatist, a man who would benefit alongside white capitalists before suffering for social justice. Edwin Henderson was a veteran NAACP official, whose recent legal challenge to segregation ended not only in defeat, but also with Falls Church whites lynching him in effigy.30 Nevertheless, both

Race Men exploited anticommunism during the First Red Scare. They marshaled the specter of Black Bolshevism rising from the “Negro Problem” to advance their contrasting ambitions.

“Before the war… and our boys went to France, there was little or no interest on the part of the race in Socialism,” Henderson testified. However, the Left’s periodicals and pamphlets were now “placed on sale at the newsstands and are being sent into various communities.” The NAACP official initially triangulated when he was asked to confirm the existence of “any movement to propagandize the Negro race in favor of

Bolshevism.” Henderson pragmatically placed legal equality between Jim Crow tyranny

28 Ibid.

29 Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman, 35.

30 Hearings Before the House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee, Sep. 5, 1919.

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and Marxist revolution. Nonetheless, the civil rights activist identified Harlem Socialists and southern migrants, A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, as the Black Bolsheviks populating white nightmares.31

Owen, a native North Carolinian, and the Florida-born Randolph were Harlem’s foremost black radicals in the World War I era. Their Socialist monthly, the Messenger

(1917), reached almost 35,000 subscriptions during the Great Migration. In the weeks before Congress considered Martin Madden’s civil rights proposal, his colleague, James

F. Byrnes, argued that “the incendiary utterances of would-be negro leaders, circulated through negro newspapers in New York, Boston, and Chicago, are responsible for the racial antagonism” in America. The South Carolina congressman insisted that the

Messenger “appeals for the establishment of a Soviet Government… urges the negro to join the I. W. W., pays tribute to Debs and every other convicted enemy of the

Government.”32 Despite racist flare, Congressman Byrnes’s characterization of

Randolph, Owen, and the Messenger as leftist revolutionaries was accurate. The

Harlem radicals called for a redistribution of wealth and power, not only for black masses denied reparations after slavery, but also self-determination for the colonial world. Nonetheless, Jim Crow and the ghettoization process, not a few dozen Black

Bolsheviks, were responsible for America’s “Red Summer.” “Agitators don’t create unrest, but unrest creates agitators,” the Socialists explained, “there is no power that can break the spirit of the ‘New Negro.’”33

31 Ibid.

32 “Declares Racial Unrest is Due to the Negro Editors,” Wilkes-Barre Times, Aug. 26, 1919, p. 11.

33 Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph, “The South’s Crime,” Washington Bee, Nov. 22, 1919, p. 7.

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Arthur Mitchell did not disclose his views on black Leftists before the House

Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee. However, after his testimony, the duplicitous principal infiltrated the vanguard of the Black Socialism on behalf of

Congressman McDuffie. In late 1919, Mitchell became a member of the unwitting

Messenger editors’ Friends of Negro Freedom (FNF), a short-lived effort to counter

Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).34 By 1920, Mitchell’s infiltration of the struggling FNF was so complete that he was presented as a public spokesman for the Harlem activists at one of their most prestigious appearances. On

June 5, 1920, McDuffie’s black patron introduced Randolph and Owen, candidates for public office in New York City, when the Socialists delivered their first campaign speech,

“The New Emancipation."35

A month later, handbills for an Independence Day rally included W. Calvin Chase of the Washington Bee, J. Finley Wilson of the Washington Eagle, and the esteemed

Arthur W. Mitchell.36 The future congressman successfully infiltrated the FNF, but the loyal client could only report the obvious to McDuffie – a palpable rage and resolute determination existed among a vanguard class of “New Negroes.” Upon Mitchell’s introduction, Randolph and Owen each elaborated an assault on Western capitalism and the American two-party system. “Is there anyone so naïve, credulous and stupid as to believe that Negroes require Bolshevism or I. W. W.’ism to make them a fighting

34 Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman, 31.

35 “The New Emancipation: A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen Deliver Their First Campaign Speech,” Washington Bee, June 12, 1920, p. 1.

36 Handbill, “The New Independence – ALL DAY OUTING ON INDEPDENCE DAY,” 5 July 1920. Arthur W. Mitchell Papers, Chicago Historical Society, (Chicago, IL), Box 1. Hereafter, AM Papers.

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force,” the Messenger editors wondered.37 The past ten months produced “eleven burned, twenty-two shot, and nineteen hung.” The conscientious objectors, briefly detained as seditious subversives, argued that the expansion of Western imperialism – profit motive, not morality – caused the Great War. Despite American promises to save democracy, black migrants in the north faced ghettoization and the “feudalistic and

Bourbon South” would “re-enslave the Negro if possible.”38

A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen suggested “Lynching, Jim Crowism, and segregation go under both the Republican and Democratic administrations,” that partisan competition did not bear upon the reality that “the wages of laborers are low and the profits for capitalists are high.”39 Migration and urban segregation provided educational and political opportunities that catalyzed ideological experimentation and created new spaces for artistic creativity. Nonetheless, A. Philip Randolph’s civil rights politics was forged against concentrated white capital and political power; and, the

Socialist countered the prevailing currents of mainstream black culture, where Oscar

DePriest thrived and Arthur Mitchell schemed.

“Do you know, Mr. Randolph, of any other racial monopoly except that of the

Pullman Company’s employment of colored porters?” Republican Committeeman Perry

W. Howard asked the pioneering labor leader.40 Howard, Mississippi’s so-called “Boss of Black-and-Tan Republicanism,” was a close associate of both DePriest and Mitchell

37 Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph, “The South’s Crime,” Washington Bee, Nov. 22, 1919, p. 7.

38 “The New Emancipation: A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen Deliver Their First Campaign Speech,” Washington Bee (D.C.), June 12, 1920, p. 1.

39 Ibid.

40 Perry W. Howard, “Hon. Perry W. Howard Asks Mr. Randolph a Few Questions,” Chicago World, October 29, 1925, p. 6.

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who believed the Pullman Company was a beacon of black opportunity, not an exploitative employer who profited from segregated service workers. 41 He personally attacked Randolph, red-baited the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), and deemed the black union an enemy of racial progress. The Republican Committeeman, and assistant counsel in the Attorney General’s office, was also a former porter, contracted by the corporation to defame Randolph and discourage the BSCP’s quest for recognition.42 The Defender predicted that the BSCP, which later spawned Randolph’s iconic March on Washington Movement, “will react against the workers in the long run.”

At a 1924 gathering of Tuskegee-based publishers and journalists, Howard and

DePriest gave keynote addresses at a rousing ceremony that not only disparaged the

BSCP, but also “came out as opposed to trade unions,” altogether – a position shared by the Defender.43

George Pullman’s provision of steady employment came with the price of segregation and it was the company’s recognition of Randolph’s union that made porters, as Larry Tye argues, the forerunners of the black middle class.44 Perry

Howard’s praise of Pullman was purchased and unfounded, but the Race Man’s red-

41 Neil R. McMillen, “Perry W. Howard, Boss of Black-and-Tan Republicanism in Mississippi, 1924-1960,” Journal of Southern History, 48 (May 1982): 205-224. Howard’s long road to financial success and political power began in the Mississippi Delta, but he was educated in Jackson, where he matured into a state leader who coordinated the resources and hopes of sharecroppers, domestic workers, and professionals. The lawyer was president of the Mississippi Benefit Life Insurance Company, the national chief counsel for the Negro Elks, trustee of two vocational schools (Utica and Prentiss institutes), and led the state’s National Negro Business League affiliates. In 1921, Howard migrated to the nation’s capitol and left the Magnolia State behind for good. From his D.C. residence, he was Mississippi’s Republican Committeeman for 35 years.

42 Ibid., 214.

43 “National Negro Press Indorses Pres. Coolidge,” Chicago Defender, March 1, 1924, p. 5.

44 See Larry Tye, Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class (New York, 2005).

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baiting of Randolph’s union has been confirmed by recent scholarship. In the Chicago

World, Howard inquired:

Is it not true that Mr. Lovett Fort-Whiteman, who recently returned from Moscow, where he was undergoing training under the inspiration of the Third Internationals, was at one time an Associate Editor of your magazine and that he was interested in this movement?45

The work of Theodore Kornweibel and Glenda Gilmore has demonstrated that Fort-

Whiteman was the early drama editor for Randolph’s Messenger, and after a Moscow education, returned to the United States as a ranking official in the American

Community Party. Nevertheless, the Messenger was nearly extinct and Fort-Whiteman had no direct association with the magazine, or BSCP, when Howard red-baited

Randolph.46

A. Philip Randolph “could not be considered a leader in 1925,” Paula Pfeffer asserts, because “his organizing efforts had failed” and “he lacked a constituency.” In the Depression era, the union man and civil rights legend learned to “play down his

Socialistic beliefs,” embraced political alliances, and swallowed his agnosticism among black ministers and devout activists.47 Randolph was a pioneer of civil rights unionism in the thirties and an architect of postwar civil disobedience.48 Yet, Republican Race

45 Perry W. Howard, “Hon. Perry W. Howard Asks Mr. Randolph a Few Questions,” Chicago World, October 29, 1925, p. 6.

46 See Theodore Kornweibel, No Crystal Stair: Black Life and the Messenger, 1917-1928 (Westport, 1975); and Gilmore, Defying Dixie.

47 Paula Pfeffer, A. Philip Randolph, Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement (Baton Rouge, 1990), 21.

48 See Robert Rodgers Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (Chapel Hill, 2003). Korstad characterizes civil rights unionism as a fusion of NAACP protest politics and CIO industrial organizing in the New Deal-Popular Front era, movements which linked racial and class-based struggles in urban areas. Civil Rights Unionism uses Local 22 of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers (CIO) at the R.J. Reynolds factory in Winston-Salem, North Carolina for an effective case study.

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Men, such as Oscar DePriest and Perry Howard, commanded the admiration of the ambitious black masses before the Roosevelt era. In the “Roaring Twenties,” a striving

Arthur Mitchell not only maintained the patronage of Democratic Congressman John

McDuffie, but he also studied politics and law at Republican Perry Howard’s prestigious

D.C. firm, which included George E. C. Haynes, and James A. Cobb, the only black municipal judge in the country.

Black America shared Perry Howard’s contention that Marxist philosophy was

“foreign to Americanism” and threatened to “empty the church pews, make inane the pulpit, and make of us a group of atheists, communists, and agnostics.”49 Howard’s exhortations reinforced the skepticism of Great Migration-era blacks towards a Left dominated by whites, both native-born and immigrant. Anti-communism and anti-union attitudes were ultimately mainstream opinions in black politics before the Stock Market

Crash. Many Communists were driven underground after the Palmer Raids and active

Reds were gripped by post-Lenin internecine conflict. The Socialist Party pursued working class political revolt, not racial justice. “On the subject of race,” Sally M. Miller argues, “ambivalence if not indifference framed the party’s record despite what at first glance appeared to be uniquely non-racist views for that era.”50

Despite a “Red Scare” and the “Negro Problem,” so-called Black Bolsheviks’ skeletal organizations did not portend a violent revolution of American capitalism. White homeowners and vigilantes, not “New Negroes,” increasingly employed physical force and modern explosives to achieve antidemocratic aims – a ghettoization process that

49 Perry W. Howard, “Hon. Perry W. Howard Asks Mr. Randolph a Few Questions,” Chicago World, October 29, 1925, p. 6.

50 Sally M. Miller, “For White Men Only: The Socialist Party of America and Issues of Gender, Ethnicity, and Race,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 2 (July 2003): 283-302.

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preserved white privilege. “We have reached the point where patience is no longer a virtue,” Oscar DePriest told black ministers after the Chicago Race Riot. Race Men must begin “fighting back as any man should to defend his manhood and home,” the former alderman insisted.51

White violence climaxed alongside the southern black exodus to the Windy City.

Between July 1917 and March 1921, there were 58 racially motivated bombings in

Chicago, which caused property damage over $100,000.52 By “Red Summer,”

Chicago’s swollen Black Belt of residential segregation expanded and threatened Hyde

Park and Kenwood. The Hyde Park Improvement Protective Club maintained

“community integrity” before World War I, and its successor, the Hyde Park and

Kenwood Improvement Association, preserved segregation amidst black migration and

“blockbusting.” In April 1921, Oscar DePriest’s home was bombed by white vigilantes – a warning to stop “integrating” rental flats on the racial border north of Hyde Park and

Kenwood. The front porch of DePriest’s residence was demolished by the powerful explosion, but no one was seriously injured.53

The bomb inflicted minor damage to adjacent dwellings, but the Chicago

Defender estimated that it would cost DePriest at least $4,000 to repair his home. A reward of $5,000 was posted for the arrest and conviction of the perpetrators.54 Oscar

DePriest told Defender reporters that his home was targeted in response to an

51 “Oscar DePriest Talks on Riot Before Ministers,” Chicago Defender, Sep. 20, 1919, p. 15.

52 Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race & Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (Chicago, 1998), 211.

53 “Hunt for DePriest Bombers,” Chicago Defender, April 9, 1921, p. 1.

54 Ibid.

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apartment building (at 37000 Ellis Avenue) where he “rented flats to people without regard to color.” The former alderman was lucky to be alive, but he was not surprised by the attack. DePriest received several warning letters prior to the explosion, which included death threats, which he turned over to the state’s attorney. The Race Man pledged to “fight this thing to the last ditch” as a matter of racial justice, which further deflected attention from his “blockbusting” real estate career.55

The Defender reported that police investigators soon discovered “the dynamiters are recruited from gangs and paid” by white homeowners. In the weeks preceding the explosion of DePriest’s front porch, the alleged bombers took part in the Hyde Park and

Kenwood Improvement Association’s “indignation meetings.” Moreover, it was common knowledge, among both city police and black Chicagoans, that white homeowners contracted violence to sympathetic thugs. To vindicate DePriest, Bronzeville called for the state’s attorney to seize the Hyde Park and Kenwood Improvement Association’s records. Some South Side residents suggested that private black detectives track and trail the association’s leaders. Oscar DePriest predicted that “within a few months… no more bombs will be thrown on the south side,” but the former alderman’s “blockbusting” and underworld ties ensured that violence would grip Black Chicago.56

The legend of the “Tall Sycamore of the Prairies” was emboldened by multiple indictments, the 1919 race riot, and the near decimation of his home. Mayor

Thompson’s crooked regime cost Alderman DePriest a seat at City Hall, but the Race

Man emerged from “Red Summer” a champion of his people during transformative

55 “DePriest Bombers Known; Arrest Near,” Chicago Defender, April 16, 1921, p. 1.

56 Ibid.

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times. “Big Bill” Thompson promised “an open door of hope to everyone within her borders,” but racial violence did not inspire any appreciable changes in city policies.57

Mayor Thompson’s progressive rhetoric soothed the souls of his oppressed constituents, but Big Bill’s Republican machine preyed upon a black bloc vote on the segregated South Side. In 1919, Big Bill was re-elected with 78 percent of the city’s black vote, chiefly citizens concentrated in the three-quarters black Second Ward.58

William Hale Thompson remained the “Second Abraham Lincoln” amidst ghettoization, in part, because the “Tall Sycamore of the Prairies” ascended to new heights as a symbol of racial progress. In the Jim Crow era, Thompson and DePriest provided a paradoxical example of democracy’s resiliency in one of the nation’s most segregated cities.

After World War I, Oscar DePriest had “the odor of machine ‘corruption’ about him and six indictments still hanging over his head.” However, St. Clair Drake and

Horace Cayton assert that the former alderman’s career was reinvigorated by southern migrants – loyal Republican voters – who poured into Chicago.59 In 1919, DePriest organized a non-partisan club, the People’s Movement, both a civic vehicle to salvage his personal reputation and an effort to retain the political loyalty of his former constituents. The People’s Movement, which hosted a literary society, charitable works, visiting speakers, mass meetings, and political rallies, was fueled by DePriest’s ambition, powerful personality, and influential relationships in business, media, and

57 “Thompson Inaugurated: All Nations Hail William Hale Thompson – ‘Birth of Nation’ Will Not Be Shown in Chicago,” Chicago Defender, May 1, 1915, p. 1.

58 Robert M. Lombardo, “The Black Mafia: African-American Organized Crime in Chicago, 1890- 1960,” Crime, Law, & Social Change 38 (2002): 33-65.

59 Cayton and Drake, Black Metropolis, 366.

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government. DePriest used the civic club to engender alliances with politicians seeking the Movement’s endorsement, which meant access to a black bloc vote that could swing close contests for partisan positions and public offices. The People’s Movement grew to several thousand black voters as “Red Summer” drew to a close, which gave new life to the former alderman’s political career.60

In 1920, Oscar DePriest became the Land of Lincoln’s first popularly elected black delegate to the Republican National Convention. The NAACP’s national office considered revoking the moribund Chicago branch’s charter as the “Tall Sycamore of the Prairies” conquered a new plateau in black politics. Political power, not civil rights activism, or community service, was DePriest’s overachieving aim for the People’s

Movement. The future congressman envisioned a personal bloc of disciplined black voters that could facilitate his return to city hall and pressure the Thompson’s machine for greater opportunities. In 1919, the People’s Movement was DePriest’s base for an ill-fated city council campaign, a race in which he challenged Big Bill’s Regular

Republican Organization. DePriest began as an insurgent in the Republican primaries and continued as an independent in the general election. Despite electoral defeat, the movement leader demonstrated an ability to attract black voters independent of

Thompson’s support – an essential factor that shaped his future success.61 Ordinary machine flunkies coerced loyalty, but DePriest became an indispensible ally to white

Republicans because many South Side blacks had genuine faith in his leadership. Yet,

60 Program from a “DePriest Testimonial Celebration,” May 21, 1923. OD Papers, Box 2.

61 Howard Gosnell, Negro Politicians: The Rise of Negro Politicians in Chicago (Chicago, 1967), 175.

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the price Oscar DePriest charged to deliver of black ballots was the advancement his career, not an amelioration of the ghettoization process.

In 1923, the People’s Movement surpassed 6,000 members and purchased its own headquarters on Indiana Avenue at a hefty cost of $25,000. DePriest, a prescient southern migrant, moved the organization from the Second Ward to the Third Ward, where the Great Migration drove a southern expansion of Chicago’s Black Belt.62 In

1920, Edward Wright became Second Ward committeeman, the first black party official to reach that capacity in the city’s history. The “Iron Master” Wright’s success in

DePriest’s old Bronzeville precincts did not deter the historic alderman, who quickly accrued political power and patronage in the Third Ward, the South Side ghetto’s new frontier.63 DePriest moved his political base of operations to the Third Ward, but remained affiliated with Daniel Jackson’s “Second Ward Syndicate.” The Embalmer’s criminal empire was aggrandized by both black migration and prohibition, and his rackets proved essential in Congressman DePriest’s return of race representation to

Capitol Hill.

In the twenties, demographics and racialized markets fueled residential segregation, while prohibition-era vice and graft further distorted the South Side’s political development. Chicago was a “wide open” town before the Volstead Act, its notorious reputation for vice and graft was cemented before Mayor Thompson entered city hall. Nevertheless, Big Bill’s crooked embrace of “wet” politics left the city crippled by violence and corruption. During the roaring decade, Thompson not only continued

62 Program from a “DePriest Testimonial Celebration,” May 21, 1923. OD Papers, Box 2.

63 Ibid., 176.

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his criminal collusion with Daniel Jackson in the Second Ward, but he also provided

“protection” for Alphonse “Scarface” Capone’s notorious Chicago Outfit. By the mid- twenties, the Outfit’s estimated annual income from gambling alone approached $25 million. “Bombings and gang killings were commonplace in political campaigns,” the director of the Chicago Crime Commission later remarked, “vote buying and vote stealing reached amazing proportions.”64

In Thompson’s wide-open city, the Chicago Outfit operated a criminal empire that touched various police departments and every vice industry – contraband booze, prostitution, gambling, and drug trafficking. Furthermore, the Outfit developed extortion schemes that victimized labor unions in construction, entertainment, transportation, and the restaurant industry.65 Al Capone recognized a lucrative black underworld of policy syndicates, entertainment, and vice. Yet, Scarface uncharacteristically chose diplomacy, not brute force, with Bronzeville’s underworld dignitaries. Backroom deals in the Second and Third Wards spared the Italian-American Outfit another front as it battled Irish mobsters on the North Side, led by Dean O’Banion and Bugs Moran. Most importantly, a peace treaty with Capone grew Daniel Jackson’s criminal empire as the

Chicago kingpins underwrote Big Bill Thompson’s crooked regime. Vice proprietors in

Jackson’s South Side syndicate maintained control over “the numbers” and possessed relative autonomy – as long as they bought and sold Capone’s liquor. Black hustlers who violated these terms risked their limbs and lives. Ultimately, illegal booze flowed,

64 Virgil W. Peterson, “Chicago’s Crime Problem,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 35 (May-June 1945): 3-15.

65 Virgil W. Peterson, “Chicago: Shades of Capone,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 347 (May 1963): 30-39; David Witwer, “The Scandal of George Scalise: A Case Study in the Rise of Labor Racketeering in the 1930s,” Journal of Social History, 36 (Summer 2003): 917- 940.

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gambling thrived, and black voters on the South Side formed a bloc vote that cast ballots in historic numbers for the Party of Lincoln.66

In addition to a historic race riot and a protracted bombing campaign, gangland violence was also a staple of the ghettoization process on a South Side where black capital accumulation was stunted by segregated rental markets and limited employment opportunities. On September 10, 1920, a Bronzeville double murder at Dan Jackson’s

Pekin Theatre consecrated Black Chicago’s Jazz Age. Two city detectives, alleged crooked cops, were murdered in front of several witnesses as the Sabbath drifted into the wee hours of a Monday morning.67 According to black journalists, Hershie Miller, “a tough gunman from the Westside,” was the culprit. The material realities of a violent ghettoization process bred gangland violence at the Pekin, a jewel of South Side entertainment. Miller claimed “there was a quarrel about a division of spoils money” among nefarious underworld operators. Only criminals graced the bloodstained scene.

Miller’s contention was substantiated by black journalists who revealed that “the operations of a big illicit whiskey ring” at Jackson’s Pekin was in fact “the cause of the tragedy.” The Chicago Police Department corroborated Miller’s accusations and

66 Lombardo, “The Black Mafia,” 59; Peterson, “Chicago,” 31-32. In Chicago, Al Capone and Johnny Torrio, Italian-Americans and New York City migrants, benefited from the labors of prior mobsters and served the Sicilian Mafia, rooted in the Empire State and Old World. On May 11, 1920, Torrio and Capone orchestrated the assassination of “Big Jim” Colosimo in his own restaurant (2136 S. Wabash Ave.) on the Mafia’s behalf. In return, the Big Apple mobsters inherited Colosimo’s saloons, brothels, gambling houses, and bookmaking rackets. They profited from Colosimo’s ties to the old First Ward Democratic Organization and established new, Republican ties with Big Bill Thompson. Most importantly, the early Outfit ended Big Jim’s unprofitable ban on contraband booze and methamphetamines. The Outfit’s initial headquarters was Capone’s Four Deuces (2222 S. Wabash Ave.), a South Side vice palace with separate floors for a saloon, gambling, a brothel, and office space. From its South Loop-Near North Side turf, which included Illinois’s First District, the Outfit fought Chicago’s infamous gang wars against Irishmen on the North Side. Torrio and Capone ultimately achieved their “American Dream” as South Side migrants who terrorized their enemies and provided coveted, banned booze for the reveling Windy City masses, of all races and ethnicities.

67 “Evil Reaping Its Toll,” Negro Star, Sep. 10, 1920, p. 1.

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discovered that the Pekin Theatre was a million-dollar operation premised on cutting- edge entertainment, racial controversy, crooked cops, and contraband booze.68

The state’s attorney detained four witnesses in the double murder, Walter Tyler, the Pekin’s black manager, “Salome,” a black entertainer, and two white employees,

Lila Kron and Jane Ritter. Walter Tyler denied that a “whiskey ring” operated out of the

Pekin under his management. Furthermore, the three women who witnessed the homicides claimed no knowledge of Miller’s motives. They wisely did not corroborate the existence of organized crime in their workplace. “Graft, politics, and the bawdy charms of women of the underworld played their several parts in the sordid tragedy,” the

Kansas Negro Star reported, “another opportunity is afforded the local press to dilate upon the criminal menaces lurking in the murky places of Chicago’s widely known

‘Black Belt.’”69

After heinous homicides in public view, Chicago police sought prosecutable connections between Mayor Thompson, Louis B. Anderson, his black floor leader at

City Hall, and Pekin operator, Daniel Jackson, a known racketeer. However, the

Second Ward Syndicate’s alliance with the Chicago Outfit, and ties to Thompson’s

Republican regime, ensured that Jackson and DePriest escaped meaningful prosecution.70 Black Chicagoans, especially southern migrants, cherished political recognition and valued their leisure activities. Moralistic attacks on Chicago vice, which often propagated stereotypes of inherent criminality, only emboldened black solidarity on the South Side. White pleas for “law and order” did not inspire a Bronzeville crusade

68 Ibid., 1.

69 Ibid., 1.

70 Ibid., 1.

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for respectability, but stoked a racial pride born of ghettoization. As a result, Jackson made a fortune as DePriest’s constituents expected to gamble a portion of their earnings without fear of jail. They also expected saloons and speakeasies stocked with liquor when they hit the Bronzeville Stroll of cabarets, ballrooms, and dancehalls.

By 1921, the Capone mob operated with impunity. An exposé by the Chicago

Daily News revealed, to no one’s surprise, that gambling houses, brothels, cabarets, and saloons flourished in the Black Belt’s Second and Third Wards. The Daily News specifically identified Daniel Jackson as the “general manager” of black vice, an operation that featured jazz and blues musicians, scantily clad dancers and escorts, whiskey, gin, slots, craps, blackjack, poker, and the famous “numbers.” According to

Robert Lombardo, the Embalmer’s “bagman,” Carter Hayes, collected 40% of the profits to provide “protection” for any illicit enterprise in his criminal dominion. In the early twenties, Jackson’s syndicate amassed an estimated $500,000 in annual gambling and alcohol sales. The Bronzeville undertaker’s criminal enterprises collected nearly

$200,000 of its annual income on the Black Belt’s new frontier, Oscar DePriest’s Third

Ward.71

Newspapers “nor anybody else will ever stop my handbooks from operating,” the

Embalmer told a South Side crowd about the any “crackdown” by White Chicago’s muckrakers. During the Daily News’s investigation, Sam Elliot, a Jackson lieutenant in

DePriest’s Third Ward, was arrested at Lorraine Gardens. Elliot confidently told police on the scene that he “kicked in” $3,200 to Big Bill’s re-election campaign for the expected “kick back” of open bookmaking. The South Side gangster boasted to Daily

71 Lombardo, “The Black Mafia,” 42.

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News reporters that his arresting officers would be transferred “out in the sticks” before a member of Jackson’s syndicate faced serious prosecution. On June 5, 1922, Dan

Jackson opened one of Chicago’s largest gambling houses, while at least a dozen other enterprises paid his mob between forty and fifty percent of their profits.72

In 1923, Mayor Thompson, amidst scandal and criminal investigations, did not seek re-election. Yet, four years later, Al Capone, Dan Jackson, and Oscar DePriest secured Big Bill’s graft-laden return to City Hall.73 During a prohibition-age of vice and violence, the Chicago Defender reported that the annual turnover of the DePriest Realty

Company was more than $225,000. The total value of the future congressman’s real estate holdings was over a million dollars.74 DePriest’s People’s Movement, Realty

Company, and stature in the “Second Ward Syndicate” was aggrandized by the Great

Migration. South Side ghettoization fostered a strident and defensive racial pride that marginalized the NAACP, but provided a blanket of solidarity for DePriest and Jackson as they profited from racketeering and residential segregation. Black Chicagoans did not find it propitious to engage in a moral crusade that highlighted Black Metropolis’s mastery of organized crime and routinization of corruption.

The future congressman shrewdly developed a pragmatic path between the late

Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Machine and the early NAACP to draw attention from his underworld ties. DePriest was not only a steadfast Tuskegee ally, but he also strengthened the NAACP’s languishing Chicago chapter. According to Christopher

72 Ibid., 42.

73 Ibid., 43-44.

74 “Binga State Bank Celebrates its 1st Anniversary Aided Business,” Chicago Defender, Jan. 7, 1922, p. 3.

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Robert Reed, the former alderman tapped into Black Chicago’s tradition of viewing civil rights and self-help as compatible approaches in the pursuit of racial equality.75 The

Chicago NAACP’s doctrinaire integrationism hindered the organization as Tuskegee auxiliaries remained active, boasted prominent Race Men, and Washington’s old machine retained coveted access to Republican patronage and corporate philanthropy.

Oscar DePriest’s ideological flexibility and pragmatism represented a broad consensus as popular black politics came of age. Booker T. Washington died when the first waves of the Great Migration reached Yankee shores, but the Wizard’s national institutions lived on. Washington’s National Afro-American Press Association (NAPA) catalyzed the growth of Robert S. Abbott’s Chicago Defender and backed the Baltimore

Afro-American, Norfolk Journal & Guide, and the Pittsburgh Courier. Moreover, the

Tuskegee Machine subsidized Boston’s Colored Citizen, the Colored American in

Washington, D.C., and the New York Age, which unwittingly supported Arthur Mitchell’s fraudulent escape from Alabama. These newspapers, whose editors congregated in the NAPA, produce a dense communication network for a black politics in a transformative era.76 In 1919, Tuskegee graduate, Claude Barnett, founded the

Chicago-based Associated Negro Press (ANP), which distributed syndicated news between big city ghettos to Cotton Belt towns. The ANP was integral in the development of national black media, which propelled its Florida-born founder into a

75 Reed, “Organized Racial Reform in Chicago during the Progressive Era,” 88.

76 Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 146.

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prominent position as publicity director for the Colored Division of the Republican

National Committee.77

According to Manning Marable, from 1900 to 1915, the National Negro Business

League (NNBL) was the chief vehicle of Booker T. Washington’s power. The NNBL, and its local affiliates in northern and southern cities, linked Black America’s few aristocrats in an era of Jim Crow and ghettoization.78 In 1915, months before his death, the famed black leader addressed the NNBL’s annual convention. Washington told a

Boston audience of black businessmen:

…I hold that there is no hope for us as a race except we learn to apply our education in a practical manner to the resources of our country… no mere education will help a race except that education be applied to the natural resources and interchange of commodities as represented in such departments of life as farming and business. An ounce of application is worth a ton of abstraction.79

The Tuskegee educator conceived of the NNBL as a vehicle for successful businessmen to exchange knowledge and distill financial wisdom to young entrepreneurs. Furthermore, Washington used the NNBL to facilitate capital accumulation for black business ventures, such as cooperative farms, grocery stores, and urban apartment buildings. In 1900, only 300 black capitalists attended the NNBL’s inaugural conference, but the NNBL grew considerably in influence and numbers during

Washington’s life.80 T. Thomas Fortune, the first chairman of the NNBL’s Executive

Committee, made an important contribution to the league’s growth. Fortune, the first

77 See Lawrence D. Hogan, A Black National News Service: The Associated Negro Press and Claude Barnett, 1919-1945 (Madison, Nj., 1984).

78 Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, 145.

79 “Report of the Survey of Negro Business,” 1929, Claude A. Barnett Papers, Chicago Historical Society (Chicago, IL), Box 277.

80 Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, 145.

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editor of the New York Age, co-founder of the Afro-American Council, and a member of the Niagara Movement, contributed to the NNBL’s reach in activist circles beyond the

Tuskegee Machine’s tentacles.81

In 1901, Oscar DePriest joined Bronzeville’s leading Race Men at the NNBL’s second convention, when the South Side’s elite formed a local auxiliary, the Associated

Business Club (ABC).82 The ABC’s early leaders included not only Alderman DePriest, but also Robert Abbott, who edited the most circulated black newspaper in the Midwest.

In the twenties, the Defender founder endorsed the NAACP while serving as ABC president. Jesse Binga, a Bronzeville real estate tycoon, served as ABC secretary.

Before the Great Migration, he possessed a long-term lease on a large group of storefront apartments, known as the “Binga Block” (on the west side of State Street between 47th and 48th Streets). Carl R. Osthaus argues that “No person did more” than

Jesse Binga “to develop Chicago’s South Side in the 1920s.” “To the extent that there was a thriving, separate black metropolis,” the ABC secretary “was a founding father.”83

Jesse Binga claimed to arrive in Chicago before the World’s Fair (1893) with just ten dollars and dream. In 1896, the striving entrepreneur opened a Bronzeville real estate office (3331 South State Street), which blossomed as Jim Crow and World War I produced an exodus of black southerners. During the “Roaring Twenties,” Binga owned

1,200 leaseholds on flats and residences. The ABC secretary possessed more frontage

81 Booker T. Washington, The Negro in Business (New York, 1907), 1-4.

82 Spear, Black Chicago, 86-87.

83 Carl R. Osthaus, “The Rise and Fall of Jesse Binga, Black Financier,” Journal of Negro History, 58 (Jan.1973): 39-60.

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on State Street – south of 12th Street – than any other real estate dealer.84 Similar to

DePriest, Binga willingly profited from “blockbusting” real estate methods. “Lots of people criticize me,” Binga confessed, “They don’t like my methods and they offer me suggestions.” “I always tell them, Jesse Binga knows what he is doing and he’s doing it like Jesse Binga wants it done,” he explained.85 “If the Colored real estate dealers did not charge the rent required by the owner,” another black capitalist candidly admitted,

“there would be found plenty of white agents who would.”86

Despite their financial interests in South Side ghettoization, Oscar DePriest and

Jesse Binga were perceived as Bronzeville patricians. In 1913, the two real estate dealers led a successful campaign for a monument in Glenwood Cemetery that honored

“the race heroes of the Civil War, their widows and their dependents and their loved ones.” The monument, a heartfelt token donated by ambassadors of ghettoization,

“may go down in history as a mark of pride and a token of respect for those who gave their lives for God and country,” the Defender remarked.87 After the Tulsa Race Riot, the Defender praised impressive $25 donations by Oscar DePriest and Daniel Jackson to a local relief committee. The politician and racketeer did not match the generosity of

Jesse Binga and Mayor Thompson, who made $100 contributions to salvage

Greenwood, or “Black Wall Street.”88 In the summer of 1921, bloodthirsty vigilantes and

84 Ibid., 42-43.

85 Christopher Robert Reed, The Rise of Chicago’s Black Metropolis, 1920-29 (Urbana, 2011), 42.

86 Thomas Lee Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto: Immigrants, Blacks, and Reformers in Chicago, 1880-1920, (Austin, 1991), 152.

87 “To Honor Soldier Dead,” Chicago Defender, May 3, 1913, p. 1.

88 “Chicagoans Raise Over $1,000 for Riot Victims,” Chicago Defender, June 11, 1921, p. 2.

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national guardsmen decimated Tulsa’s black community. The white mob’s torturous tally was between 35 and 50 innocent lives lost and property damages over $1.5 million.89 Ida B. Wells’s Tulsa Relief Committee raised $1,200 and organized a

“mammoth meeting” at the Eight Regiment Army within a week of the racial pogrom.90

Jesse Binga and Oscar DePriest were privileged children of Reconstruction era, but they were framed as self-made pioneers in black press. In 1865, Jesse Binga was born to free black parents who maximized their opportunity to accumulate capital in the

“free labor” North. Binga’s father owned a Detroit-area barbershop, but his mother was the family’s true entrepreneur. She operated a row of tenement houses, the first “Binga block,” and was among the first to ship whitefish and sweet potatoes for southern sale.

Nonetheless, the prodigal son fled economic security for the frontier. Binga found gainful employment as a Pullman Porter on a line between Utah, Montana, and Idaho, where he purchased 20 lots of land that financed his migration to Chicago and swift success in real estate.91 The Horatio Alger stories of both Jesse Binga and Oscar

DePriest involve violent feuds with white real estate dealers, homeowners’ organizations, and vigilantes. Binga’s lavish residence in a white community near Hyde

Park (5922 South Park), was bombed four times by the time DePriest’s home was targeted. By the end of the decade, Binga’s home was bombed over a half-dozen times.92

89 Sullivan, Lift Every Voice, 101.

90 “Chicagoans Raise Over $1,000 for Riot Victims,” Chicago Defender, June 11, 1921, p. 2.

91 Osthaus, “The Rise and Fall of Jesse Binga,” 40-41.

92 Spear, Black Chicago, 211.

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The vitriol of white homeowners, and the dynamite of their henchmen, only grew the stature of the Race Men. The violence Oscar DePriest and Jesse Binga faced, and their persistence despite threats, gained the respect of Black Chicago. Nevertheless,

DePriest and Binga profited from both “blockbusting” and underworld ties – the former facilitated racketeering for political gain, while the latter used “dirty” money to capitalize his business empire. In the twenties, DePriest’s wealth boomed, evidenced by a collection of stocks and bonds that included sizable investments in U. S. Agency

Company, A. E. Barlow, Inc., Middle West Utilities, Central Gas, and 53 shares of Binga

State Bank.93 It was an open secret that a substantial portion of Binga’s initial capital was a wedding present from John “Mushmouth” Johnson upon his union with the crime boss’s sister. In 1921, Jesse Binga used his “dirty” dowry, “blockbusting” income, and business league connections, such as co-investors DePriest and Robert Abbott, to establish a Bronzeville bank for families and entrepreneurs denied credit by white financiers.94

In August 1924, Abbott, Binga, and DePriest, the new head of the Third Ward

Republican Organization, hosted a banquet of esteemed NNBL officers at the

Vincennes Hotel. ABC President Abbott told local and visiting NNBL members that they were “men as determined as the Pilgrim fathers when they made their landing on the

New England coast.” “Visit our stores and business houses and see how they are conducted,” Abbott insisted, “you will find all first class business men carrying on… in a high class manner.” By the mid-twenties, the ABC grew to 500 members with interests

93 List of Stocks. OD Papers, Box 2. In addition to his investment in Binga State Bank, DePriest possessed 77 ½ shares of United States Agency Company, 40 shares of A. E. Barlow, 27 shares of Lincoln Bank, 25 shares of Central Gas, and 100 shares of Middle West Utilities.

94 Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes, 47; Cayton and Drake, Black Metropolis, 82.

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in real estate, medicine, journalism, agriculture, retail, law, barbershops, groceries, and insurance.95 Black America’s leading corporate titans, Frank L. Gillespie and C. C.

Spaulding, were high-profile attendees at the Windy City banquet. Gillespie’s Supreme

Liberty Life Insurance Company and Spaulding’s North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance

Company were the largest black corporations before World War II.96

C. C. Spaulding’s career of activism and capitalism traversed Tuskegee auxiliaries, the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, NAACP, Urban League, and the

Southern Regional Council – a pragmatic path of New South accommodation in the post-Washington-era of black politics. Frank Gillespie held leadership roles in the

NNBL during the interwar years, while his company both turned profits and produced a new generation of civil rights leaders. Truman Gibson was a longtime president of

Liberty Life, while his son, Truman Gibson, Jr., worked his way up from the company’s offices to Roosevelt’s “Black Cabinet” as an official in the War Department.97 Liberty

Life’s Executive Board included two important members of black media, Claude Barnett of the ANP, and Joseph Bibb, co-founder of the Chicago Whip and well-known architect of Chicago’s “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaign. Bibb’s Whip co-founder, A.

C. MacNeal became Depression-era secretary of the NAACP’s Chicago Branch, where

95 Ethel Minor Gavin, “Business League Officers Welcomed at Huge Banquet, Chicago Defender, Aug. 23, 1924, 2.

96 See Walter B. Weare, Black Business in the New South: A Social History of North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company (Urbana, 1973); and Robert C. Puth, “Supreme Life: The History of a Negro Life Insurance Company, 1919-1962,” Business History Review, 43 (Spring 1969): 1-20.

97 Ebony, Nov. 1955. C. C. Spaulding Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Box 7. Hereafter, CS Papers. On Gibson’s time in the War Department, see Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff’s “Variety of Servicemen: The ‘Jubilee’ Show and the Paradox of Racializing Radio during World War II,” American Quarterly, 56 (Dec. 2004): 945-973, and “Constructing G.I. Joe Louis: Cultural Solutions to the ‘Negro Problem’ during World War II,” Journal of American History, 89 (Dec. 2002): 958-983.

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he coordinated the national office’s lobbying tactics. The Whip folded in the mid-thirties, but Joe Bibb wrote a regular column in the Pittsburgh Courier, served as the newspaper’s Chicago distributor, and spread the “Double V” campaign on the South

Side.98

Earl Dickerson spent the twenties as an embattled black Democrat on the

Republican South Side. However, the longtime Liberty Life counsel held local and national leadership positions in the NAACP, was first black Democrat elected to the

Chicago City Council (1939), and served on Roosevelt’s Fair Employment Practices

Committee (1941). Furthermore, Dickerson’s dogged litigation against restrictive covenants produced the NAACP’s landmark victory in the Hansberry v. Lee (1940) case. The decision, famously dramatized by Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, was a key precedent in the final defeat of restrictive covenants in the Shelley v.

Kraemer (1948) case.99 The Great Depression and New Deal, which forever ousted

Chicago Republicans, precipitated Earl Dickerson’s ascent in politics and civil rights activism – and his rise to the presidency of Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company.100

However, another global conflict and a larger great migration expanded DePriest’s era of ghettoization south (later, west) for the rest of the twentieth century.

98 Spear, Black Chicago, 98; Reed, The Rise of Chicago’s Black Metropolis, 94; Provident Phalanx, July 1946; and “Joseph Bibb, 1st Negro In State Cabinet, Dies,” Chicago Sun Times, Dec. 7, 1966, in Joseph D. Bibb Papers, Chicago Historical Society, (Chicago, IL), Box 1.

99 On Dickerson, see Robert J. Blakely and Marcus Shepard, Earl Dickerson: A Voice for Freedom and Equality (Chicago, 2006); and, Kenneth W. Mack “Bringing the Law Back into the History of the Civil Rights Movement,” Law and History Review, 27 (Fall 2009): 657-669; and “Law and Mass Politics in the Making of the Civil Rights Lawyer, 1931-1941,” Journal of American History, 93 (June 2006): 37-62.

100 “Supreme Liberty Marks Company’s 35th Birthday,” Richmond Afro-American, Aug. 25, 1956. CS Papers, Box 7.

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Oscar DePriest’s ties to the NNBL and NAPA facilitated relationships with the nation’s leading black capitalists, most influential politicians, and important civil rights activists. In February 1924, Oscar DePriest was a keynote speaker at the NAPA’s twenty-fifth annual meeting in Nashville, where he contributed $250 to develop the

Tuskegee auxiliary’s Capitol Hill office. The convention also honored local NNBL member, Robert Reed Church, widely recognized as the first black millionaire. “I hope your organization will devote itself to the promotion of high purposes and be guided by practical ideals, as it has in the past,” read a telegram from President Calvin Coolidge, a beneficiary of “lily-white” southern votes who dared not attend the black convention. In addition to Oscar DePriest’s remarks, Perry W. Howard, Pullman propagandist and

Arthur Mitchell’s legal mentor, gave the other keynote address at the NAPA’s Nashville convention.101 The Mississippi-born Republican committeeman, Warren G. Harding’s first black appointment, was identified as, the was “the “highest paid negro” in government service.102

In Washington, Mitchell chased down his childhood dream to study the law.

Similar to the majority of his peers, he did not receive formal training at a major university, but sufficed on independent study and apprenticeships. The former principal enrolled in correspondence classes at Chicago’s Blackstone School of Law, but supplemented his studies with an apprenticeship at Perry Howard’s prestigious D.C. firm. Howard not only prepared Mitchell for the bar, he also taught the political aspirant new lessons about urban politics and partisan service. In 1927, Mitchell gained

101 “National Negro Press Indorses Pres. Coolidge,” Chicago Defender, March 1, 1924, p. 5.

102 Neil R. McMillen, “Perry W. Howard, Boss of Black-and-Tan Republicanism in Mississippi, 1924-1960,” Journal of Southern History, 48 (May 1982): 205-224.

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admission to both the Illinois and D. C. bars, which provided a crucial layer of credibility for his path to Congress. The Great Depression realigned black partisanship, but Perry

Howard and his protégé remained lifelong friends as ghettoization spread its tentacles across the country.103

Attorney Arthur Mitchell never found the social stature or financial success he imagined as a tenant-farming Black Belt youth. On one hand, racial discrimination limited Mitchell’s client pool. On the other hand, Mitchell’s strict denial of controversial clients and civil rights cases truly limited his future prospects as a practicing lawyer.

Nonetheless, his biographer argues that “the ten-year period from 1919 to 1928” was critical for the future congressman’s financial security, professional development, and political prospects. By mid-decade, Mitchell’s Mutual Housing Company managed three apartment buildings south of the Anacostia River, where they prospered from district- area ghettoization until the 1960s. Despite his growing professional prospects, the former principal did not abandon fraud when he resettled in the nation’s capital. Mitchell duped Mutual shareholders and used company assets for personal side ventures. In particular, he used rent money as capital for loan-sharking amidst segregated residents who faced discriminatory credit lenders and possessed little, if any, collateral. The public record, and the congressman’s manuscript collection, reveals that Arthur Mitchell never expressed shame. He never regretted exploiting sharecroppers, inflating rents, cheating stockholders, or loan-sharking away the meager wages of his black neighbors.104

103 Ibid., 33.

104 Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman, 32-33.

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Phi Beta Sigma, a black fraternity founded at Howard University in 1914, was the engine of Arthur Mitchell’s social mobility and political professionalization – the future congressman’s maturation into a Race Man that could reasonably challenge Oscar

DePriest, “The Tall Sycamore of the Prairies.” Mitchell was president of Phi Beta Sigma for nine years and resigned as the congressmen-elect of Illinois’s First District in 1934.

Fraternity brothers linked Mitchell to the Tuskegee Machine’s new hierarchy, most importantly, Washington’s successor, Robert Russa Moton, and Albion L. Holsey, secretary of both the Institute and NNBL. Mitchell moved from political obscurity to partisan recognition with Moton’s Republican patronage. During Herbert Hoover’s 1928 campaign, Moton’s beneficence produced a Chicago assignment on behalf of the

Republican National Committee that ultimately positioned the Alabama educator at the rise of Roosevelt-era civil rights politics.105

Arthur Mitchell ignored the NAACP in the Great Migration era. His closest contact with the venerated association was sharing a platform with Elmer Henderson during congressional testimony in 1919. Later, Congressman Mitchell, a client of Solid

South representatives and token of Chicago’s Democratic machine, admonished the

NAACP. However, Congressman Oscar DePriest lent his support to the Windy City’s struggling Chicago branch. He annexed its moral credibility to advance his broadening political ambitions and to distract attention from the Thompson-Jackson syndicate with progressive rhetoric and contributions to civil rights’ coffers. By the mid-twenties, the

Great Migration grew the South Side’s boundaries and black population, but the

NAACP’s membership rolls remained stagnant. In 1926, the association’s national

105 Ibid., 35-36.

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leaders decided to hold the annual convention in Chicago, an attempt to invigorate the local branch. In a Black Metropolis fueled by race pride – not activist integrationism – the NAACP’s strategy to save the branch nearly backfired.

Dr. Herbert A. Turner, a noted surgeon and president of the Bronzeville branch regretted to inform Defender reporters “that Chicago has not yet developed the real enthusiasm that we had hoped before this time.” As the convention approached,

Turner’s spirits, and the chapter’s prospects, were boosted by Oscar DePriest, who lent reputation, contacts, and money, as head of the convention’s Citizens Committee.106

DePriest, a proud participant in Tuskegee auxiliaries, displayed his commitment to full citizenship by making a $1,000 contribution to the NAACP, which purchased a lifetime membership.107 DePriest’s role on the Citizens Committee saved the NAACP an embarrassing turnout in a city where black capitalism and political power was soaring to new heights. The Race Man’s congressional secretary, Morris Lewis, was a ranking official in the Chicago branch. According to Christopher Robert Reed, Lewis “provided a counterweight to the slow and cautious organizational approach” of the branch’s white president, Harold L. Ickes.108

The thousand dollars DePriest spent for his lifetime membership in the NAACP purchased a new layer of credibility as his political career remained dependent upon the vice and machine politics that gripped his ghetto constituents. During Mayor

Thompson’s interregnum (1923-1927), the former alderman, head of the Republican

Party’s Third Ward Organization, maintained illicit ties with Daniel Jackson’s profitable

106 “Chicago All Set for Big Convention,” Chicago Defender, June 12, 1926, p. 2.

107 Reed, The Rise of Chicago’s Black Metropolis,165.

108 Ibid., 173.

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Second Ward Syndicate. “Decent” William E. Dever was personally “wet,” but the new mayor was committed to law and order. Dever pledged to wage a war against the dastardly forces that perverted democracy in Big Bill’s wide open city. The Democratic administration’s prosecution of the Volstead Act only increased the profitability of bootleg booze, which catalyzed gangland violence to defend urban space and clientele, or “turf.” From 1923 to 1927, organized criminals with modern weapons, from machine guns to grenades, engaged in a protracted war over turf, pride, and city hall.109

Capone’s accommodation with South Side rackets ensured that the Outfit did not have to fight a two front conflict during Chicago’s prohibition-era mob wars, largely fought between Italian and Irish gangsters. Yet, Capone and Jackson suffered lost revenue under the city’s most Mayor Dever’s brief wave of failed reform. In Thompson’s absence, Jackson supported Dever’s campaign, but only under false assurances from vote-seeking Democrats that his crime syndicate would be spared from the new mayor’s moral crusade. In 1927, the Embalmer and Scarface decided not only to remove

William Dever from office, but also returned Big Bill Thompson to his rightful position as city leader. North Side gangster, “Bugs” Moran, gave the Thompson campaign,

$50,000 for protection, but Capone contributed $260,000 for Big Bill’s restoration. The

Chicago Crime Commission revealed that money was distributed to Thompson campaign workers in a room at the Hotel Sherman, where the bathtub was full of $5 bills. For Capone’s generous contribution, the Chicago Tribune reported that the Outfit

109 Laurence Bergreen, Capone: The Man and the Era (New York, 2013), 208, 315. There are two infamous moments that signify the beginning and end of Chicago’s gang wars between Italian-based mobsters in the South and their Irish rivals on the North Side. On November 10, 1924, Al Capone’s Chicago Outfit murdered Dean O’Banion in cold blood as he attended to his flower shop, his well-known “front.” Five years later, the Outfit’s war against North Side gangsters climaxed in the notorious St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, when Capone’s thugs murdered five of their Irish rivals in a Lincoln Park garage (21222 N. Clark St.).

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gained “the undisputed right to houses of prostitution and gambling houses, to operate slot machines, and control of the sale of beer and booze in all the territory of the city south of Madison street.” In other words, the Outfit’s criminal enterprises held dominion over Chicago’s democracy south of the Loop, or all underworld turf below Grant Park’s northern border.110

“The city is overrun with morons and other vicious elements,” read a Thompson campaign ad in the Tribune, “The papers teem with accounts of murders and other horrible lawlessness.” “Thompson pledges himself to change these conditions and make life and property once again secure,” campaign propaganda assured white voters, which promised ghettoization persisted in Black Chicago.111 During Big Bill’s 1927 campaign, DePriest’s political coalition and Jackson’s syndicate engineered a solid

South Side bloc vote. In historic Bronzeville, the Second Ward, Mayor Thompson’s plurality among black voters was over 90 percent.112 According to Horace Cayton and

St. Clair Drake, DePriest, “saying the good word to neighbors,” rang doorbells, visited gambling dens, and rallied church congregations. “The People’s Movement preached the Gospel of the Good Old Days when Big Bill, the ‘Little Lincoln,’ ran City Hall,” and

“Patiently, one by one, the DePriest forces gathered Thompson pledge cards.”113 In

1928, Jackson’s criminal empire collected as much as $1 million in contributions for

110 Ibid., 221.

111 Ibid., 220.

112 Lombardo, “The Black Mafia,” 44.

113 Cayton and Drake, Black Metropolis, 366-367.

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Thompson candidates during Chicago’s notorious “Pineapple Primary,” so-titled for the preponderance grenades tossed in mob wars.114

Mayor Thompson’s election meant political spoils for the Bronzeville elite, but the masses of South Side voters did not receive patronage or power – only idealistic, integrationist rhetoric and symbolic gestures of goodwill amidst ghettoization. In 1928,

Thompson’s endorsement secured Oscar DePriest’s election as Third Ward committeeman. Second Ward Committeeman, Edward Wright, made a fatal miscalculation and refused to support Thompson’s election. The aging “Iron Master” was subsequently replaced by Daniel Jackson.115 A year later, the known racketeer was appointed the Commerce Commission by Illinois Governor Len Small, but Jackson never assumed the coveted office. In 1929, the “Embalmer” died of natural causes, and he was memorialized as “close mouthed… canny in politics and openhanded and generous to the less fortunate among his fellow Negroes.” The Race Man was remembered for his contributions to the victims of race riots and donations to the

NAACP, not eulogized as the one of the most successful organized criminals in the history of Black Chicago.116

On one hand, the Embalmer’s brother, Charlie Jackson, vice president of Binga

State Bank, inherited the family businesses, legal and criminal, as the Great Depression approached.117 On the other hand, Oscar DePriest was left with criminal indictments

114 Lombardo, “The Black Mafia,” 44.

115 Gosnell, Negro Politicians, 180-182.

116 Lombardo, “The Black Mafia,” 44.

117 Mark H. Haller, “Policy Gambling, Entertainment, and the Emergence of Black Politics: Chicago from 1900 to 1940,” Journal of Social History, 24 (Summer 1991): 719-739.

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that resulted from Daniel Jackson’s final crooked years. DePriest and Jackson were indicted on gambling and political fraud charges. In addition to providing “the numbers” for loyal Republican voters, the Thompson conspirators allegedly altered ballots in the

Second Ward (60th Precinct). In 1929, an air of criminality hung over DePriest’s political career, but he survived another round with state prosecutors and returned race representation to its rightful place on Capitol Hill.118

Bronzeville community resolutions that endorsed Oscar DePriest for Congress emerged as early as 1923. South Side Republicans believed the white elder statesmen, Congressman Martin B. Madden, should run for the U. S. Senate and the

“Tall Sycamore of the Prairies” deserved his seat. Yet, racial solidarity did not breach

Black Chicago’s political loyalty to Big Bill Thompson. In 1928, when a young black lawyer and war veteran, William L. Dawson, led an insurgent race against Madden the

Bronzeville political elite supported the Thompson-backed, white incumbent. “Mr.

Madden… does not even live in the district,” Dawson exclaimed to South Side voters,

“He is a white man… for these two reasons if no other, he can hardly voice the hopes, ideals, and sentiments of the majority of the district.”119 Dawson succeeded DePriest and Mitchell as First District representative, and he proved an essential cog in the

Democratic machines of Mayors Edward Kelly and Richard J. Daley.

In 1933, Congressman DePriest’s support was essential in Republican William

Dawson’s election to the Chicago City Council. A decade later, Dawson, Second Ward

Democratic Committeeman, engaged in backroom bargaining with Mayor Kelly that

118 Gosnell, Negro Politicians, 182.

119 Cayton and Drake, Black Metropolis, 367.

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drove Mitchell out of Congress, Chicago, and back down south for a precipitous political retirement. However, Dawson was no match for Oscar DePriest and the Thompson regime in the twenties. In the spring of 1928, Congressman Madden defeated Dawson in the Republican primary, but the aging white legislator died just weeks after the election. Cayton and Drake suggest that DePriest, a veteran of the Thompson ally, who supported Madden amidst Dawson’s insurgency, “had the nomination before other aspirants woke up as to what was happening.”120 “Knowing the great interest you always take in things pertaining to our racial group” and “realizing that the First

Congressional District is three-fourths black,” Bronzeville voters petitioned for Big Bill’s endorsement of DePriest’s congressional candidacy.121

In November 1928, DePriest’s Thompson-backed candidacy was victorious. The

“Tall Sycamore of the Prairies” carried the district by just 3,800 votes, but he became the first black representative of the Jim Crow era. The Congressman-elect blamed his narrow victory on the entrance of a black independent that campaigned against “the disreputable leadership of the gangster, gambler, grafter type.” The stain of “Roaring

Twenties” corruption threatened to follow DePriest to Capitol Hill. However, a few days before Congress convened, the state’s attorney announced that the prosecution’s evidence against DePriest was “insufficient to warrant the defendant’s being brought to trial.” In March 1929, a less odious stench of political graft and organized crime trailed

Oscar DePriest when he was inaugurated.122

120 Ibid., 367-368; Parke Brown, “Madden’s Death May Seat Negro – Mayor Controls Nominee,” Chicago Tribune, April 28, 1928.

121 Petition to Mayor William Hale Thompson (1928). OD Papers, Box 2.

122 Gosnell, Negro Politicians, 182-183.

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The 1928 campaign season not only resulted in Congressman Oscar DePriest election, it also brought Arthur Mitchell from the nation’s capital to cultivate South Side support for Herbert Hoover’s presidential bid. The Republican National Committee employed Mitchell, on recommendations from Robert R. Morton and Perry W. Howard, for three months of Chicago campaign duty. The ambitious lawyer amassed a thousand dollars of travel expenses, which were covered by a generous Party of Lincoln.123

Mayor Thompson had an iron-fist on South Side black votes, and the true focus of

Republican Party leaders was the growth of a competitive “lily white” contingent in

Democratic Dixie. Nonetheless, the Republican National Committee’s Colored Division aimed to address not only the diminished lure of the Party’s abolitionist legacy, but also to promote a new generation of black leaders in growing ghettos.

The Democratic Party, under the banner of New York Governor Al Smith sought black votes with unprecedented vigor. Earl Dickerson, director of the Upper Middle

West Region of the Democratic National Committee’s new Colored Division, was given an impressive $28,000 budget. In part, Dickerson’s political war chest was spent funding Smith “truth squads” that harangued Arthur Mitchell at campaign stops.124

“Truth squads” did little to diminish the overwhelming support of Thompson loyalists for the Republican candidate. In 1929, President Herbert Hoover was inaugurated, Arthur

Mitchell became a Chicago resident, and Oscar DePriest was seated as Black

America’s only congressman. DePriest spent his first months as a national race leader raising money for the NAACP’s Twentieth Anniversary Fund. The Chicago Race Man

123 Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman, 36.

124 Ibid., 38.

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traveled to Kentucky, Ohio, and Pennsylvania on a fundraising tour that netted at least

$350. DePriest’s solicitation was welcomed by Truman Gibson, Sr., president of

Chicago’s Liberty Life Insurance Company, who donated $50 to the anniversary fund.

Robert L. Vann, founding editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, contributed $60, and Dr.

Richard R. Wright, revered editor of the Christian Recorder, gave $100 to the traveling congressman as he passed through Philadelphia.125

Oscar DePriest, a son of former slaves and Kansas Exodusters, advanced the

NAACP’s crusade for racial equality, even as he reaped profits and power from the ghettoization process. The Alabama-born congressman argued that the NAACP followed in the mighty footsteps of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, who began as “obscure, unlettered, unschooled, without direction and alone in their bold thoughts.” Yet, the “Rail Splitter” followed moral tracks to emancipation, and Douglass, a runaway slave, intrepidly “launched out on the sea of life.” DePriest believed that

Douglass would be pleased by “four million freemen grown to fourteen million – true, loyal, American citizens” but distressed by Jim Crow. “Every age, every crisis, has its leaders,” Congressman DePriest remarked, and the illustrious birthday shared between the “Great Emancipator” and the NAACP was no mistake. DePriest knew the association began its work “against stupendous obstacles” in the Great Migration era, “it had few friends and little money… prejudice against the Negro was widespread and lynching and brutalities were rampant.”126

125 Notebook, Feb. 1929. OD Papers, Box 2.

126 Ibid.

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Against the odds, the NAACP “organized and financed a campaign against lynching” that dramatized the brutal injustice “before not only the United States but the civilized world.” Congressman DePriest, a facilitator of black-and-tan brothels and ballrooms, could not be more pleased that the NAACP “disproved the slander that the

Negro was a rapist.” “I do not expect this new nation to ever disappear,” the ghetto profiteer remarked, but “I do expect it will grow more and more cosmopolitan.” Atop the new mountain in black politics, a crooked Congressman DePriest idealistically confessed, “I anticipate that the father God will be accepted and the Brotherhood of man will be acknowledged and that this nation, now the melting pot of the world, will mete out even-handed justice to all, with malice toward none but charity for all as God will give them the power to see.”127

In the 1920s, Race Men possessed varying motives and drew inspiration from diverse sources. Nevertheless, national black leaders – in media, politics, business, and organized crime – shared a mutual vision of self-help, racial pride, and pragmatic accommodation with metropolitan machines, the “free market,” and the two-party system. Congressman Oscar DePriest returned race representation to Capitol Hill as a leading ambassador of South Side ghettoization, a master of racialized real estate markets, machine corruption, and movement politics. DePriest was a curious advocate for racial uplift and civil rights, but he was an effective politician who drew strength and credibility from both the Tuskegee Machine and NACCP to offset criminal associations with William Hale Thompson and Daniel Jackson.

127 Ibid.

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On one hand, Congressman DePriest embodied paralyzing new realities grounding black politics. On the other hand, “The Tall Sycamore of the Prairies” expressed the collective aspirations of striving generation of black migrants. Most Jim

Crow refugees relocated from Black Belt farms to segregated slums, where they remained committed to the “American Dream” of socioeconomic mobility and political recognition. Oscar DePriest was demonstrable evidence of black progress against modern discrimination. The Alabama-born politician was proof that they could survive and thrive in a White America that ostracized, exploited, and feared them.

In 1901, Congressman George H. White, the last black representative of the

Reconstruction era, left office. “This is perhaps the Negroes’ temporary farewell to the

American Congress,” White remarked, “let me say, Phoenix-like he will rise up some day and come again.”128 The North Carolina politician may have wept if he lived to witness his prophesy fulfilled by Oscar DePriest and Arthur Mitchell. According to

Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake, Black Chicago’s return of race representation to

Washington is a “story of the way in which the ‘God-fearing people, faithful, industrious, and loyal people’ are yoked in with the gamblers, prostitutes, and the demimonde and are led by forceful personalities to the conquest of political power.”129 Steven Hahn argues that the Great Migration “served as a large and powerful political transmission belt that moved and redeployed the experiences, institutions, and networks” essential for modern black politics.130 Nevertheless, the politicization of enfranchised southern

128 Benjamin R. Justesen, George Henry White: An Even Chance in the Race of Life (Baton Rouge, 2001), 311.

129 Cayton and Drake, Black Metropolis, 361.

130 Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 467.

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migrants was distorted by ghettoization on a racial frontier of residential segregation, machine politics, violence, and urban vice.

The next chapter will examine Congressman DePriest’s tenure on Capitol Hill and chapter 6 will explore Congressman Mitchell’s role in the creation of Chicago’s

Democratic Machine. Their New Deal-era political rivalry featured a well-known

Republican Race Man and a reputed “Uncle Tom,” who was victorious, with Roosevelt’s coattails, in the wake of economic cataclysm. In 1934 and 1936, DePriest and Mitchell fought over Black America’s only seat in the nation’s capital while a new political machine, an old underworld, and the creation of the modern social welfare state accelerated South Side ghettoization.

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CHAPTER 5 CONGRESSMAN DEPRIEST, RACE MAN: BLACK REPRESENTATION IN HERBERT HOOVER’S AMERICA

“I do not go to Congress as a Negro,” Oscar DePriest told a crowd of Harlemites,

“but as an American citizen to serve all the people alike.” In March 1929, the “fighting

Chicago politician, who rose from obscurity” to represent “the richest Illinois district,” outlined his agenda at Harlem’s Bethel A. M. E. Church. According to the Amsterdam

News, DePriest contextualized his remarks with Reconstruction and his “slave parents in Alabama, who… never had a chance.” The South Side politician affirmed his determination “to take what his kin had been denied.” DePriest not only stated his commitment to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, but also “declared that no support will be given to the Eighteenth Amendment unless all the amendments, including those dealing with the Negro, are enforced.” The Race Man pledged to fight for racial justice in Washington. Most importantly, he “urged Negroes to forget all petty differences and present a unity front demand and take the political and economic recognition due to them.”1

In Harlem, Congressman DePriest proudly boasted of Chicago’s 40,000 voters that not only returned race representation to Capitol Hill, but also elected two aldermen, five assemblymen, a state senator, over forty lawyers in the city legal department. Big

Bill Thompson, a “champion of human justice,” contributed $15,000 to DePriest’s election and carried Lincoln’s legacy forward in the segregated First District. As

Harlem’s renaissance came to a close, DePriest proclaimed, “You will never succeed until you establish a black leadership of this black district, and to do that you will have to

1 “City; Pledges Self to Represent All People and Fight Dixie Disfranchisement,” Plaindealer, March 15, 1929, p. 1.

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fight for yourselves… why should you expect anyone to fight your battles for you?”

“Harlem had as good an opportunity as Chicago to elect one of her own to Congress, but did not take advantage of it,” William M. Kelley, the master of ceremonies remarked.

In a nationally syndicated column, the Amsterdam News professed that DePriest’s

“recital of Negro unity might well serve as a model for any Negro community in America, especially in New York City.”2

The Harlem newspaper did not expect a century of ghettoization to shadow the politicization of their segregated district. In 1945, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. rallied another generation of southern migrants and joined Chicago Machine Democrat,

William L. Dawson, on Capitol Hill. The Powell family’s legacy in religion and politics is well known in popular black culture.3 Even Arthur Mitchell’s dastardly path from tenant farming to Capitol Hill has been chronicled. Nevertheless, Oscar DePriest’s historic return of black representation in the Jim Crow era has not received an in-depth examination. The “Tall Sycamore of the Prairies” survived a Great Depression that deposed Mayor William Hale Thompson and President Herbert Hoover. Yet,

Congressman DePriest, an ambassador of South Side ghettoization, has escaped scrutiny. DePriest was strengthened by NAACP advocacy and emboldened by a white backlash in the Bourbon South. The Hoover administration’s “southern strategy” and libertarian response to the Great Depression deposed the Party of Lincoln for a

2 Ibid., 1.

3 On Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., see Will Haygood, King of Cats: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (New York, 2006); Charles V. Hamilton, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.: The Political Biography of an American Dilemma (New York, 2001); and Adam by Adam: The Autobiography of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (New York, 2002).

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generation, but DePriest lived to fight against Arthur Mitchell after Roosevelt’s “First

Hundred Days.”

Congressman Oscar DePriest’s return of race representation sparked immediate controversy on Capitol Hill. In particular, the black politician complicated President

Herbert Hoover’s “southern strategy,” which produced five victories across the former

Confederacy in the recent election. The first major hullabaloo during DePriest’s tenure was an integrated social affair at the Hoover White House that betrayed “lily-white” southern voters and offended the racial sensibilities of segregationists across White

America.4 “During my administration there was a Negro Congressman,” Hoover recounted in his memoirs. Despite pleas from “some of her Congressional lady friends not to do it… in giving the usual teas for Congressman’s wives, Mrs. Hoover insisted upon inviting the Negro’s wife equally with the others.”5

In June 1929, Jessie Williams DePriest, a music teacher, was at the center of a political firestorm that gripped the nation’s capital, fed by her husband, embroiled by

Bourbon Democrats, and pragmatically managed by the Hoover administration. “The initial Hoover strategy catered to, rather than challenged, Southern mores,” historian

David S. Day argues, which frustrated the early aims of Dixie politicians “to identify and to exploit an [racial] issue.” On May 16, a month before Mrs. DePriest’s appearance at the White House, President Hoover received Tuskegee’s Robert R. Moton – a visit

4 Howard Gosnell, Negro Politicians: The Rise of Negro Politics in Chicago (Chicago, 1967), 184. DePriest survived a second round of criminal indictments en route to Washington, where his inauguration was almost derailed. His membership in the 71st Congress was questioned by Southern Democrats, whose state delegations threatened a boycott. House Republicans used their majority position to adopt new inauguration procedures that simultaneously administered the oath of office to all members in one ceremony, which sidestepped the grandstanding of Dixie segregationists. On April 15, 1929, Congressman DePriest was inaugurated with his white colleagues.

5 David S. Day, “Herbert Hoover and Racial Politics: The DePriest Incident,” Journal of Negro History, 65 (Winter 1980): 6-17; quotations from 6 and 8.

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which produced no southern rage. However, in the weeks following Moton’s trip,

Congressman George H. Tinkham (R-MA) introduced legislation which Southern

Democrats perceived as “Negro Domination.” Dixie demagogues, anxious to enfeeble partisan competition in the Solid South, also seized upon Lou Henry Hoover’s tea party

– a matter of presidential courtesy and custom – as Republican affirmation of cursed

“social equality.”

In the summer of 1929, Congressman George Tinkham led a legislative crusade to resurrect the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. On June 4, Tinkham introduced a measure to constitutionally coerce the former Confederacy’s compliance. He proposed the reduction of southern congressional representation upon census data proving racial discrimination. Tinkham proclaimed to his colleagues:

…if this amendment is not adopted… this House is a House of Hypocrites, of nullifiers, and of men wholly lawless [Applause and laughter]. This House is a House that does not believe either in the Constitution or in law.6

Tinkham’s measure targeted the Jim Crow South – it did not question the antidemocratic character of Republican machines in Yankee ghettos. Congressman

DePriest, a financial and political beneficiary of residential segregation, supported his colleague’s plan for racial justice in the South. The Hoover administration, recent victors in Texas, Florida, Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina, did not support the

Tinkham amendment. Nevertheless, the Republican measure – followed by Jessie

DePriest’s appearance at the White House – catalyzed a southern backlash that jeopardized Herbert Hoover’s “lily white” inroads.

6 Ibid., 8

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According to David Day, “Hoover and his political lieutenants were aware that racial matters required delicate handling,” and the administration “did anticipate political repercussions from the annual Congressional Wives tea party.” Presidential advisors and the first lady’s office “engaged in deliberate planning, carefully evaluating a variety of options.”7 “The question arises as to what can be done about the family of our new colored representative,” the first lady’s secretary wrote to Walter Newton, leading presidential aide, “we must think not only of this occasion, but of what is to be done during the entire term of the Representative.” Newton and the first lady’s office coordinated a strategy rooted in Jessie DePriest’s inclusion as an apolitical matter, a formal custom. A routine function – one White House reception – was immediately ruled out because it could inspire boycott by segregationist southern wives. Lou Henry

Hoover shrewdly screened congressional spouses for four tea parties on Jim Crow

Capitol Hill. Under the first lady’s orders, Jessie DePriest’s invitation to the final reception on June 12 was not issued until June 5, or, the day of the third event. Mrs.

DePriest’s invitation, per Lou Hoover’s instructions, included a note to keep her upcoming appearance confidential.8

The first three tea parties filled the White House’s Green Room with a over a hundred congressional wives. However, the vetting process for final reception ensured that it paled in comparison. The first lady’s inner-circle, including her sister and secretaries, joined less than a dozen congressional spouses who received Mrs.

7 Ibid., 9.

8 Nancy Beck Young, “Lou Hoover: An Activist First Lady in Traditional Washington.” Accessed on Jan. 3, 2015 from http://www.whitehousehistory.org/presentations/depriest-tea- incident/first-lady-lou-hoover.html#4; quote from Secretary to Walter P. Newton, May 21, 1929. See Young, Lou Hoover (Lawrence, 2004).

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DePriest. Despite the Hoover administration’s preemptive strategy, the integrated affair was a lightning rod for southern opponents of Oscar DePriest’s election. Integrated affairs “can only bring harm to the negroes of the South,” a white Texan suggested.

White southerners “love the negro in his place, but not at our dinner table,” he professed.9 Senator Morris Sheppard (D-TX) argued that the tea party was a “step fraught with infinite danger to our white civilization.” In Dallas, a short-lived Anti-Tea

Society was formed, which failed in its quixotic mission to eliminate American tea consumption. Representative Robert Green (D-FL) announced that he would no longer attended functions at Hoover’s White House, while Senator Thaddeus Carraway (D-AR) introduced white supremacist diatribes into the Congressional Record.10 On the South

Side, the Chicago World reported that Dixie has “gone mad over the incident.”

Democrats were “foaming at the mouth.”11

An offended Dixie was joined by segregationists across the country who protested the Hoover administration’s breach of racial custom and blatant disregard for

Anglo-Saxon superiority. “My WIFE and I are dumb-founded tonight to read in the papers that you have entertained a nigger lady,” a disgusted Nebraska man wrote to the first lady. “I fear you do not understand the amount of damage you have done to this country,” the Cornhusker complained, “It places them on equality with the CAUCASIAN

RACE, and assists for the amalgamation of the races.” “I’ll admit however it’s a nigger vote getter for your distinguished husband,” he reasoned, “whom we all supported because of the fact we wanted an AMERICAN on guard at Washington, D.C.” “Shame

9 Ibid.

10 Day, “Hoover and Racial Politics,” 9-10.

11 “The Washington Tea Party,” Chicago World, June 29, 1929, p. 8.

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on you forever,” a Chicago woman wrote to Lou Hoover, “You must love the dirty smelly niggers… no decent white woman would invite a nigger.” America “elected you and your husband to take care of the nation… we did not think we would have to be ashamed of your actions later on,” she concluded.12

The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom formally praised Lou

Henry Hoover’s token gesture of racial goodwill. A Pennsylvania woman wrote to Mrs.

Hoover to profess that she was a “noble, brave lady” for hosting Jessie DePriest at the

White House. “If we only had more women like yourself who would rise above this unholy prejudice, this estimate of race differences, it would soon be forever banished from our midst,” she believed. The Hoovers refused to sign a restrictive covenant when they purchased their Washington, D. C. home. On one occasion, Lou Hoover paid tuition for her ambitious black maid. Yet, the first lady, a longtime president of the Girl

Scouts, did not publicly defend Mrs. DePriest. The First Couple neither endorsed integration, nor challenged the ideological and institutional sources of racial discrimination.13 David Day notes that administration officials framed the first lady as a

“reluctant, but noble participant in a horrible dilemma” caused by Congressman

DePriest’s historic election.14

In the 1920s, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover did not advocate the use federal power to advance black empowerment while he built his namesake dam. After the Great Mississippi Flood (1927), the Great Humanitarian of World War I, segregated

12 Young, “Lou Hoover;” quotations from C. L. and Eunice E. Nethaway to Lou H. Hoover, June 19, 1929, and anonymous to Lou H. Hoover, June 23, 1929.

13 Ibid.; quote from Mary Andrews to Lou H. Hoover, June 19, 1929.

14 Day, “Hoover and Racial Politics,” 9-10.

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labor camps and Jim Crow relief among destitute black victims.15 In 1928, President

Hoover’s path to the White House resulted from unprecedented Republican success among segregationists in so-called Solid South. Furthermore, the administration’s re- election prospects were tied to solidifying “lily-white” Dixie delegations that drove remaining “black-and-tan” elements out of the party – not resurrecting the “Party of

Lincoln.”16 The Hoover White House hoped public regret and subsequent silence would remove the tea party affair from popular political discourse. However, Congressman

DePriest was eager to defend his wife’s honor and aggrandize his reputation as the nation’s leading Race Man. Moreover, southern demagogues were all too eager to exploit the tea party to sully “lily whites” with the black grime of “social equality.”

“I want to thank the Democrats of the south for one thing,” Congressman

DePriest proclaimed, “They were so barbaric they drove my parents to the north. If it had not been for that I wouldn’t be in Congress today.” “I’ve been Jim Crowed, segregated, persecuted” the Alabama-born representative noted, “I think I know how best the Negro can put a stop to being imposed upon.” Congressman DePriest argued,

“It is through the ballot, though organization, through eternally fighting” for racial justice.17 The nation’s lone black congressman used a male identifier in a partisan politics that marginalized the plights of female tenant farmers, teachers, domestic

15 See John M. Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America (New York, 2007).

16 Richard B. Sherman, The Republican Party and Black America from McKinley to Hoover, 1896-1933 (Charlottesville, 1973), 224-259. Also, see Donald J. Lisio, Hoover, Blacks, and Lily-Whites: A Study of Southern Strategies, (Chapel Hill, 1985).

17 Shelley Stokes-Hammond, “Pathbreakers: Oscar Stanton DePriest and Jessie L. Williams DePriest.” Accessed on Jan. 3, 2015 from http://www.whitehousehistory.org/presentations/depriest-tea-incident/african-american- congress.html; quotations from “DePriest Accuses Foes of Cowardice,” Washington Post, July 3, 1929, 20.

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workers, and mothers.18 “DePriest was no fool,” David Day asserts, and the congressman “skillfully manipulated the public notoriety created by his wife’s attendance at the tea… to transform it into contributions to the NAACP.”19

On June 16, Oscar DePriest announced that he would appear at an NAACP

“musicale and reception” on Friday, June 21. The NAACP aimed to raise $200,000 for congressional lobbying, a cause the South Side politician aimed to harness for his record, re-election, and the Race.20 The junior representative invited nearly all of his

Republican colleagues, a gesture of goodwill that was sure to receive publicity on the

Hill and certain to provoke southern Democrats. DePriest turned the tea party controversy, and the NAACP’s noble mission, into an opportunity to embolden his profile as a Race Man – an effort aggrandized by a white backlash in the former

Confederacy. The day after DePriest’s announcement, Senator Coleman Blease (D-

SC) introduced an opportunistic resolution that condemned the Hoover administration.

After a poem, “Nigger in the White House,” Blease argued that the first lady placed

Washington in “racial peril,” called President Hoover an advocate of “race mixing,” and deemed DePriest a promoter of “social equality.”21

18 On the racialized origins of maternalist politics and racialized social welfare policies, see Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890-1935 (New York, 1991). Regarding black domestic workers, see Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke, “The Bronx Slave Market,” Crisis, (Nov. 1935), 330- 331, 340; Tera Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass., 1997); and Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement (Chapel Hill, 2003), 76-77. On female tenant farmers and teachers, see Katherine Charron, Freedom’s Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark (Chapel Hill, 2009); Adam Fairclough, Teaching Equality: Black Schools in the Age of Jim Crow (Athens, GA, 2001); Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana, 2000); and Susan Eva O’Donovan, Becoming Free in the Cotton South (Cambridge, Mass., 2007).

19 Day, “Hoover and Racial Politics,” 12.

20 Ibid., 12.

21 Ibid., 13; quote from New York Times, June 18, 1929, p. 28.

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Senator Hiram Bingham (R-CT) ensured that Blease’s racist resolution was not printed in the Congressional Record. The New Englander believed his colleague’s measure was an insult “to hundreds of thousands of our fellow-citizens and an offense to the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution.” Nonetheless, the South

Carolina politician stoked southern vitriol toward the DePriests and the NAACP. For example, the Texas State Legislature passed a measure which condemned Lou Henry

Hoover and those who voted for her husband. Texas’s Hoover condemnation reached the desk of Democratic Governor Dan Moody, who ultimately vetoed the measure. Yet,

Governor Moody’s objection was accompanied by a vitriolic statement that demonized

“race mixing.” “Lily white” Republicans also expressed their displeasure with Oscar

DePriest.22 In an open letter, Congressman Joseph Shaffer (R-VA) proclaimed the

Chicago politician was “embarking on a perilous course” with NAACP advocacy.

Senator Blease withdrew his resolution, but the fire-eater roused the Rebel South. The

South Carolinian assured colleagues and journalists that he did not reconsider his resolution because it “may give offense to the niggers.”23 Rather, the segregationist

Democrat accomplished his political objectives.

On June 21, DePriest issued a statement in defense of his spouse, who was invited “because she happened to be the wife of a man who was a member of

Congress.” The Chicago representative believed southern demagogues would only

“drive all the colored votes… into the Republican Party” for good. The following evening, at the NAACP musicale, the Race Man pilloried southern politicians,

22 Ibid., 13-14; quote from Congressional Record, Vol. 71, pt. 3, 2946-2947.

23 Ibid., 12-14; quotations from Joseph C. Shaffer to Oscar DePriest, June 18, 1929; and Congressional Record, Vol. 71, pt. 3, 2946-2947.

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Democratic and “lily-white,” who used his wife “for the political effect at home.” In the weeks that followed, David Day asserts that the Hoover administration adopted a policy of “dignified silence,” so as to avoid further provoking its new, timorous southern contingent. However, Oscar DePriest gained national press coverage and flexed his political muscle on the Hill. Racist diatribes and inflammatory resolutions only emboldened his political credibility in Black America. By July, the “Tall Sycamore of the

Prairies” further provoked the White South before a Bronzeville audience by calling his

Jim Crow enemies “a lot of cowards.”24

Congressman DePriest’s first weeks produced controversy over social customs, but a few colleagues refused to even legislate alongside him. Representative George

Pritchard (R-VA) declined a Capitol Hill office next to DePriest when the first session of the Seventy-First Congress began.25 DePriest’s appointments to the Indian Affairs and

Invalid Pensions committees did not evoke controversy. However, the black representative’s position on the House Enrolled Bills Committee provoked a protest from Congressman Miles C. Allgood (D-AL). On December 13, 1929, Allgood announced his resignation from the committee, which was promptly accepted by House

Speaker, Nicholas Longworth (R-OH). “I cannot serve now that the Republican from

Chicago has been added to it,” Allgood explained, “I do not desire the honor.”26

Allgood’s resignation capitalized on a southern backlash and only magnified

DePriest’s reputation in mainstream black politics. The Race Man told an interracial

24 Ibid., 14; quotation from New York Times, June 22, 1929, 17.

25 Ibid., 11-12.

26 “DePriest Speaks Out When Alabama Democrat Resigns from Enrolled Bills Committee,” Black Dispatch, Dec. 26, 1929, in Oscar S. DePriest Papers, Chicago Historical Society (Chicago, IL), Box 4. Hereafter, OD Papers.

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audience of over a thousand New Yorkers that his racist colleagues should all carry prejudices “to their logical conclusion and resign from Congress.”27 When Washington

Post reporters revealed to DePriest that Allgood resigned, his response was, “Who cares?”28 It is “too bad that there are not enough Negroes in Congress to put one on every committee so that Allgood would have to stay off all committees,” William Pickens stated in his ANP column. Pickens, an NAACP national officer and veteran field organizer, argued that Congressman Allgood “might go on and be perfectly consistent and resign from all connection with the Human Race, since DePriest is also a member of that.” Pickens recognized Allgood’s calculated effort to marshal anti-DePriest sentiment in the South to raise his national profile. The racist resignation “is the only reason why any of us have ever heard that Allgood was in Congress,” Pickens admitted,

“he ought to thank DePriest.”29

Two days after Allgood’s resignation, Congressman DePriest addressed the

Sunday evening forum at New York’s Community Church. Before an integrated audience of 1,500, the Chicago politician proclaimed, “We cannot have a true democracy until the American vote is equalized.” DePriest’s address, “The Negro’s

Opportunities and Handicaps in America,” highlighted disfranchisement, which made “a vote for a member of Congress in South Carolina… worth ten times as much as one in

27 “DePriest Declares America Can Have No Democracy With Vote Unequalized,” Amsterdam News, Dec. 18, 1929. OD Papers, Box 2.

28 “Clark Not to Quit on DePriest Issue,” Washington Post, Jan. 1930; DePriest Speaks Out When Alabama Democrat Resigns from Enrolled Bills Committee,” Black Dispatch. OD Papers, Box 4. DePriest’s reiterated his remarks with ANP reporters. He insisted “it would be better for congress if the minority of race-hating, prejudiced and bigoted representatives such as Allgood were excluded altogether.”

29 William Pickens, “Allgood – All Bad!,” Baltimore Afro-American, Dec. 28, 1929. OD Papers, Box 4.

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New York.” The New York Amsterdam News reported that the Chicagoan was

“insistent in his demand that disfranchised and abused citizens learn their rights under the Constitution and demand them.”30 During his first weeks on Capitol Hill,

Congressman DePriest’s office distributed 10,000 copies of the Constitution and

Declaration of Independence to constituents and concerned black citizens.31 Ten thousand was a small portion of the number the Race Man aimed to rally for a national bloc vote that would enhance his political leverage in Washington. Oscar DePriest defended his wife’s honor, race pride, and black political empowerment, but he also rallied behind an NAACP that still reeled from failed twenties campaigns for antilynching legislation.

In the early Depression years, neither the South Side congressman, nor the

NAACP, used the Fourteenth Amendment to press for “social equality,” or the repeal of the Plessy decision. DePriest pledged his commitment to “equal justice under the law” and restoring suffrage for black southerners, but he decried “social equality” as a senseless distraction. The NAACP’s early legal campaign exercised the Fifteenth

Amendment in cases against the grandfather clause, white primary, and literacy tests, but the association pragmatically avoided use of the Fourteenth Amendment to press for integration of the nation’s public accommodations. During the Hoover years,

DePriest sought to embolden Chicago’s Black Metropolis, and he hoped to reproduce such racial aggrandizement across the nation in segregated ghettos. Meanwhile, the

30 “DePriest Declares America Can Have No Democracy With Vote Unequalized,” Amsterdam News, Dec. 18, 1929. OD Papers, Box 4.

31 Hammond, “Pathbreakers: Oscar Stanton DePriest and Jessie L. Williams DePriest.” Accessed on Jan. 3, 2015 from http://www.whitehousehistory.org/presentations/depriest-tea- incident/african-american-congress.html.

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post-Great Migration NAACP was vigorously committed to anti-lynching bills and school equalization cases designed to enforce the Plessy decision. The venerated association aimed to make “separate” more “equal.”32

On December 18, 1929, Congressman Oscar DePriest made his first speech on the House floor. The Republican Race Man did not discuss the recent Stock Market

Crash, or the ghettoization process that gripped his constituency. Instead, DePriest used his national platform and precious allotment of time to discuss the U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915-1934), a nation where nineteenth-century racial revolution crumbled into modern imperialism. According to Glenda Gilmore, Jim Crow refugees “watched Jim

Crow spread its wings across the nation and fly over Haiti,” causing many “to wonder if they had fled far enough.”33 Nonetheless, the South Side congressman seconded

President Hoover’s request for a civilian committee to further investigate – not immediately liberate – Haiti. DePriest maintained that American lawmakers needed to asses “the opinion of the great mass of the common people” in Haiti. Civilized statesmen needed to observe “more correctly” if the islanders could “carry out the program of American in wishing these people to carry out the program of self- government.”34

Congressman DePriest did not challenge the scheduled end of the Haitian occupation, but he demanded the appointment of two black citizens on the federal investigatory committee. On one hand, the South Side politician used Haiti to divert

32 Adam Fairclough, “The Costs of Brown: Black Teachers and School Integration,” Journal of American History, 91 (June, 2004): 43-55.

33 Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 (New York, 2009), 28.

34 “Haiti and the Negro,” Dec. 18, 1929. OD Papers, Box 4.

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national media attention away from the nefarious web of “blockbusting,” organized crime, vice, and machine politics fueling his ascent to power. On the other hand,

DePriest used the Haitian occupation to emphasize the hypocrisy of Southern

Democrats who supported an investigation of Haiti, but were perennially hostile to scrutiny of their own Jim Crow districts. Republican DePriest was pleased to witness

Southern Democrats “so very solicitous about the condition of black people in Haiti… I wish to God they were equally solicitous about the black people of America.” “We in

America would like in some of the States of this country to have the right to self- determination,” the black congressman proclaimed.35

By the Great Depression, Pan Africanism drew together the twin forces of imperialism abroad and ghettoization at home to produce a militant racial pride in mainstream black politics. Pan-Africanism touched varied streams, such as Black

Communists’ conception of self-determination in the Cotton Belt, Marcus Garvey’s

Universal Negro Improvement Association, W. E. B. Du Bois’s international conferences, and black journalists’ increasing coverage of the international color line.36

DePriest used militant rhetoric to mask his support for the gradual liberation of a Haiti that remained under America’s imperial jurisdiction. After World War I, “when every

35 Ibid.

36 On the rise of mainstream Pan-African politics, see Jonathan Rosenberg, How Far the Promised Land?: World Affairs and the American Civil Rights Movement from the First World War to Vietnam (Princeton, 2006). On the African Blood Brotherhood and the Communist Party’s “Black Belt” Theory, see Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem during the Depression (Urbana, 2005); Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill, 1990); and Mark Soloman, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936 (Jackson, 1998). Regarding Du Bois’s Pan-African conferences, see David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963 (New York, 2000). On Caribbean-influenced Pan- Africanism and the UNIA, see Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (New York, 1998); Tony Martin, Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Westport, CT, 1976).

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group in the world, it was stated, should have the right to self-determination,” DePriest noted that Haitians were notably excluded. He proposed that self-determination “should apply to Haiti and also to every other class of people God’s sun shines on.” The

Chicago representative ironically congratulated southerners “converted to this way of thinking, for once in their lives.”37

America’s occupation of Haiti was marred by indignities that were published in black mass media. Yet, Congressman DePriest defended the overall conduct and credibility of American forces. He appreciated “the great work that has been accomplished since we have occupied the country.” “I know our Government is not there to exploit that island Republic,” he insisted. According to DePriest, “The marines in Haiti may have committed wrongful acts… but that was done individually, it was not the purpose or policy of the American Government.” The South Side politician admitted that Congress was “not familiar with the conditions of Haiti” but “sought enlightenment from a commission that will make an impartial investigation” with “information outside of the military channels.”38

Two days before his “maiden speech,” DePriest was heckled by a student of

West Indian affairs who “rapped the iron fisted methods of the marines in dealing with the Haitian peasants.” The heckler decried an occupation “deliberately keeping the people from participation in the management of their country.” Nonetheless, the New

York City audience was pleased by Congressman DePriest promise of “one or two

37 “Haiti and the Negro,” Dec. 18, 1929. OD Papers, Box 4.

38 Ibid. See Mary A. Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1940 (Chapel Hill, 2001).

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Negroes on the commission… to make sure that a sympathetic study is made.”39 In

Chicago, Oscar DePriest ensured the Black Metropolis’s stale spoils from the ghettoization process. On Capitol Hill, the machine politician did not directly confront imperialism, but aimed to promote black participation in the process. “I have faith in

Hoover and the White House Staff,” Congressman DePriest concluded in his debut on the House floor, “I think he is one of the best qualified Presidents this country ever had.”

A thunderous applause gripped the congressional chambers after DePriest’s post-Crash praise of President Hoover, who “wants the best for the people of Haiti.”40 In the end,

DePriest did not secure black appointments from the Hoover administration, but he survived a debut speech that did not address unemployment in Depression-era ghettos.

Congressman DePriest was in high demand for speaking engagements across the country. Despite critics who believed the nation’s only black congressman should be rooted in Washington, DePriest claimed his time was better spent speaking across urban America. The Race Man recognized that progressive legislation was highly unlikely, but his office and national fame provided a platform to spread a template for black empowerment. On January 2, 1930, DePriest was the keynote speaker at

Philadelphia’s Mount Tabernacle Church, where the Chicagoan joined congregants who celebrated the Emancipation Proclamation’s Sixtieth Anniversary. The congressman urged black Philadelphians to “sell their votes to the highest white bidder and then elect the Negro of their choice instead.” Only a well-organized bloc vote “will discourage the

Caucasian bosses from trying to buy Negro votes in the future.” Republican Mayor

39 “DePriest Declares America Can Have No Democracy With Vote Unequalized,” Amsterdam News, Dec. 18, 1929. OD Papers, Box 4.

40 “Haiti and the Negro,” Dec. 18, 1929. OD Papers, Box 4.

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Harry A. Mackey (1928-1931), a Penn-educated lawyer, more famous as a college football player and coach, advised the crowd to follow Oscar DePriest’s lead “on political and social matters.”41

In Philadelphia, the South Side congressman not only dodged the ghettoization process, he also self-righteously castigated local blacks. According to the Philadelphia

Record, DePriest asserted that “the Negroes were at fault for most of their unpleasant social conditions.” Though he was a high-ranking lieutenant in Big Bill Thompson’s notorious political machine, DePriest claimed urban blacks “were too lenient to vice conditions in the neighborhoods in which they live.” “Report every den you know about,” DePriest smugly instructed, “Show the white folks that you desire your neighborhood to be as decent as any.” “Quit talking about social equality,” the Race

Man insisted. DePriest was affirmed when he asked the audience a simple question,

“Who wants social equality?” In a rigidly segregated Philadelphia, DePriest caustically joked “there won’t be so many mulattoes among us” without “the social equality forced on us by the whites.”42

During his first term, Oscar DePriest was an NAACP supporter and opponent of integration who drew strength from a black pride and a southern outrage born of the false contention that the South Side politician favored “social equality.” On January 27,

1930, Carter G. Woodson proclaimed that Congressman DePriest was “a man of courage.” The founding director of the Association for the Study of African American

Life and History (ASALH) “took his hat off to him.” “I have felt better since he took his

41 “DePriest Boosts Campaign for Phla. Negro in Congress,” Philadelphia Record, Jan. 2, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

42 Ibid. On Philadelphia’s ghettoization process, see Michael B. Katz and Thomas J. Sugrue, ed. W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and the City: The Philadelphia Negro and Its Legacy (Philadelphia, 1998).

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oath of office,” Woodson told a national conference of black Baptist ministers. The legendary historian argued “we have been miseducated or misinformed, and we can’t hope to get very far” with black leaders spawned from schools “in the hands of white people.” Woodson believed that black communities needed more men like the “Tall

Sycamore of the Prairies,” who “did not stay in school long enough to hear the tommyrot taught in those schools.” “We are teaching our children that George Washington never told a lie,” but “sometimes I think he never told anything else,” Woodson joked.43

Weeks later, Congressman DePriest repackaged the black historian’s themes in a way that rationalized his wealth and power after the Stock Market Crash. In the shadows of Ford’s anti-union shops, the Chicago politician told a Flint audience of nearly 2,000 blacks that the race must develop self-confidence before it could expect constitutional rights. White America “will never think more of its Negroes than they think of themselves,” DePriest explained. “Too often, when one man starts going upwards there are many who are only too willing to pull him back down,” the ghetto profiteer remarked.”44 By early 1930, a historic banking crisis became the Great Depression. On the South Side, black voters, mostly menial and service-sector workers whose wages and jobs were the first cut in crisis, desperately needed assistance.

In 1931, Black Chicagoans composed 4 percent of the city’s population, but accounted for 16 percent of those out of work. By 1933, one-quarter of Americans were unemployed, while Black Chicago and other urban ghettos suffered unemployment

43 “Carter Woodson Flays Negroes in White Schools,” Washington Tribune, Jan. 27, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4. See Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro (New York, 1977).

44 “DePriest See Progress DePriest Race Handicaps,” Flint Daily Journal, Feb. 17, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

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rates that exceeded 50 percent. 45 Yet, Oscar DePriest did not directly confront the structural causes of economic catastrophe. The Republican Race Man was a devotee of free-orthodoxy who did not believe American capitalism suffered structural deficiencies. DePriest remained a loyal ally of Mayor Thompson’s Republican machine, whose coffers and patronage rapidly dwindled amidst economic crisis. Big Bill’s final tenure (1927-1931) was marred by graft, gang wars, and a ridiculous, one-sided feud with King George V of England. Thompson’s failed bid for the U.S. Senate (1930) and exit from city hall marked the veritable death of Republican politics in Chicago for the rest of the century.46

In the early thirties, Big Bill Thompson’s political machine was doomed by an absence of municipal resources and underfinanced vice among South Side residents losing jobs and lacking discretionary income. Demagogic xenophobia was an ideological tool that both Mayor Thompson and Congressman DePriest exercised as embattled Republicans forced to deliver for an ever-increasing number of poverty-struck constituents. In January 1930, DePriest finally addressed Black America’s economic status by supporting immigration restriction to stop foreigners from “stealing” coveted jobs from native-born citizens.47 During the first session of the Seventy-First Congress, the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization considered several restriction measures. Most importantly, they pursued bills sponsored by Committee Chairman

45 Nancy J. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR (Princeton, 1983), 15, 48. When Roosevelt took office, one-quarter of urban blacks were on relief, but less than 10 percent of metropolitan whites received government assistance.

46 On Mayor Thompson, see Douglas Bukowski, Big Bill Thompson, Chicago, and the Politics of Image (Urbana, 1998).

47 “DePriest Says Bar Foreigners for 10-Year Period,” Washington Tribune, Jan. 12, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

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Albert Johnson (R-WA), Representative John Box (D-TX), and Senator William Harris

(D-GA) which amended the quota system established by the Immigration Act (1924) by adding Latin-American nations – an effort to curtail the traffic of Mexican workers into the United States.48

On January 12, 1930, the Washington Tribune reported that Congressman

DePriest carefully observed the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization.

The Race Man speculated “if there are not 4,000,000 unemployed men in this country at present” who should have work “instead of admitting hordes of Mexican laborers?” He told a national official from the Chamber of Commerce, who opposed the measure, that southwestern white planters simply “wanted the Mexican because they work for less than American laborers.”49 On January 26, Oscar DePriest rallied support for his anti- immigrant jobs policy in a keynote address before the National Negro Labor Congress

(NNLC). The black politician elaborated a list of xenophobia demands. First, DePriest argued that the existing quota system should apply the entire Western Hemisphere and amended to exclude Western Europeans. Second, the Chicago representative proposed that the current allotment of “250,000 aliens a year should be stopped entirely for a period of ten years.” Finally, the Race Man advocated new legislation that would compel “every alien in this country who has not declared his intention to become an

American citizen” to pay a federal tax.50

48 Rick Baldoz, The Third Asiatic Invasion: Migration and Empire in Filipino America, 1898-1946 (New York, 2011), 163.

49 “DePriest Says Bar Foreigners for 10-Year Period,” Washington Tribune, Jan. 12, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

50 “DePriest Asks 10-Year Ban on All Aliens,” Chicago Herald Examiner, Jan. 27, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

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DePriest ultimately used a xenophobic jobs campaign to please a working-class audiences and voters facing a historic unemployment crisis. “Why should alien workers be permitted to come to this country to work in competition with American workers when they are not subject to the draft law,” the he pondered. “I was on the Pacific coast not long ago and saw aliens at work while native-born Americans were walking the streets looking for a job,” the Race Man complained.51 “Let the gates be closed for at least ten years,” he exclaimed, “it is the worst folly imaginable” to be “confronted with the spectacle of thousands of American laborers out of work and aliens permitted to hold jobs and set up unfair, un-American competition.”52 Oscar DePriest understood that immigration restriction was not only a makeshift jobs policy. He also realized if new legislation was enforced, it would undercut his Democratic opponents, strengthened by a century of European migration to Chicago.53

Congress only advanced proposals that targeted Mexico, Central America, and

South America. New quotas rescinded DePriest’s requests to cover Europe. His senior white colleagues only considered proposals that preserved a broadening whiteness.

Popular new restrictions used “Western Hemisphere” as vague terminology to mask bans of Latino immigrants, given that leading bills granted Canada “paper quotas” as

51 Ibid.

52 “DePriest in Favor of Ban on Foreigners,” Chicago Tribune, Feb. 16, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

53 Before Anton Cermak, a Czech immigrant, reached City Hall, Chicago’s mayors and councilmen were dominated by Western European immigrants and their descendents, especially from Ireland. In terms of proportion, immigration to Chicago peaked in 1890 when the foreign-born composed 40 percent of the city’s population. In overall numbers, Chicago’s foreign-born population peaked in 1930, when they composed 866,861 of the city’s 3,376,438 residents. The black population experienced dramatic growth from the turn-of-the-century through the 1960s. See, Cayton and Drake, Black Metropolis, 8-9; Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 17.

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large as 67,000. Many amendments ignored the northern border all together.54

Congressman DePriest’s legislative proposals failed, but his xenophobic response to unemployment was backed in mainstream black press. The Washington Tribune, which believed “Mexican labor is really a menace to American labor in the southwest,” supported DePriest’s ten-year immigration ban. Our southern neighbors “come to this country in hordes and work for a mere pittance,” the Tribune claimed, “big pay for them” that “helps to keep down the standard of American wages and lowers the standard of living.”55

The Pittsburgh Courier reported that even Southern Democrats “saw fit to go out of their way in an appeal to curtail foreign immigration that the Negroes might be able to fill limited opportunities in the labor world.” “The law of self-preservation has gradually crowded the Negro even from his position of manual labor control,” the Courier lamented. Nevertheless, the Pittsburgh Courier hoped Congressman DePriest and his unlikely allies from the Solid South were “on the right road for a solution.”56 The

Washington Tribune suggested that black citizens “should get busy and let their

Congressmen know their attitude on this important subject.” “Negroes are the first ones affected by increased immigration,” the Tribune remarked, “every foreigner coming here and getting a job means that there is just one less for a native American.”57

On February 20, 1930, DePriest told black Bostonians, “When numerous in a community… vote together regardless of parties.” The Chicago politician forwarded

54 Baldoz, The Third Asiatic Invasion, 163.

55 “Restrict Immigration,” Washington Tribune, Feb.14, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

56 “The Negro and Labor,” Pittsburgh Courier, April 12, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

57 “Restrict Immigration,” Washington Tribune, Feb.14, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

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himself as proof that urban blacks, “under wise leadership,” would receive “the balance of power” in cities dominated by whites, native-and-European born. “Vote for the candidate most likely to stand for your rights as Negroes,” Congressman DePriest demanded of Boston-area blacks. The South Side representative praised famous

Mayor James M. Curley, the city’s Democratic leader, who appointed two black citizens to city government. Moreover, DePriest’s Boston appearance highlighted Senator

David I. Walsh’s (D-MA) successful efforts to confirm Walter Cohen, a black man, to federal office.58 Four days later, in Altoona, Pennsylvania DePriest reiterated his plea for blacks to support “political leaders who will work for the laws helpful to the negroes and to refuse to barter or trade the vote.”59

In February 1930, Joseph V. Baker argued that Congressman DePriest was “the most representative personality of which the race can boast,” a Race Man “who by sheer force of personality has come to revive a tradition of… a Negro beneath the capitol dome.” In a nationally syndicated ANP column, Baker noted that the “Tall

Sycamore of the Prairies” did not posses “superior training” at a distinguished university.

He “can point with pride to the force of his dynamic personality… as the power behind his presence in the forum of the directors of this mighty nation.” “I do not exaggerate when I say that Mr. DePriest is at present the most popular living Negro,” Baker proclaimed. The ANP column’s effusive praise continued:

Oscar DePriest, a personality, that’s all. No doctor of so and so, no master of this or that, but… a man whose personality inspires confidence, whose loyalty to friends and generalness of caste respect implies honor…

58 “DePriest Advises Bostonians to Back Best Man Regardless of Ties,” Boston Guardian, Feb. 20, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

59 “Oscar DePriest Speaks in City,” Altoona Mirror, Feb. 24, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

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the lone spokesman of ten million Negroes… the one race voice, which the federal government is ‘bound’ to respect.

“No borough of the by-ways of the south… where it is almost a crime to call his name,” was unfamiliar with the Chicago congressman, Baker suggested. The South Side representative “has come from the only large city that dares to bring the ballot into play” when “human rights are staked.”60

On one hand, Oscar DePriest was an ambassador of ghettoization who ignored depression-era unemployment. On the other hand, the “Tall Sycamore of the Prairies” was a self-made legend of the Great Migration frontier that supported the NAACP and boasted influential allies in black mass media. “Year after year, our schools and colleges give to the race and the world hundreds and thousands of ‘letter efficient’ men,”

Joseph Baker lamented, “but where, oh where, can we find a plant creating some personalities, creating some leaders of men?”61 During Negro History Week (1930),

Congressman DePriest reunited nearly every living black representative from the

Reconstruction-era for an honorable return to Washington. In the nineteenth century,

John R. Lynch (R-MS) predicted that he “would live to see the day when another colored man would occupy a seat” in Congress.” However, the Chicago migrant never imagined that he would have “the honor and privilege of contributing to his election by… vote and personal influence.”62

On February 23, Thomas E. Miller (R-SC) joined Lynch, DePriest, and an audience of 5,000, at the Washington Auditorium for ASALH’s national celebration of

60 Joseph V. Baker, “Hon. Oscar DePriest,” Chicago Whip, Feb. 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

61 Ibid.

62 “Lynch Sees Prediction Come True,” Chicago Bee, Feb. 23, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

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black history. The morning of the event, Congressman DePriest hosted the former representatives and Carter G. Woodson for breakfast at the House restaurant. Later,

DePriest introduced Lynch and Miller to his white colleagues on the House floor.63

According to the Chicago Bee, the black congressman used the historic occasion to condemn Jim Crow and to express “keen disappointment at President Hoover’s failure to appoint a Negro on the Haitian commission.” DePriest, a known underworld ally, also commented upon the hypocrisy of a Congress and White House that more vigorously enforced prohibition than they protected black constitutional rights. The Bee reported that DePriest deplored congressional appropriations “for enforcement of the eighteenth amendment without a similar amount being appropriated for enforcement of the fourteenth and fifteenth amendment.”64

During Negro History Week, John Lynch praised DePriest and the Party of

Lincoln, but he admitted that “colored voters have no other option than to vote with the

Republicans whether they are in accord with the party or not.” “Thousands of colored voters are Republicans, not from choice, but from necessity,” the former slave regretted.

For Lynch and his people, Democratic ballots meant “voting to endorse, approve, and sanction every wrong of which he is the victim, every injustice from which he suffers and every right of which he is deprived.”65 Jim Crow and ghettoization systematically victimized Black America, but partisanship and the two-party system also paralyzed political empowerment. In a pre-New Deal age of “lily white” Republicans and Bourbon

63 “Yesterday and Today,” Washington Tribune, Feb. 14, 1930; and “DePriest Makes Speech,” Chicago Bee, Feb. 23, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

64 “Lynch Sees Prediction Come True,” Chicago Bee, Feb. 23, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

65 Ibid.

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Democrats, Oscar DePriest’s personality and race pride was more important to his reelection than policy positions.

On the South Side, Congressman DePriest grew critics, not only ambitious politicos who coveted his office, but also inquisitive black journalists. DePriest has

“spent more time on the road than in Washington legislating on behalf of his people,” one intrepid South Side newspaper claimed. “We have been severely criticized because of our attitude toward Congressman DePriest,” the Chicago World admitted, but the black editors were “big and fearless enough to say what it honestly believes to be the truth, regardless of the consequences.” “Sallying Over Country When Race

Needed Him to Fight for it in Congress,” read a World headline that attacked DePriest as an absentee representative. The World’s Julius J. Adams charged that DePriest

“has a sort of propensity for saying and doing things he shouldn’t say and do… [he] truly neglects to do the things he should say and do.”66

According to Adams, the South Side congressman could not honestly discuss facts because they were “political indictments.” The World deemed itself one of “the most progressive and constructive Negro newspapers in the country.” The upstart paper pledged to never “condone exploitation” or endorse “any politician or public servant who seeks to Hoodwink the public will.” A charlatan “will be branded before the very people he seeks to hoodwink,” the World warned. Nonetheless, the World could not compete with the Chicago Defender and the ANP, which provided positive press in national syndication for DePriest’s trail to Capitol Hill. Two decades earlier,

Congressman George White (R-NC) predicted that “Phoenix-like, the Negro will rise up

66 Julius J. Adams, “Congressman DePriest Sallying Over Country When Race Needed Him to Fight for it in Congress,” Chicago World, June 29, 1929, p. 1. OD Papers, Box 4.

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and return,” but he certainly “did not think he would return embodied in a man like

DePriest,” the World lamented.67

Mayor Thompson’s Republican machine, the engine of Oscar DePriest’s political career, crumbled under the weight of Depression-era poverty and Big Bill’s fulsome pride. In 1930, Thompson’s unsuccessful race for the U.S. Senate targeted former governor, Senator Charles S. Deneen (R-IL), and the McCormick family’s Chicago

Tribune. DePriest was left in the political cross-hairs of rival white Republican factions that sought to usurp him. The Tribune launched a campaign to persuade Defender founder, Robert S. Abbott, to enter the race against the incumbent. On January 6, State

Representative George T. Kersey (R-IL) told a South Side mass meeting that Robert

Abbott “has been on the firing line for the Race for over a quarter of a century.” The

Tribune’s coverage inspired Kersey to make a “public declaration of the intention to draft the most outstanding champion of liberty, freedom, and equality to all men and women, regardless of race, creed, or color.”68

George Kersey, Edward Wright, Louis B. Anderson and Earl Dickerson, a striving

Democrat, aligned with the Tribune and Senator Deneen to depose DePriest from

Congress and claim his position as Third Ward committeeman. “The whole story is news to me,” Robert Abbott insisted when he was besieged by reporters upon his return from a four-mouth European vacation. Kersey and Dickerson “assured Mr. Abbott of the support of all the factions and groups representing the best elements,” but the

Defender editor stated that he had no inclination to challenge Oscar DePriest.69

67 Ibid., 1.

68 “Ask Abbott to Run for Congress,” Chicago Defender, Jan. 6, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

69 Ibid.

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“Whenever our enemies want to rob us of such representation they get some other member of the race to oppose our successful one,” a syndicated black columnist remarked. “All this, Brother Abbott knows, we feel for sure,” the editorialist claimed.

The Race Man was “too loyal and wise to permit the Chicago Tribune, for years one of the worst enemies of the race in this country, to entice him into the race.”70 A citizens committee in faraway Denver, Colorado even published an open letter. “As loyal Race men… we are anxious that our group still have representation in Congress,” the pioneer blacks explained to Abbott, “a seat… will not add one iota to your fame as a publisher and a race patriot.” Abbott’s candidacy was certain to “have the effect of so dividing the strength of the electorate… as to prevent the election of a race representative.”71

The draft-Abbott movement failed, but Roscoe Conklin Simmons led a primary challenge against the “Tall Sycamore of the Prairies.” Simmons, a Mississippi-born migrant and the late-Booker T. Washington’s nephew, was a columnist for the Chicago

Tribune and a devoted orator for the Republican Party’s Colored Speakers’ Bureau.

Simmons’s primary insurgency displeased pragmatic black Americans, fearful of a split ticket that may propel a white politician to victory with a slim plurality. “What is it that

Congressman DePriest hasn’t done or won’t do that Mr. Simmons would have done or could do if he were in Congressman DePriest’s place,” the Black Dispatch asked. “The

‘so-called Big Negro’ so often serves as the race’s worst enemy,” the Oklahoma City newspaper reported, “he is like a crab… as fast as one attempts to rise, the other pulls

70 Editorial, “DePriest-Abbott,” Jan. 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

71 “The West Speaks Out on Threatened National Racial Crisis in Politics,” Denver Star, Jan. 25, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

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him back.”72 The Baltimore Afro-American argued that “a primary fight engendering bitterness and resulting in the defeat of all colored candidates” would foment “a nationwide resentment” that would depose “the heads of Chicago politicians responsible for it.”73

On March 20, weeks before the primary, the ANP reported Simmons’s bold prediction to “whip” DePriest.74 Yet, Simmons’s rogue candidacy was an affront to racial loyalty and black empowerment in Jim Crow America. “From all over the nation have gone letters and telegrams to Chicago leaders,” the Afro-American reported, thousands of demands for Bronzeville Race Men “to let well enough alone and support

DePriest.”75 The Pittsburgh Courier suggested “any attempt to defeat DePriest was political suicide.”76 According to the Chicago Reaper, “Never before have we had a congressman who has gone so bravely to the front for us.” The Republican representative, who also held party office on the South Side, “secured more positions for his [Third] ward than any committeeman of any ward in the city of Chicago.” The

Reaper intimated that DePriest’s opposition was rooted in petty jealously among ambitious black politicians, who “should remember that all cannot be given jobs at the same time… their time may come next.”77

72 “DePriest All Right,” Black Dispatch, Jan. 14, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

73 “Line-Up Shows 3 Colored, 2 White on G.O.P. Ticket,” Baltimore Afro-American, March 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

74 “Applause of Speeches and Epistle Sanction Buoy Simmons in Fight Against Oscar DePriest,” Associated Negro Press, March 20, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

75 “Line-Up Shows 3 Colored, 2 White on G.O.P. Ticket,” Baltimore Afro-American, March 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

76 “DePriest Conquers Simmons,” Pittsburgh Courier, April 10, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

77 Jasper Walker, “Congressman Oscar DePriest,” Chicago Reaper, March 21, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

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The Washington World endorsed Oscar DePriest’s primary candidacy a week before the primary. “Whatever may be the shortcomings,” the incumbent was “from every angle… far above Roscoe Conklin Simmons.” Congressman DePriest “has gone about the country like a modern Paul Revere arousing the Negro votes,” the World exclaimed. “He has been an inspiration to many… caused a general awakening throughout the nation,” the World explained. DePriest was not an absentee legislator, but a racial leader.78 The Chicago Defender’s early reports of the April primary results showed that “America’s first dark congressman in twenty-eight years” was leading

Simmons four to one.79 The Ohio Informer reported that DePriest’s renomination was

“splendid evidence that Chicago Colored People are capable of determining qualification, fitness and racial unity and racial loyalty.”80 Congratulatory telegrams poured into Oscar DePriest’s room at the Vincennes Hotel. “Tell the world I am going back to Congress,” the proud incumbent remarked to journalists.81

In the spring and summer of 1930, mainstream black reporters eagerly anticipated DePriest’s re-election. “Though this newspaper frankly has not always agreed with the activities of Congressman DePriest,” the Norfolk Journal & Guide maintained the Race Man “has been sincere, courageous, and inspiring.” The Journal

& Guide properly identified the structural limitations and cultural demands DePriest faced in Washington. The Virginia newspaper claimed:

78 “The First District of Ill.,” Washington World, April 1, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

79 “DePriest Wins; Judge George Defeated; Mrs. Ruth McCormick Swamps Deneen; Robert Leads,” Chicago Defender, April 10, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

80 “Oscar DePriest Nominated April 8th,” Ohio Informer, April 18, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

81 “DePriest Conquers Simmons,” Pittsburgh Courier, April 10, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

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Realizing the singleness of his position and the virtual impossibility of producing legislation in his own right, he has wisely set himself largely to the task of political education for his group. Believing that serving his underprivileged people is even a higher duty than actually representing his Congressional district… [DePriest] has had to accept the role of universal Negro race representative that the circumstances cast upon him. Any man cast into the role of people’s representative has a most difficult job cut out for him.82

Nevertheless, the Journal & Guide was joined by the Afro-American who pragmatically endorsed a Race Man politician by the standard that “no one has called… an ‘Uncle

Tom.”83

The Chesapeake’s leading black newspapers, whose readership came of age with the Great Migration, agreed that by fulfilling Black America’s cultural demands,

DePriest deserved re-election. Baltimore’s Afro-American proudly boasted that

DePriest, unlike his Tuskegee-bred opponent, “has not been quoted as saying that the

‘South is the best place for the Negro,” that “the southern white man is the Negro’s best friend.” The Chicago congressman’s “plain speaking” and political rhetoric “differs so radically from that popularized by the late Dr. Booker T. Washington that it has of necessity found warm friends and strong enemies.”84

Oscar DePriest, who purchased a life-long NAACP membership in 1926, used the association’s maturing lobbying campaign to buoy his re-election campaigns as the

Depression deepened urban poverty. In 1929, Walter White succeeded NAACP executive secretary James Weldon Johnson. According to Patricia Sullivan, the post- crash NAACP possessed high-profile leadership and a nationwide network of branches.

82 “Congressman DePriest’s Renomination,” Norfolk Journal & Guide, April 19, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

83 “No ‘Uncle’ Oscar,” Baltimore Afro-American, April 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

84 Ibid.

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Moreover, the NAACP hired full-time field workers, who facilitated the development of statewide organizations across America. White believed the NAACP’s future was in legal cases and Washington lobbying, both of which were advanced by black migration to segregated ghetto districts. During the 1928 presidential election, the Al Smith campaign offered White a job overseeing the governor’s race among black voters, which promoted a detailed study by the NAACP official.85

In “Analysis of Possible Effect of Negro Vote in 1928,” Walter White identified the swing-vote potential of concentrated black voters, even in relatively small numbers, where white ballots were split between rival factions and major parties. The executive secretary declined a position with the Smith campaign, but White’s analysis of black voting patterns shaped the association’s future.86 NAACP co-founder and Crisis editor,

W. E. B. Du Bois, possessed a different analysis of the 1928 election. On one hand, Du

Bois suggested that Solid South disfranchisement and lily-white Republicanism had eliminated the relevance of the black vote below the Mason-Dixon Line. On the other hand, the iconic black leader observed that northern suffrage in segregated ghettos facilitated politicization, but not necessarily community empowerment. The NAACP’s legal victories against the grandfather clause, restrictive covenants, and white primaries were evaded. Legal precedents were “without significance unless they point to fuller political power” and federal enforcement, Du Bois maintained.87

85 Patricia Sullivan, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (New York, 2009), 134.

86 Ibid., 134.

87 Ibid., 135.

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White and Du Bois differed in political ideology, but they shared high aspirations for both urban black organizing and the NAACP’s role in facilitating political power in

Washington. During the Hoover administration, the association matured through the strength of its urban branches – and black bloc votes – in the nation’s segregated cities.

In early 1930, the NAACP announced its opposition to President Hoover’s Supreme

Court nominee, Judge John J. Parker, a segregationist from Charlotte, North Carolina.

Sullivan asserts that the NAACP was “prepared to draw on the dynamic elements that made up the association and finally test its muscle in the national political arena.”

Parker, a federal judge on the Fourth Circuit Court, had a long, racist history in Jim

Crow politics, as revealed by the NAACP’s rigorous research. The Greensboro branch discovered Judge Parker’s victory speech upon becoming the Republican gubernatorial nominee in 1920. The southern Republican used the auspicious occasion to assure white North Carolinians of both parties that “the participation of the Negro in politics is a source of evil and danger to both races and is not desired by wise men.”88

John Parker denied such remarks, while the Greensboro Daily News, who reported his statements a decade earlier, feigned ignorance. However, the NAACP distributed the original article to journalists and its branches across the country. Walter

White urged urban black voters to contact Washington and warn that they will “hold their senators accountable for their votes on the Parker confirmation.” The NAACP executive secretary appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he professed that

Parker’s comments were a “shameless flouting of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments of the federal constitution.” In the weeks preceding the Senate’s vote, the

88 Ibid., 138-139.

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NAACP organized to substantiate its threat to support insurgencies against legislators who nominated Parker. Daisy Lampkin, NAACP regional secretary for the Midwest, and national organizer for the National Association of Colored Women, rallied her network of

250,000 black clubwomen for the anti-Parker campaign. According to Sullivan, 200 black newspapers, fraternal organizations, and churches joined the anti-Parker crusade.89

The NAACP’s anti-Parker campaign provided Congressman DePriest with a political crusade to distract voters from increasingly unpopular ties to Republican administrations, President Hoover and Mayor Thompson. On May 6, 1930, the night before the Senate’s confirmation vote, DePriest spoke before 2,000 at Baltimore’s

Shiloh Baptist Church. The Chicago congressman asked the black audience to consider “how the race would have fared if there had been a few more fellows like

Parker sitting on the Supreme Court Bench.” He continued:

You would not be able to vote in Baltimore. I would not be able to vote in Illinois and would not be in Congress. Parker is not only against me, but he is against you and all the black people.

The “Tall Sycamore of the Prairies” used the anti-Parker campaign to further aggrandize his status as a Race Man – to prioritize cultural pride amidst ghettoization. DePriest excoriated Dr. James Shepard, president of North Carolina College for Negroes before

Baltimore blacks. A token Shepard distributed letters and telegrams across the New

South that vouched for Parker’s goodwill across the color line. “I want nothing to do

89 Ibid., 139.

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with white-folk’s Negroes,” Congressman DePriest proclaimed, “I do not propose to affiliate with any Negro that forgets the Negro.”90

“I have always said if God would forgive me for being born in Alabama, I would never return there,” the southern migrant admitted, but “only a person who has been

‘jim-crowed, segregated, and persecuted’… a person who can understand our handicaps can lead us.”91 “So far as I am concerned, ‘Uncle tom’ is dead and buried and I pray that he shall not be resurrected,” the Republican Race Man exclaimed.

DePriest, Du Bois, White, and Tuskegee’s Robert R. Moton all joined forces in the anti-

Parker campaign, which marked a turning point in civil rights politics. On May 7, 1930, the Senate defeated Judge Parker’s nomination by two votes, 41 to 39.92 Congressman

DePriest claimed Parker’s rejection was “the greatest step ever taken to win respect for the Negroes.”93

The New York Times reported that “organized minorities are now in a position to wield a powerful influence over the Senate when the Supreme Court nominations are at stake.” The Christian Science Monitor reported that the anti-Parker campaign was “the first national demonstration of the Negro’s power since Reconstruction days.” By the anti-Parker campaign, the NAACP boasted branches in forty-eight states, which included each member of the former Confederacy. However, Parker faced more formidable foes on Capitol Hill. More than half of Senate Democrats voted against the

90 “Cancels N.C. Address,” Cleveland Gazette, May 10, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

91 Ibid.

92 Sullivan, Lift Every Voice, 140.

93 “Rep. DePriest Urges Election of Negroes to Party Committees,” St. Louis Daily Globe Democrat, July 16, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

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lily-white Republican, an avowed segregationist, for partisan purposes. Moreover,

Judge Parker supported “yellow dog” contracts, which provoked an AFL campaign that not only outspent the NAACP, but also rejected White’s overtures for collaborative efforts.94 Nevertheless, after the NAACP’s failure to secure anti-lynching in the twenties, Parker’s defeat marked the association’s new stature in Washington, which

Walter White quickly sought to amplify during the next election cycle.

In May 1930, the NAACP embarked on a national campaign to oust two vulnerable pro-Parker Senators, Henry Allen (R-KS) and Roscoe McCulloch (R-OH).

The Midwestern legislators hailed from states that boasted large, concentrated black constituencies. Most notably, Kansas City and Cleveland, were prime Great Migration- era destinations.95 DePriest’s speeches “on the block system of registration and voting,” which Clevelanders “put into practice at once,” produced three Race Men at city hall and elected a Race Woman to the local school board.96 NAACP field secretary,

Daisy Lampkin, and a young Roy Wilkins, editor of the Kansas City Call, mobilized black communities in both states, which added to the association’s membership rolls and coffers, as well97 Oscar DePriest capitalized on the success of the anti-Parker campaign and used the NAACP’s crusades against Allen and McCulloch to further his re-election prospects.

94 Sullivan, Lift Every Voice, 139-141; quotations from 141.

95 Kansas City’s black population grew by one-third from 1910 to 1920. During the same period, Cleveland’s black population increased by 308 percent, while Detroit and Chicago rose by 611 and 148 percent, respectively. Charles E. Coulter, Take Up the Black Man’s Burden: Kansas City’s African American Communities, 1865-1939 (Columbia, MO, 2006), 62; Kenneth L. Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870-1930 (Urbana, 1978), 157.

96 “No ‘Uncle’ Oscar,” Baltimore Afro-American, April 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

97 Sullivan, Lift Every Voice, 141.

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In Ohio, the South Side politician emphasized racial pride and self-help, not unemployment or residential segregation. On May 20, DePriest told an audience of

Toledo blacks, “Forget about social equality and social functions… be thrifty, work hard, and vote right… insist on your rights but do not be obnoxious.” As he campaigned against Senator McCulloch, the Race Man reminded black voters that “Social equality is a personal matter, not a race matter… the first and fundamental thing for the Negro… is to see that his conduct is above reproach.”98 In West Virginia, DePriest distributed mail lists of pro-Parker senators and demanded that “it is up to the voters to see to it that any man who voted for Judge Parker does not go to the senate.” “If they were from my state I would see to it that neither one ever sat in the United States senate ever again,” the Chicago congressman maintained.99

Oscar DePriest’s NAACP advocacy reignited a southern backlash that served to advance his re-election campaign. In the summer of 1930, DePriest accepted an offer to be the keynote speaker at the Mosaic Templars’s national convention on July 17.

The black fraternal order expected to draw some thirty thousand people and aimed to accommodate all “who wanted to see and hear the only Negro in Congress.” The

Templars moved the convention from Birmingham’s Sixth Avenue Baptist Church to the city’s Metropolitan Auditorium, which provoked the outrage of white Democrats and

Alabama Klansmen. J. M. Jones, Jr., President of the Birmingham City Commission invalidated a permit granted to the fraternal order, while the local Ku Klux Klan

98 “Proper Vote Use is Urged by DePriest,” Toledo Blade, May 21, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

99 “Negro Congressman Defies Ku Klux Klan in Address Here; Explains Parker Case,” Denver News, May 31, 1930.

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organized a mass meeting.100 On June 19, approximately one thousand Klansmen, dressed in full regalia, gathered at a black grade school in the Collegeville area, where the Birmingham Post reported that Congressman DePriest and white Communist, Tom

Johnson, were burned in effigy.101

According to the Associated Press, two placards were placed on the charred visages of the infamous political personalities. “Here lies the body of negro Oscar

DePriest… he believed in social equality,” one placard read. Johnson’s marker noted,

“He believed in communism and social equality.”102 The Alabama Klan grouped

Johnson and DePriest, natural ideological enemies, in their crosshairs because the white terrorists opposed any possible medium of black empowerment, from the

Comintern to the Party of Lincoln. For both Klansmen and Solid South Democrats,

Johnson and DePriest linked Dixie’s greatest existential threats. After the mock lynching, hooded Klansmen led a parade of their sympathizers through the heart of downtown Birmingham. As the segregationists marched past the federal building, they distributed placards which read, “Alabama is safe for white supremacy… It is a good state for good negroes, but a bad stage for bad negroes.”103

By nightfall, Klansmen terrorized the city’s black districts, which included

Graymont, Northside, and Barmash. Melvin Chisum, field representative for the

Tuskegee-based National Negro Press Association, witnessed the mob’s night ride of

100 “DePriest Cannot Speak in City Auditorium,” Atlanta World, June 20, 1930; “City Bars DePriest,” Boston Guardian, June 21, 1930; and “Bar DePriest from Speaking in City Hall,” Chicago Whip, June 21, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

101 “Negro Solon is Burned in Effigy Here,” Birmingham Post, June 20, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

102 Ibid.

103 “Alabama Klansmen Burn Oscar DePriest in Effigy,” Associated Press, June 20, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

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almost 2,500 who “fired pistols and machine guns” across Black Birmingham. Chisum drove “from point to point” as marauding Klansmen sang “Happy Days Have Come

Again,” which “seems to be the national anthem of the mobbers and the lynchocrats.”

“This is a frightful section of the uncivilized world,” Chisum admitted, “I believe this southern white man is becoming more bloodthirsty each day he lives.”104 “Law of

Jungle Yet Holds Sway in Dixie,” a Detroit Press News headline read.105 Despite

Birmingham’s white backlash, DePriest’s secretary, Morris Lewis, told black reporters that the southern trip had not been cancelled, “nor is there any inclination on the part of the congressman that there will be a cancellation.” “Mr. DePriest will be in Birmingham on July 17,” Lewis announced.106

On June 25, Congressman DePriest released a threat from Alabama Klansman to Washington reporters and black journalists. “Your presence is not desired in

Alabama… a white man’s State,” the Klan remarked. The AP claimed that the telegram was “from the State’s grand dragon’s office,” but “was not authorized by the State executive office of the organization.” Nonetheless, southern segregationists provided

DePriest with a prime opportunity to grow his Race Man credibility on the campaign trail.

The South Side politician told Washington Post reporters, “besides being a citizen he was a member of Congress and felt privileged to go where he pleased.”107 Birmingham

“boasts a large number of tax payers,” the Chicago Whip asserted, black citizens whose

104 “Alabama Kluxers Warn,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 28, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

105 “Kluxers Send Warning to Congressman,” Detroit Press News, July 5, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

106 “No Title,” Washington Tribune, July 5, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

107 “Klan in Wire Warns DePriest,” Washington Post, June 26, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

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rights and dignity should not be subordinated to “Klansmen and Negrophobists” who

“object to the militant Congressman from Illinois.”108

The Whip highlighted the personal opposition of Oscar DePriest’s “arch-enemy

Senator Tom Heflin.”109 In 1901, Heflin, a reputed Klansmen, led Alabama’s legal construction of Jim Crow statutes. “I believe as truly as I believe that I am standing here that God Almighty intended the negro to be the servant for the white man,” Heflin proclaimed at Alabama’s constitutional convention. “I do not believe it is incumbent upon us to lift him up and educate him on an equal footing that he may be armed and equipped when the combat comes,” the Black Belt segregationist reasoned.110 In 1908, an armed Tom Heflin targeted an “uppity” black man on a Washington streetcar, but he nearly killed an innocent bystander – a white man – in the process. The incident emboldened Heflin’s racist reputation and possibly enhanced his political prospects.111

When Oscar DePriest arrived on Capitol Hill, Senator Heflin told ANP reporters that he would personally “throw DePriest out of the senate dining room if he caught him eating there again” with congressional colleagues. The ANP reported that the feud persisted with no confrontations, “but it is not known whether that is because Mr. Heflin has been afraid to come on over;” or, because DePriest “has been afraid to eat there.”112

108 “Bar DePriest from Speaking in City Hall,” Chicago Whip, June 21, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

109 Ibid.

110 Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, (New York, 2009), 122.

111 William Pickens, “Allgood – All Bad!,” Baltimore Afro-American, Dec. 28, 1929; and “A Political Tangle,” Clarion, April 19, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

112 “DePriest Speaks Out When Alabama Democrat Resigns from Enrolled Bills Committee,” Black Dispatch, Dec. 26, 1929. OD Papers, Box 4.

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In the summer of 1930, Senator Heflin told the Washington Tribune that if

DePriest “would place his life in serious jeopardy” if he spoke in Birmingham. “DePriest has made many insulting remarks about me in any number of addresses all over the country,” Heflin fumed, “and my friends in Alabama resent it.” The Race Man’s journey to Alabama “would be very unwise… it would precipitate a riot, and might result in his being made unable to make any more speeches,” Heflin threatened.113 Despite death threats, Oscar DePriest pledged to honor his commitment to the Templars. Heflin and

Klan cronies would not stop DePriest from returning to the state where his parents toiled as slaves. The “Tall Sycamore of the Prairies” even suggested speaking outside in the humid summer air if segregationists denied black citizens access to the Municipal

Auditorium. In late June, the fraternal order ultimately moved its national convention to

Little Rock, Arkansas. Nonetheless, Congressman DePriest’s political profile was raised by a showdown with the Klan at the height of campaign season.114

Oscar DePriest’s conflict with Alabama Klansmen also emboldened his efforts on behalf of the NAACP’s campaign against pro-Parker Senators Allen and McCulloch. “I know the Kluxers get out and burn their fiery crosses,” the Chicago congressman told

Americans, “What of it. What does it mean? Battle the Klan and you will win the respect of every right thinking citizen.” DePriest claimed, “Any person who would condone the principles of the Klan in opposing negroes, Jews, Catholics, and the

113 “No Title,” Washington Tribune, July 5, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

114 “DePriest Going to Ala. Despite Klux Threat,” Black Dispatch, June 28, 1930; “Mosiac’s Move Meeting After Klan Threat,” Washington World, June 27, 1930; “DePriest Alabama Speech Canceled,” Washington Post, June 28, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

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foreign born is worthy of nothing but contempt.”115 However, the black congressman joined the Klan’s Democratic Party in supporting immigration restrictions as a nativist, non-solution to Depression-era unemployment. Klan hate submerged the Chicago politician’s xenophobic policies, which were accepted by ghetto voters who were engaged in daily conflicts with immigrant workers and homeowners.

DePriest hid behind not only race pride and nativism as “Hoovervilles” proliferated, he also leveraged anticommunism. The Great Depression demanded

“patriotic love of country,” DePriest told an Ohio audience, because “Socialists and

Communists are plotting the nation’s downfall.” “Let all the discontented people who want to destroy the American government be gathered and deported,” the Chicago representative proposed to Black Columbus. “Negro lend no ear to Communism,” the

South Side congressman told Black Atlanta, “it is not good for you because the Negro demands upon the white man for a job.” “America is a land where every man has a public school education afforded him and a land where anyone with ambition can go to college,” DePriest patriotically proclaimed. “Red” traitors “would destroy this land of opportunity.”116

Oscar DePriest’s xenophobia and anticommunism remained mainstream positions in urban black communities while he advocated for the NAACP’s campaigns against Senators McCulloch and Allen. In early July, the Race Man, who recently demanded black voters ignore “social equality,” released a private letter from Arthur A.

Flower. “Firstly I am white – what of it,” the Michigan resident boldly began, “no one

115 “Negro Congressmen Defies Ku Klux Klan in Address Here; Explains Parker Case,” Denver News, May 31, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

116 “DePriest Hits Reds in Talk,” Ohio State Journal, March 20, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

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asked me, before I was born… so I am neither to be commended or condemned for it.”

Two weeks after Judge Parker’s rejection, Flower was inspired as a spectator of

Congressman DePriest’s remarks in Grand Rapids. The born-again racial liberal wrote to the South Side politician:

I wish to ask you if there is any reason why I could not become a member of the NAACP. If the association is for the elimination of racial hatred, if it is for the banding together of colored people, not in a combative gesture but rather as a well organized league quietly asserting their rights as a citizen, then I am whole-heartedly for it and wish to become a member.

“I am only a working man and perhaps could not do a great deal,” Flower admitted, but he reasoned “with each member doing a little, when taken altogether means much.”117

The white liberal believed “racial hatred is the silliest and most uncalled for element in our so-called civilization.” Flower was raised “to hate no man without just cause,” and pledged to “draw no color line… until I can find some good, sensible reason why I should.” Oscar DePriest released Flower’s letter to publicize his re-election bid amidst the anti-Parker senate races. He was sure journalists knew he sent the

Michigan liberal membership information and responded his “feelings and sympathies are all for it.” DePriest also extended Flower an open invitation to discuss racial politics, personally, if he was ever in the nation’s capitol.118

By the summer of 1930, Congressman DePriest solidified his reputation as the nation’s leading Race Man on Capitol Hill. In Black Chicago, the “Tall Sycamore of the

Prairies” was emboldened by the nefarious designs of urban thugs. On September 11,

DePriest received a murderous letter from anonymous extortionists, the “Brooklyn

117 “DePriest Speech Converts New NAACP Member,” Chicago Whip, July 12, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

118 Ibid.

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Rats.” “We come to Chicago with the avowed purpose of assassinating you,” the criminals threatened, “we have been well paid for the mission.” The extortionists professed “no real grievance” against the Race Man, and “decided to play the middle against both ends.” The “Brooklyn Rats” were due $5,000 for DePriest’s life, but they offered to spare the politician for $10,000 cash and damning evidence “against certain high officials in Washington and Alabama.” “Show this letter to no one… positively tell no one about it,” the Rats concluded, or “nothing on earth will save you not matter how much wealth or influence you may have.”119

Despite warnings to the contrary, DePriest took to extortion letter to law enforcement officials, who organized a sting operation. On September 12, the congressman followed the extortionists’ instructions. He placed a personal advertisement, “I agree to your proposition,” in the Chicago Daily News, then left a package at the designated drop site, 17th and Wood Streets. However, the Race Man delivered $200 in marked bills, collected by Solly Lason, a milk truck driver, who was apprehended by detectives on the scene.120 Lason gave a full confession and named the masterminds of the extortion plot, which included: Aaron Moshiek, a notorious forger, Joseph Goldstein, a racketeer known as the “master penman,” and Julius J.

Link, whom the Tribune called “a minor politician” in the First District. Link was captured at his home, where Chicago police discovered a pistol, two sawed-off shotguns, and large amounts of contraband booze.121

119 “Forger Sought as Brains of DePriest Plot,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Sep. 15, 1930; and “DePriest Defies,” Washington World, September 19, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

120 “DePriest Traps Gunmen Who Attempt Extortion,” Commonwealth-Herald, Sep. 20, 1930.

121 “Forger Sought as Brains of DePriest Plot,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Sep. 15, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

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At the police station, Link was initially evasive with interrogators. However, the disgruntled prohibition-era politico relented when confronted with a mountain of evidence that confirmed his guilt. Detectives not only wielded Lason’s confession, they also located witnesses that confirmed Link’s sedan speeding away from the sting site.

In defeat, Link wheeled around in his chair and shouted at a nearby Oscar DePriest,

“You’ve got all the patronage in the district. I’m broke. I’ve been starving to death down here.”122 Within a week of the plot, Moshiek and Goldstein were also apprehended, and all men were subsequently charged with extortion by threat to kill and indicted by a

Chicago grand jury.123 The “Brooklyn Rats” were foiled, but Congressman DePriest received subsequent death threats. On September 16, he opened a letter which read,

“nothing can save you from ultimate assassination.” The Race Man made the death threat public, and the Chicago Whip quipped that the letter was the work of a “crank” and a courageous DePriest was “paying no attention to it.”124

The fearless Republican Race Man won re-election, while the NAACP’s anti-

Parker campaign resulted in the defeat of Senators Allen and MuCulloch. However, two other pro-Parker officials targeted by the association, Senators Daniel O. Hastings (R-

DE) and Jesse H. Metcalfe (R-RI), were reelected.125 Nevertheless, Patricia Sullivan argues that the “dramatic demonstration of independent political action marked a watershed in the development of the NAACP.” Walter White trumpeted the anti-Parker

122 Ibid.

123 “Indict Three in DePriest Plot,” Chicago Evening American, Sep.15, 1930; and “Held in Alleged DePriest Extortion Plot,” Washington Sentinel, Sep. 20, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

124 “DePriest Gets Second Death Threat,” Chicago Whip,” Sep. 20, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

125 Sondra Kathryn Wilson, ed., In Search of Democracy: The NAACP Writings of James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and Roy Wilkins (New York, 1999), 245.

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campaign “to further define and reinforce” black empowerment “in the national political arena.”126 The paralyzing political foundation for the NAACP’s success in November was great migrations to Ohio and Kansas, which grew ghetto districts more populous and powerful than black communities in Delaware and Rhode Island. Nevertheless,

White believed the NAACP’s legal and lobbying campaigns, under his strategic guidance, were the only roads toward racial justice – a path that did not veer Left toward organized labor or bleed Red for communism.127 According to Sullivan, White “was thrust into a position he suddenly seemed unprepared for” and “other groups rose up to address the deep economic distress plaguing black America.” The NAACP “struggled to maintain its footing and chart a new direction during the Depression decades.”128

Oscar DePriest neither proposed new state relief measures, nor did he preemptively petition for increased federal assistance from the Hoover administration as unemployment soared on the South Side. Hoover’s Reconstruction Finance

Corporation (1932) was too little too late for the banking industry and DePriest’s constituents, who faced material insecurity well before the banking crisis begot chronic unemployment.129 The self-made southern migrant largely advocated volunteerism, private charity, persistence, and a ten-year immigrant ban to boost the American labor

126 Sullivan, Lift Every Voice, 141.

127 Kenneth Robert Janken, White: The Biography of Walter White, Mr. NAACP (New York, 2003), xv.

128 Sullivan, Lift Every Voice, 144.

129 David M. Kennedy, Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929- 1945 (New York, 2005), 84. The RFC was chiefly an instrument for making taxpayer dollars available to private institutions for bailouts. Congress capitalized the agency with $500 million and authorized it to borrow $1.5 billion more for emergency loans to banks, building-and-loan societies, railroads, and agricultural firms.

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market.130 He survived damning Republican political ties as an NAACP advocate, but also as a Depression-era Race Man who told audiences, “We do not ask for social equality but only for equal opportunities.”131

Congressman DePriest won re-election, but Black America began to voice displeasure as the only black congressman ignored ghetto communities ravaged by the unemployment. In November 1930, “Hisses, Booes, and Cat-calls” greeted DePriest when he assailed Democrats and government assistance at a Detroit meeting of the

Wolverines Republican Club. “Detroit is the balance of voting power in the state of

Michigan” and “should be controlled by a republican,” the Chicago congressman maintained, “no public official has the right to use the tax payers’ money as a political football and dole when the people want work.” Even black Republicans were dismayed by DePriest’s implicit attack on Mayor Frank Murphy’s support for municipal relief efforts, coveted by the jobless, hungry, and homeless. The South Side politician argued the Great Depression was “simply a reaction from the democratic administration during the World’s war.” Furthermore, DePriest promised the Detroiters that “if a democrat is elected president it will mean four more years of depression.”132

“Negroes can’t send a man to congress from New York City for they all vote as democrats,” Congressman DePriest told Governor Franklin Roosevelt’s black voters.

“Then the uproar started,” the ANP reported. The visiting politician was “booed and hissed for five minutes, while “many people left the hall, others fired words back at the

130 “DePriest Says Bar Foreigners for 10-Year Period, Washington Tribune, Jan. 12, 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

131 “DePriest Hits Gold Star Mothers and Parker Cases,” July 1930. OD Papers, Box 4.

132 Robert A. Crump, “DePriest Treated Unkindly in Detroit,” Plaindealer, Nov. 13, 1931, 4. OD Papers, Box 4.

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speaker.” “If you people don’t soon get some work to do, you will not be able to boo much longer,” an irked DePriest sardonically retorted, “so boo on boys.” Police officers emerged to quell the chaos, but the Race Man ordered law enforcement to stand down as he battled with hecklers for another fifteen minutes. “You can vote as you choose but you couldn’t do it down south where most of you came from,” Republican DePriest reminded Jim Crow refugees that embraced liberal relief, “if the democrats were in power you couldn’t vote or boo either.”133

During Oscar DePriest’s first term, Illinois’s First District grew increasingly segregated and remained overwhelmingly committed to the Party of Lincoln. By 1930,

Chicago’s black communities were concentrated in 11 of the city’s 50 wards. DePriest’s district included the entire Second Ward, and a portion of the Third Ward, which were ninety-six and seventy percent black, respectively. Ninety-five percent of black

Chicagoans voted for Warren Harding, and Calvin Coolidge received just four points less in 1924. Herbert Hoover’s lily-white “southern strategy” cost him, but seventy-five percent of Black Chicagoans still voted for the embattled Republican.134 Neither the

Hoover administration, nor the Thompson regime, survived the Great Depression but

DePriest’s career persisted beyond the stock market crash and banking crisis. In 1931,

Mayor Thompson was defeated by the Chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party,

Anton Cermak, a Czech immigrant, who spent three decades growing a devoted, diverse constituency of ethnic voters on the North and West Sides.135

133 Ibid., 4.

134 Rita Werner Gordon, “The Change in the Political Realignment of Chicago’s Negroes During the New Deal,” Journal of American History, 56 (Dec. 1969): 584-603.

135 Bukowski, Big Bill Thompson, 232-237.

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Cermak’s election was not a mandate for clean, open politics – it marked regime change that birthed Chicago’s Democratic machine. An alleged profiteer in the

“bootlegging industry,” Cermak’s administration used local law enforcement officials to send a clear message to the Second Ward Syndicate and the Chicago Outfit – cooperate with the transition to graft and vice under Democratic rule, or suffer the consequences. According to Mark Haller, the Democratic mayor used targeted police raids on gambling and vice activities in the Second and Third Wards to annex

Thompson’s black bloc vote. Cermak created the foundation for a new era of machine politics before the New Deal provided novel programs and institutions that empowered

Chicago Democrats for the rest of the century.136

Congressman DePriest began his second term without Big Bill Thompson and the coercive arm of the Bronzeville underworld – the crooked foundation of his long political career. Yet, the South Side Republican survived both the Great Depression and the inaugural years of Democratic regime change and won a third term. Oscar

DePriest, without Thompson’s machine, was forced to rely upon a well-cultivated political skills and a formidable reputation among mainstream black leaders. In

December 1931, DePriest organized a nonpartisan, black political conference, or, as one journalist called it, a meeting for “keeping a NORTHERN BLACK man in Congress.”

Attendance included nearly three-hundred delegates, representing 27 states (nine from the South and four Border States), that spanned a Black America transformed by Great

Migration-era ghettoization. The most prominent delegations at DePriest’s national conference were from New York City, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Newark,

136 Mark H. Haller, “Policy Gambling, Entertainment, and the Emergence of Black Politics: Chicago from 1900 to 1940,” Journal of Social History, 24 (Summer 1991): 719-739.

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Baltimore, and Chicago. Furthermore, DePriest gathered an astounding array of black leaders.137

W. E. B. Du Bois, who increasingly considered socialist politics and segregated institutional development, led a committee investigating economic discrimination. Sallie

W. Stewart, president of the NACW, and former director of the NNBL’s Women’s

Auxiliary, led a conference panel on female political activism. Daisy M. Lampkin,

NAACP field organizer, presided over a discussion of lynching, which gained the most attendance. A civil service committee was co-chaired by Carl Murphy, editor of the

Baltimore Afro-American and Robert L. Vann, founder of the Pittsburgh Courier.

Another newspaper editor, P. B. Young of the Norfolk Journal & Guide, presented personal research on disfranchisement in Virginia. Garnett C. Wilkinson, assistant supervisor of Washington, D.C. schools, led a committee which examined the discriminatory disbursement of public education funds. Though Oscar DePriest’s conference gathered a generation of black leaders, the affair was contextualized by

Thomas Miller. The 88 year-old former congressman connected Reconstruction-era struggles to contemporary crusades for racial justice in Jim Crow America. According to the ANP’s Capitol Hill correspondent, the conference’s final resolutions included the drafting of suffrage bills for distribution in Congress, called for the enforcement of the

Fourteenth amendment and demanded suffrage for “every Negro of voting age.”138

Congressman DePriest’s stature in mainstream black politics grew, even as his constituents suffered historic rates of unemployment. The black politician’s presence on

137 T. W. Anderson, “DePriest Has Conference Started – Leaders of Interest Rally to Call for Political Emancipation,” Plaindealer, Dec. 11, 1931, 1.

138 Ibid., 1.

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Capitol Hill provoked the outrage of Bourbon Democrats, but a white backlash only enhanced DePriest’s credibility as a courageous Race Man. Moreover, Washington’s lone black representative linked his racial stewardship to the NAACP’s crusade to restore Reconstruction-era constitutional privileges reserved for whites. In 1932,

Congressman DePriest was reelected in a presidential cycle that contained Franklin

Roosevelt’s historic coattails. The South Side Republican’s third term would be his last.

The next chapter will explore Arthur Mitchell’s rise as a “token” for Chicago’s new

Democratic machine, which solidified South Side ghettoization and toppled the “Tall

Sycamore of the Prairies.”

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CHAPTER 6 CONGRESSMAN MITCHELL, “UNCLE TOM”: CHICAGO’S DEMOCRATIC MACHINE & THE RISE OF CIVIL RIGHTS POLITICS

In 1934, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal received a mandate in a midterm election that featured Arthur Mitchell’s victory over Oscar DePriest. The Republican

Race Man aimed to reclaim his seat from the newcomer next cycle, but President

Roosevelt’s coattails carried Congressman Mitchell to re-election over the “Tall

Sycamore of the Prairies.” The fraudulent former principal publicly challenged a crooked DePriest en route to re-election. “No man should hope to win an election by other than clean and fair methods,” Mitchell explained to DePriest, “Men who stoop so low as to engage in unlawful methods… should be tried in the courts of the State and

County.”1 Congressman Mitchell assumed an air of statesmanship above DePriest’s racial populism. However, the trailblazing Democrat was an opportunistic New Dealer who ruthlessly benefited from ghettoization and partisan realignment on the Depression- era South Side. In 1936, Roosevelt cruised to re-election, but nationally syndicated black journalists argued that neither Mitchell nor DePriest deserved to represent Black

America.2

The NAACP lost a steadfast ally when Mitchell defeated Congressman DePriest.

The GOP politician used the NAACP to submerge his criminal liaisons and

“blockbusting” real estate firm, but the Race Man poured attention and dollars into the association. Oscar DePriest supported the NAACP’s anti-Parker campaign and antilynching bills, but Congressman Mitchell proved an obstructionist rival of Walter

1 Arthur W. Mitchell to Oscar S. DePriest, Nov. 1, 1936. Oscar S. DePriest Papers, Chicago Historical Society (Chicago, IL), Box 1. Hereafter, OD Papers.

2 “Our Only Member of U.S. Congress Succeeded the Hon. Oscar DePriest of Chicago,” Cleveland Gazette, Feb. 1, 1936, p. 1.

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White’s association. On Capitol Hill, the former principal was as loyal to Chicago’s

Democratic machine as he was indebted to Black Belt planters for sharecropping schemes that funded West Alabama Institute. Mitchell prioritized personal ambition as

South Side deprivation reached new heights in the Depression era.

The first waves of the Great Migration persisted in the 1920s, when over 120,000 migrated to Black Chicago. The southern exodus decreased with Depression-era poverty – only 43,828 blacks relocated to Chicago during the 1930s. Nevertheless, a ghettoization process that propelled the careers of DePriest and Mitchell was aggrandized by the New Deal and deepened after World War II.3 On one hand,

Congressman Mitchell’s historic tenure marked the Democratic Party’s embrace of interracial politics after Reconstruction-era betrayal. On the other hand, the forgotten sons of Alabama slaves represented a paralyzing future for civil rights politics, premised on the strength of segregated urban districts. Mitchell spent four terms in Washington subjecting WPA jobs to machine sponsorship, “protecting” Democratic mobsters, obstructing anti-lynching legislation, and red-baiting the NAACP.

In April 1930, a black Boston Post columnist, Eugene Gordon, named

Congressman Oscar DePriest the second “most interesting negro in the United States.”

Gordon believed world-renown Tuskegee scientist, George Washington Carver, was more influential than the Chicago politician. Yet, the popular journalist argued DePriest was more interesting than W. E. B. Du Bois, who ranked third, and A. Philip Randolph,

3 Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race & Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (Chicago, 1998), 17. During and after World War II, the Second Great Migration was longer and larger than the first southern exodus. Blacks represented only 4.1 percent of the city’s total population in 1920 and just 8.2 percent in 1940. However, by 1950, black Chicagoans accounted for 13. 6 percent of the overall population, a proportion which increased to 22.9 percent in 1960.

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listed in the tenth slot.4 Oscar DePriest stood at the pinnacle of black political power in the early Depression years. The Race Man used his fame and political office to forward

Republican loyalty and free-market orthodoxy. He did not support material aid for his segregated, suffering constituency. Nevertheless, Congressman DePriest identified the political reality that partisanship paralyzed black empowerment. At the metropolitan and state level, black bloc votes were chained to the crumbs of machine clientage – the scraps of spoils after other coalition members were satiated.

In the spring of 1930, Oscar DePriest told an audience gathered near Thaddeus

Stevens’s grave that the “traditional adherence of Negro voters to the Republican party was doomed.” The black politician “predicted that a solid block, offering a ‘square deal’” and “wielding a balance of power… would before formed in Congress within a few years.”5 “Why should the Negro follow any party blindly,” the Chicago politician asked,

“The Republicans think they own us and people don’t do things for those they own.”6 In a rare moment of selfless leadership, DePriest, a staunch partisan, argued that coordinated black voting power was the road to recovering Reconstruction-era rights. In

Washington, DePriest recognized that the Great Migration produced the roots of an empowered Black America – if ghetto communities organized bloc votes and Race Men mobilized them for common objectives, as demonstrated by the NAACP’s anti-Parker campaign.

4 Eugene Gordon, “The Thirteen Most Interesting Negroes in the United States,” Wyandotte Echo , April 25, 1930, 1.

5 “DePriest at Stevens’ Grave,” Plaindealer , May 2, 1930, 4.

6 “DePriest Sees Increase in Negro’s Power,” Lancaster Daily, April 17, 1930. OD Papers, Box 2.

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The 1930 congressional elections, a referendum on the Hoover administration’s response to the Great Depression, produced demonstrations of black political independence; or, Democratic inroads, among major black voting blocs, such as New

York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. In 1931, Anton Cermak’s victory over William Hale

Thompson marked the birth of Chicago’s Democratic machine, which did not gain full control of the South Side’s Second and Third Wards until World War II.”7 Thompson’s defeat splintered black Republicans into rival factions and their Democratic rivals soon boasted political patronage, jobs, relief, and the most popular president in modern times. Oscar DePriest was freed from the grip of Big Bill’s machine, but the Republican did not make substantive efforts to form alliances with black Democrats.

The embattled black congressman clung to the Party of Lincoln and he supported the NAACP’s nonpartisan lobbying campaign. During the anti-Parker campaign, active national officers, local branches, and black block votes in Cleveland and Kansas City propelled victories over two incumbent senators. Yet, the NAACP failed to pass antilynching legislation and the association’s incipient legal campaign remained focused on equalization, not an explicit challenge of the Plessy decision. Moreover, direct-action protest, unsanctioned by the national office, emerged from renegade branches. “While other groups rose to address the deep economic crisis plaguing black America,” Patricia

Sullivan argues that the NAACP “struggled to maintain its footing and chart a new

7 See Nancy J. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR (Princeton, 1983), 287-288; Rita Werner Gordon, “The Change in the Political Alignment of Chicago’s Negroes During the New Deal,” Journal of American History, 56 (Dec. 1969): 584-603. In 1936, FDR gained 49 percent of the vote in Black Chicago, which doubled his showing four years earlier. In 1940, Roosevelt gained his first majority among black voters in the Windy City, or 53 percent, which grew to 65 percent in his final race. Presidential-level realignment occurred slower in Chicago than other cities, a testament to the Republican Party’s legacy among southern migrants on the South Side. In 1940, when FDR gained his first majority in Black Chicago, 81 percent of Black Harlem, 75 percent of Black Detroit, 69 percent of Black Philadelphia, and 67 percent of Black Cincinnati voted for the Democratic icon.

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direction.”8 During “First Hundred Days,” the NAACP and Congressman DePriest were both challenged by militant activists, unions, Communists, and a diverse, new generation of black progressives.9

In the early 1930s, no politician or journalist predicted that Arthur Mitchell, a recent transplant, would defeat Oscar DePriest and claim a seat on Capitol Hill.

Mitchell’s labors on behalf of Hoover’s election prompted a move to Chicago, where he observed a long-standing Bronzeville elite dominate Republican politics. An absence of

Republican opportunities and the GOP’s damaged brand after the Stock Market Crash promoted Mitchell’s pre-New Deal shift in party affiliation. According to his biographer, the future congressman was “a loner by nature” who “did not seem to posses the charm and personality required of Chicago politicians.” The new arrival lived on the South

Side’s social margins, sometimes recognized for “his tendency to rub people the wrong

8 Patricia Sullivan, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (New York, 2009), 144.

9 In the early 1930s, the Chicago NAACP’s members who led the city’s “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work Campaign” and direct-action protests over discriminatory practices at Sears department stores did so against Walter White’s orders. The NAACP leader feared the loss of Julius Rosenwald’s philanthropy, ever-more important in the midst of a historic depression. Also, White worried that direct- action protest, would paint the association “Red,” linked to the Communist Party’s hunger marches, unemployment and relief councils, eviction defense squads, rent strikes, and boycotts. The NAACP’s leadership used anti-communism to effectively frame themselves as patriotic, non-partisan, respectable activists that promised legal reform, not a radical revolution. On conflict and collaboration between the NAACP, Communists Party, the labor-left, see Beth Thompkins Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925-1945 (Chapel Hill, 2001); Dan T. Carter, Scottsboro: An American Tragedy (Baton Rouge, 2007); Glenda Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of the Civil Rights, 1919-1950 (New York, 2009); Robin D. G. Kelly, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill, 1990); Robert Rodgers Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, 2003); Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of American History 75 (Dec. 1988): 786-811; Michael K. Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (Urbana, 1993); Mark Naison, Black Communists in Harlem during the Depression (Urbana, 2005); Christopher Robert Reed, The Depression Comes to the South Side: Protest and Politics in the Black Metropolis, 1930-1933 (Bloomington, 2011); Mark Soloman, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936 (Jackson, 1998); Randi Storch, Red Chicago: American Communism at its Grassroots, 1928-35 (Urbana, 2007); and Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill, 1996).

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way.” Nonetheless, Arthur Mitchell was a workaholic. He spent most of his days at his struggling law office (417 East Forty-Seventh Street) and logged long nights at

Democratic functions in the Second and Third Wards.10

The former principal lacked popular appeal in Bronzeville as he had in Alabama’s

Black Belt. Yet, Mitchell significantly improved upon his ability to cultivate white clientage as Chicago’s Democratic Machine formed. In 1932, the Republican convert, backed with Congressman John McDuffie’s recommendation, secured a high-profile opportunity with the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The DNC, eager to recruit and train new black talent, tapped Arthur Mitchell as a “truth squad” to trail Oscar

DePriest’s re-election’s campaign on a West Coast tour.11 DePriest’s tour included

Great Migration-era destinations such as Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, and

Oakland, unconquered territory for the “Tall Sycamore of the Prairies.”12 Mitchell told the “truth” about DePriest’s beloved Party of Lincoln. He highlighted Hoover’s lily-white complicity with Jim Crow, made plain by the president’s nomination of segregationist

Judge John Parker to the Supreme Court.

In 1932, Congressman DePriest repeated a familiar Frederick Douglass retort,

“The Republican Party is the deck, all else the sea,” but he offered few substantive policies to address the Great Depression. “These are old words, DePriest admitted,

“but at this time they come home with terrific force.” The incumbent instructed Black

10 Dennis S. Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman: A Life of Arthur Wergs Mitchell (Columbia, Mo., 1997), 52.

11 Ibid., 41.

12 On black migration to California, see Douglass Flamming, Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America (Berkeley, 2005); William L. Lang, ed. Seeking El Dorado: African Americans in California (Seattle, 2001); Herbert G. Ruffin, Uninvited Neighbors: African Americans in Silicon Valley, 1769-1990 (Norman, 2014); and Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, 2005).

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America to trust in the Party of Lincoln and to have faith in the tenacity of free markets.13

Most importantly, the South Side politician reminded northern black voters that

Democrats still disfranchised their southern kinfolk. DePriest and black Republicans seized upon Franklin Roosevelt’s running mate, House Speaker John Nance Garner (D-

TX), as a wedge issue. “Cactus Jack,” pleased the Solid South and was the first of many compromises Roosevelt swallowed to pacify the party’s regional wings and focus on economic recovery. “We have enough of Texas already without putting John Garner next door to the white house,” South Side Republicans remarked.14

During the 1932 race, Claude Barnett devoted the Associated Negro Press’s

(ANP) resources to embattled Republican candidates, Congressman DePriest and

President Hoover. Barnett, a Tuskegee alum and publicity official for the Republican

National Committee’s (RNC) Colored Division, used Black America’s leading syndicated news service to emphasize the Democratic Party’s historic commitment to white supremacy. Black Republicans also rationalized the benefits of even a “lily-white”

Republican Party. The Colored RNC’s leaders argued:

We cannot afford to lose the ground we have already gained. The South controls the Democratic Party and we know that whatever the South controls means to do us as a race no good. While we may not be satisfied with the treatment accorded us by the Republican Party, we must select the lesser of two evils.15

13 Press Release, Oscar DePriest, “WHY THE NEGRO SHOULD VOTE THE REPUBLICAN TICKET THIS YEAR,” Sep. 29, 1932, in Claude Barnett Papers, Chicago Historical Society (Chicago, IL), Box 342. Hereafter CB Papers.

14 Press Release, “RACIAL INTERESTS IMPERILED IF DEMOCRATS GAIN FURTHER FOOT HOLD, CONTROL OF HOUSE AND SENATE COULD BE DISASTROUS TO OUR GROUP,” Sep. 29, 1932. CB Papers, Box 342.

15 Ibid.

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Congressman DePriest’s re-election bid was at the forefront of the Republican Party’s effort to resurrect Lincoln’s legacy and defeat Rooseveltian Democrats. His Chicago seat was Black America’s first line of defense against creeping white supremacy.

“The colored citizens of the U.S. face a grave menace in the impending election,”

DePriest proclaimed. It was clear the race’s “best interests” were with Hoover’s

Republicans, “on the Democratic side is hazard,” he believed. DePriest suggested that a Roosevelt-Garner victory would put the “South in the Saddle.” “History is replete with evidences of democratic regimes with their disastrous treatment of the Negro,” the congressman recounted, led by “the Ku Klux Klan and other similar organizations obstructing the progressive pathway of the Negro.” The Alabama migrant remembered

“Lynchings, burnings at the stake, discrimination, injustice and intimidation were the lot of our forefathers under the yoke of bondage in the reconstruction period.” DePriest asserted that the few black delegates at the Democratic National Convention, “fenced off by chicken coop wire and… not allowed to take part in the proceedings,” epitomized political enslavement.16

“It is strange how democrats have the temerity to ask Negroes in the North to support their ticket while in the South the democrats deny Negroes the privilege of participating in their local or national politics,” Congressman DePriest explained.17 In early October 1932, the ANP circulated a special press release that highlighted a recent conference between President Hoover and Republican Race Men. A month before the election, President Hoover fatuously lionized the GOP’s “friendship” with Black America

16 DePriest, “WHY THE NEGRO SHOULD VOTE THE REPUBLICAN TICKET THIS YEAR,” Sep. 29, 1932. CB Papers, Box 342.

17 Ibid.

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that “has endured unchanged for 70 years.” He disingenuously professed that the party

“pledges itself to the continued insistence upon his [black] rights.” Instead of ghetto bloc votes, menial labor, and machine clientage, Hoover identified interracial collaboration that “has borne fruit… evident in business, in the arts and sciences, in the professions… in the Olympiad.” “I shall sustain this pledge given in the first instance by the immortal

Lincoln,” the posturing president remarked as he promised “The right of liberty, justice and equal opportunity.”18

The DNC’s infant Colored Division dispatched black operatives, but the party did not address civil rights in its platform. Furthermore, leading Democrats were pragmatists, not moralists, and they did not calculate a permanent place for blacks in the party’s coalition. Hoover Republicans boasted a veteran Colored Division that featured a diverse cast of notable black leaders. Congressman DePriest, a leading member of the Colored Division’s Planning Board, was joined by, among others,

Mississippi Committeeman, Perry W. Howard, Dr. Lacey K. Williams, president of the

National Baptist Convention, NACW co-founder, Mary Church Terrell, Nannie Helen

Burroughs, co-founder of the National League of Republican Women, and Adam

Clayton Powell, Sr., pastor of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church. In an appearance with Congressman DePriest, Powell boldly predicted that Governor Franklin Roosevelt’s victory would mark the “beginning of the blackest year in the history of the modern world.”19

18 Press Release, “PRESIDENT HOOVER’S SPEECH AT WHITE HOUSE CONFERENCE,” Oct. 2, 1932. CB Papers, Box 342.

19 Press Release, “Untitled,” Oct. 3, 1932; and Press Release, “Untitled,” Oct. 25, 1932, CB Papers, Box 342.

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Arthur Mitchell was well-versed in Democratic talking points when he trailed

Congressman DePriest in California. The party’s upstart Colored Division and sympathetic black newspaper publishers equipped Mitchell’s “truth squad” with targeted campaign materials. “Franklin Roosevelt: A Leader in Progressive Democracy,” a mass-circulated pamphlet, argued that Black America was included in the Democratic nominee’s “plan to aid the plight of the forgotten man, absolutely and impartially.”

During Governor Roosevelt’s tenure “the Negro race was accorded its highest political recognition” in state history. FDR’s old age pensions were “a boon to hundreds of aged colored men and women” who “would be homeless and destitute were it not for this humane piece of legislation.” The pamphlet reported that 5,000 black New Yorkers over

70 years-old received monthly pensions, 3,400 of whom were Harlem residents.20

Nonetheless, Democratic propaganda focused more on the failures and slights suffered under Hoover Republicans than it promoted what Roosevelt offered to Black America.

“No Republican or Democratic President has displayed such gross indifference in appointing colored Americans to outstanding positions of responsibility and trust,” a pro-

Roosevelt pamphlet charged. The conversion stories of early black Democrats were also recounted in Roosevelt propaganda. S. W. Green, grand chancellor of the Knights of Pythias, listed several reasons why he was “Not a Hoover Republican,” while Arthur

G. Froe, recorder of deeds in the nation’s capital, called for the race to “Display

Independence.” Dr. W. G. Anderson, a former member of the New Jersey state legislature and two-time GOP national delegate, believed his loyalty to the Party of

20 Pamphlet, “To Colored Voters – Franklin D. Roosevelt – A Leader in Progressive Democracy,” 1932, in Arthur W. Mitchell Papers, Chicago Historical Society (Chicago, IL), Box 1. Hereafter AM Papers.

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Lincoln was worthless. Anderson claimed the Republican “habit has been to use the colored brother for voting purposes, to ignore him after voting day, and to gradually but effectively eliminate him from any place of consequence in the party.” Democratic propaganda also spread denunciatory remarks by Crisis editor, W. E. B. Du Bois, who claimed, “I cannot take seriously the platitudes and well-meaning generalizations” forwarded by President Hoover.”21

“The Negro in the United States today has less opportunity of achievement and less freedom for development than any other American group,” Du Bois argued. Yet, propaganda falsely implied that the NAACP leader foresaw a brighter future under

Franklin Roosevelt and a Dixie-driven Democratic Party. The DNC distributed propaganda that introduced Black America’s “forgotten political history” of cooperation with the party of their southern captors. “Long before slavery was a political issue,”

Thomas Jefferson freed his bonded laborers, forbid bondage in the Northwest

Ordinances, contracted Benjamin Banneker to survey Capitol Hill, and upheld the constitutional mandate to close the transatlantic slave trade. However, Abraham

Lincoln, “as a war measure, issued the Emancipation Proclamation,” Democratic propaganda charged. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it,” the pragmatic emancipator once told Horace Greely.22

Democratic propaganda for black voters described Reconstruction as a

Republican failure, and issued Frederick Douglass’s indictment as evidence:

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid.

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The government left the freed man in a bad condition. It made him free and henceforth he must make his own way in the world. Yet, he had none of the conditions of self-preservation or self protection… freed from the individual master, but the slave of society. He had neither money, property, nor friends… He was turned loose, naked, hungry and destitute to the open sky.

The DNC wisely sidestepped Andrew Johnson, vagrancy laws, sharecropping, convict labor, lynching, and the Ku Klux Klan, who “Redeemed” Dixie from “Negro Domination.”

Conversely, the Roosevelt campaign deceitfully spun “the early history of the American

Negro” as “the history of a Democratic movement, maintained in the face of bigotry and prejudice, and often at the cost of the fortunes, positions and safety of its sponsors.”23

The DNC’s message filtered down to South Side organizers, who circulated a pamphlet entitled, “The Rise of the Negro in the Democratic Party in the City of Chicago.” Black

Chicago’s Republican loyalty “was nothing less than political slavery” the pamphlet remarked, and the race is “making a determined effort to get out of it.” Mayor Cermak’s

Democratic converts were “undoubtedly not pleasing to Republican bosses” who

“always boasted of having the Negro voters in the vest pockets,” the Illinois Democrat suggested.24

In 1932, the Roosevelt campaign and municipal Democrats aimed to swing urban segregated districts, while Republicans desperately clung to ghetto bloc votes born of the Great Migration. The showdown between Arthur Mitchell and Oscar DePriest on the

West Coast marked ghettoization’s politicization of Black America, from sea to shining sea. The trailblazing Chicagoans first swapped blows in California’s leading destinations for southern migrants, Los Angeles and Oakland. Mitchell tracked

23 Ibid.

24 Pamphlet, “The Rise of the Negro in the Democratic Party in the City of Chicago,” 1932. AM Papers, Box 1.

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Congressman DePriest’s campaign stops at street rallies, church meetings, and private parties with influential contributors. Mitchell circulated propaganda widely, networked extensively, and even unnerved the incumbent on a few occasions.25 Only DePriest’s reputation was at stake out West, not his congressional seat. Moreover, Franklin

Roosevelt did not need Mitchell’s efforts to carry California. The charming candidate relied upon Hoover’s unpopularity for a historic landslide. However, in Chicago, Oscar

DePriest was re-elected and seventy-five percent of black voters remained loyal to

President Hoover. Mitchell and ambitious peers recognized that Cermak’s Democratic machine only generated twenty-three percent of Black Chicago’s ballots for FDR.26

The unscrupulous former principal believed his token services were exactly what the Chicago’s Democratic regime needed to conquer the South Side. According to his biographer, the West Coast trip established Arthur Mitchell “as an effective force in the party’s Colored Division.” The striving Democratic immediately aimed to capitalize on his surging credibility. After Roosevelt’s victory, Mitchell rallied members of the DNC’s incipient Colored Division with plans to form a black executive committee to press racial concerns, namely patronage access with the DNC and new administration. In January

1933, Mitchell organized a two-day conference of black Democrats from across the country. He secured the participation of corporate lawyer and veteran South Side

Democrat, Earl Dickerson. Moreover, Mitchell gained the cooperation of Pittsburgh

25 Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman, 42.

26 Gordon, “The Change in the Political Alignment of Chicago Negroes During the New Deal,” 592.

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Courier editor, Robert L. Vann, the first major black publisher to swap parties and join

Roosevelt Democrats.27

“If you and Dickerson are working together on this thing just drop me a line… and

I will invite the men that I know from Ohio, West Virginia, Indiana, and Michigan, who are really active,” Vann wrote to Mitchell. The Courier editor was confident that Mitchell and Dickerson could “take care of Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, and Kansas.”28 An overzealous Mitchell intimated that he could secure appearances by white party leaders, such as House Majority Whip, John McDuffie, Vice President-elect Garner, and

Mississippi Senator Pat Harrison, who effectively sold Roosevelt, a Yankee aristocrat, to skeptical southerners.29 A week before the conference, McDuffie informed Mitchell that

“neither Senator Harrison nor Mr. Garner could be at your meeting.” “Mr. Garner has never filled an engagement like this,” Congressman McDuffie explained, “while he appreciates the importance of the meeting from every angle.”30

The House Majority Whip also regretted to inform Mitchell that he would be absent as well. “I wish I could appear at the meeting,” McDuffie remarked, because “I think I could give those assembled some idea of the keen and friendly relations existing between our races in the South.” The Alabama congressman thought it was unfortunate to lose an opportunity “to give assurance of the appreciation of the Party for the support of the colored people in the last campaign.”31 On January 20, the Chicago

27Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman, 42-43.

28 Robert L. Vann to Arthur W. Mitchell, Dec. 22, 1932. AM Papers, Box 1.

29Arthur W. Mitchell to Dr. William J. Thomkins, Jan. 9, 1933. AM Papers, Box 1.

30 John McDuffie to Arthur W. Mitchell, Jan. 14, 1933. AM Papers, Box 1.

31 Ibid.

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conference became a segregated affair, but in effect, one of the first caucuses of black

Democrats in American history. In addition to Mitchell, the toastmaster, Dickerson, and

Vann, conference attendees included: Truman H. Gibson, President of Supreme Liberty

Life Insurance Company, whose son joined Roosevelt’s “Black Cabinet,” Edith

Sampson of Cook County’s Juvenile Court, the first black delegate to represent the U.S. at the United Nations, and Illinois Assistant Attorney General, Nathan K. McGill, corporate attorney for Robert S. Abbott’s publishing empire.32

The West Coast tour and Chicago conference raised Arthur Mitchell’s national profile, but the Windy City gathering did not produce the sustained organization he hoped. Mitchell used Congressman McDuffie’s patronage, service to the DNC, and surging credibility with black professionals to engineer his own path to Capitol Hill. On

March 11, 1933, he informed Congressman McDuffie of his rising aspirations. “I wish to say that I am interested in doing something substantial in the way of helping many thousands of Negroes who during the past fifteen years have left the farms in the

South,” Mitchell professed to his patron. The native Alabamian was certain that “the nearly fifty millions of dollars” appropriated by Springfield and Washington “could have been used to a far better advantage had this money been loaned to the people with the distinct understanding that they would immediately locate themselves on farms and… purchase stock, cattle, hogs, chickens and seed for planting purposes.”33

During the first week of Roosevelt’s “First Hundred Days,” Arthur Mitchell privately confessed to McDuffie that many blacks “receiving doles from the

32 Program, “Banquet Given in Honor of Democratic Visitors to Chicago by the Committee of Non- Partisan Chicago Citizens,” Jan. 21, 1933. AM Papers, Box 1.

33 Arthur W. Mitchell to John McDuffie, March 11, 1933. AM Papers, Box 1.

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government… are being less interested in helping themselves, and far less inclined to work for a living.”34 By May, the former principal remarked, “Nothing has pleased me more than to watch the fine service you have so ably rendered President Roosevelt and the Party in bringing about legislation which I firmly believe will save our nation and country.”35 Less than a month after Mayor Anton Cermak’s assassination, Mitchell recommended his token services to Illinois Governor Henry Horner, Patrick Nash,

Chairman of the Cook County Democratic party, and Edward J. Kelly, Chief Engineer of the Sanitary District and President of the South Park Board. “The Republican Party is doing everything it can to discourage the growth of the Democratic vote among the

Negroes in states where they vote in large numbers,” Mitchell warned.36

“I am sure that to elect a Democratic Mayor to succeed the late Mayor Cermak the votes of Negroes in Chicago’s South Side will be greatly needed,” the upstart politician claimed. Mitchell suggested, “Nothing would do more to help us… to corral a large number of Democratic votes… than the immediate appointment of a few credible race representatives to the State’s Attorney’s Office and in the Corporation Counsel’s

Office in Chicago.” “I have no selfish interest in making this observation,” a calculating

Mitchell professed, “but I am vitally interested in… maintaining the Democratic strength we have in Chicago among my people.”37 On April 13, the Chicago City Council, at the insistence of Patrick Nash, co-founder and inheritor of Cermak’s Democratic

34 Ibid.

35 Arthur W. Mitchell to John McDuffie, May 3, 1933. AM Papers, Box 1.

36 Arthur W. Mitchell to Thomas J. Courtney, Judge Harry M. Fischer, Edward J. Kelly, Patrick A. Nash, and John J. Sullivan, March 11, 1933. AM Papers, Box 1.

37 Ibid.

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organization, elected Mayor Edward Kelly. The new mayor received a congratulatory letter from Arthur Mitchell, who suggested “the best thinking Negroes of Chicago, regardless of party affiliations, have the highest respect for you and unshaken confidence in your honesty and integrity.” “We believe with your leadership the second and third wards will swing to the Democratic Party,” he concluded.38

In May 1933, Arthur Mitchell made his selfish political designs explicit. “I know your interest in me and your influence with the administration will result in my being taken care of,” he wrote to Congressman McDuffie, “Heretofore the republican party has used two or more colored lawyers in the department of justice away from Washington.

It is work of his kind I should be interested in.”39 On June 29, McDuffie’s recommendation letter to DNC Chairman James A. Farley, Roosevelt’s campaign manager, suggested much more than a civil service position. “I do not know any colored man in the country who is a more active and loyal Democrat,” the House

Majority Whip exclaimed, “There is a probability of his succeeding Oscar DePriest.”

McDuffie suggested the fraudulent former principal “is a man of the highest integrity and very fine ability,” truly “one of the outstanding representatives of the colored voters of

America.” “My confidence in him prompts me to unqualifiedly endorse him…He would serve with distinction in any position he might assume,” the Alabama congressman concluded. 40

Arthur Mitchell solicited patronage at the highest levels of the Democratic Party, but his token value to white ward leaders in the Chicago machine proved essential in

38 Arthur W. Mitchell to Edward J. Kelly, April 15, 1933. AM Papers, Box 1.

39 Arthur W. Mitchell to John McDuffie, May 3, 1933. AM Papers, Box 1.

40 John McDuffie to James A. Farley, June 29, 1933. AM Papers, Box 1.

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elevated him to historic heights. The late Anton Cermak did not seek black votes, eliminated many of the patronage positions a beloved Big Bill granted to South Side constituents, and disciplined Republican gamblers and racketeers in the Second and

Third Wards.41 Mayor Kelly promised to return Thompson-era political recognition, patronage, and protected “numbers” syndicates to earn Black Chicago’s loyalty. In

1932, the Kelly-Nash regime appointed Michael “Ed” Sneed, a black Republican convert, as Democratic Committeeman. Sneed’s position was a gesture of goodwill to the Third Ward while the rest of the city’s fifty wards were led by white officials.

Democratic Committeeman, Joseph Tittinger, an embattled white lieutenant, relied upon the machine’s coercive power for his influence in a segregated Second Ward with an overwhelming black majority.42

Tittinger was convinced the only way he could survive popular demands for race representation and his removal was to elect a black Democrat in Oscar DePriest’s congressional seat. In early 1934, Tittinger met Arthur Mitchell, a cold pragmatist with political potential. On January 12, the aspiring black Democrat wrote to Tittinger and confirmed his desire to enter the race for Illinois’s First Congressional District. “I have given twenty years active service to the public,” the former principal claimed, “I have fine connections in Washington” and “a large following among substantial colored citizens of the city of Chicago.” Mitchell dodged his shady past in the Alabama Black Belt and

41 John Kass, “Cermak’s Death Offers Lesson in Chicago Way,” Chicago Tribune, March 7, 2013. A large contingent of Chicago journalists, politicians, and residents believe Cermak’s assassination was a hit by the Chicago Outfit, orchestrated by Frank “The Enforcer” Nitti while Capone was incarcerated on tax evasion charges. On February 15, 1933, Cermak was murdered in Miami, after his personal bodyguards botched a hit on Nitti, who was shot three times but survived. Cermak ended Thompson’s underworld diplomacy with the Outfit and sought to bend the mob to his will. Clearly, the mayor miscalculated.

42 Gordon, “The Change in the Political Alignment of Chicago Negroes During the New Deal,” 596-597.

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exaggerated his influence as a recent transplant, but he effectively communicated his loyalty to party and power over his people. “I wish to emphasize… that I have no desire to run as an independent candidate and have not considered any such thing,” Mitchell professed. “I am interested in the success of the Democratic Party in our city and state and believe that we can succeed only as we work through it and with our leaders,” the future congressman declared.43

On January 30, 1934, Joseph Tittinger announced Arthur Mitchell’s candidacy before a Second Ward crowd celebrating Franklin Roosevelt’s birthday.44

Congressman McDuffie eagerly forwarded an updated endorsement to DNC Chairman

Farley, which read, “This man, Mitchell, is a very excellent citizen” who “enjoys the esteem and respect of all those who know him.” “He would be a decided improvement over the Republican Member, DePriest,” McDuffie told Farley, and he hoped the DNC would “find it feasible to lend its support.”45 On March 6, McDuffie trumpeted his trusted black client to Mayor Kelly and Patrick Nash as a “thoroughly dependable” ally that deserved a seat alongside him in Washington.46

“I do not know if endorsements have been made,” Nash replied to McDuffie, “but

I assure you I will see what I can do toward complying with your request.”47 On March

22, Mitchell thanked Edward Kelly for a public endorsement at a meeting of Second

43 Arthur W. Mitchell to Joseph F. Tittinger, Jan. 12, 1934. AM Papers, Box 1.

44 Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman, 51.

45 John McDuffie to James A. Farley, Feb. 7, 1934. AM Papers, Box 1.

46 John McDuffie to Edward J. Kelly and Patrick A. Nash, March 6, 1934. AM Papers, Box 1.

47 Patrick A. Nash to John McDuffie, March 16, 1934. AM Papers, Box 1.

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Ward Democrats.48 Nonetheless, Kelly and Nash did not bend to Tittinger and

McDuffie’s recommendations. The Chicago machine did not compel the district’s political organizations to support Arthur Mitchell’s primary bid. Democratic committeemen in the white majority First, Fourth, and Eleventh Wards, which accompanied Bronzeville in Illinois’s First District, supported Harry Baker’s rematch with

Oscar DePriest. In the April primary, Baker (7,236) narrowly defeated Mitchell (6,812), but the Democratic nominee died of heart failure before the general election.49

After Baker’s death, the Kelly-Nash machine formally accepted Mitchell’s candidacy. Mayor Kelly privately assured Mitchell that it was his pleasure to endorse him at the Regal Theatre. “I have a world of confidence in you,” Kelly wrote, “I feel certain that when you are elected you will represent your district in such a manner as to reflect credit not only upon yourself but upon those whose confidence you merit and enjoy.”50 Mitchell, an unapologetic opportunist, proved the perfect token to depose

Congressman DePriest and aggrandize the Democratic regime. Black Democrats rallied behind Mitchell’s candidacy, a veritable unknown, against the legendary “Tall

Sycamore of the Prairies.” “I rejoice in the expectancy of seeing a colored Democrat from the First Illinois District,” Earl Dickerson assured Mitchell, “All of us who support

President Roosevelt, as I most enthusiastically do, will be found on your side in

November.”51

48 Arthur W. Mitchell to Edward J. Kelly, March 22, 1934. AM Papers, Box 1.

49 Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman, 54.

50 Edward J. Kelly to Arthur W. Mitchell, Aug. 13, 1934. AM Papers, Box 2.

51 Earl Dickerson to Arthur W. Mitchell, Aug. 3, 1934. AM Papers, Box 2.

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In August 1934, black Democrats on the South Side formed a Citizens

Committee to engineer Mitchell’s campaign operation. On August 7, Albert S.

Beckham’s public letter informed the Citizens Committee of Mitchell’s “unusual fitness” for public office. He is “essentially what we call a ‘Race Man,’” Beckham explained to voters. Beckham asserted that he had known Mitchell for a decade, a period in which the “fearless” Democratic nominee demonstrated that he was “lawyer of outstanding ability and intelligence... a genuine friend to the race… willing to fight its battles.” “Mr.

Mitchell knows how to handle white opposition and the history of his progress indicates that he gets results,” Beckham noted of the former principal.52 After a request to “talk

Turkey” with the Democratic nominee, Caswell Crews, a black GOP loyalist, formed an organization of Mitchell Republican Boosters to mobilize South Side voters making a historic leap from the Party of Lincoln.53

On August 27, Crews, former president of Oscar DePriest’s Third Ward organization, expressed his appreciation for the opportunity to work on Mitchell’s campaign. He was confident “we have no man in the race better qualified… You have intelligence, poise, courage, honesty, and a clean record.” “I am still a Republican,”

Crews admitted, but “I am a firm believer in the policies of the present president.” The

Chicago Defender printed Crews’s endorsement and announced broken ranks among

South Side Republicans. “I am glad to use my influence to send you to Congress… to help with the… greatest social, political, and economic program ever offered for the

52 Albert S. Beckham to the Citizens Committee for A. W. Mitchell for Congress, Aug. 7, 1934. AM Papers, Box 2.

53 Arthur W. Mitchell to Caswell W. Crews, Aug. 14, 1934. AM Papers, Box 2.

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American people,” Crews concluded. “You may count on me and my friends not only to work for you, but to work untiringly for your election,” he promised.54

Arthur Mitchell also secured the high-profile support of Harvard-trained black philosopher, Alain Locke, famed publisher of The New Negro (1925). “I can sincerely say that I see the greatest necessity for representation on a higher plane of politics and with a voice in the present administration,” Locke confessed to Mitchell. In 1932, the

Howard professor voted for Roosevelt. He was “even more enthusiastic” upon news of

Mitchell’s congressional bid. The Chicago Democrat graciously accepted Locke’s encouragement and the academic’s $25 campaign contribution.55 “It would do you good to see the strategy I have used,” Mitchell replied to Locke, “DePriest has been beaten and out-generaled at every stage of the game.” In early October, a confident Mitchell predicted, “My outlook is brighter everyday… I shall have to continue to… hit it hard, to see that there is no slip in affairs… but I am just as sure of winning as if the election had already been held and my victory officially pronounced.”56

The Democratic challenger was a newcomer to Windy City politics, but he developed an effective political strategy that exploited Congressman DePriest’s vulnerably and marshaled machine endorsements and Roosevelt’s coattails. On

October 4, Mitchell challenged the Republican incumbent to four debates in public letter his campaign circulated to black journalists. “I feel that by doing this we can take the issues of the campaign, without bombast or camouflage, direct to the voters,” Mitchell

54Caswell W. Crews to Arthur W. Mitchell, Aug. 27, 1934; “Republican Leader Goes into Mitchell’s Camp; Tells Why,” Chicago Defender, Sep. 1, 1934. AM Papers, Box 2.

55 Alain Locke to Arthur W. Mitchell, Sep. 22, 1934. AM Papers, Box 2.

56 Arthur W. Mitchell to Alain Locke, Oct. 6, 1934. AM Papers, Box 2.

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explained to DePriest.57 The challenger shrewdly sought a public forum in which FDR’s record of relief, and Mayor Kelly’s political recognition, would stand in stark contrast to

DePriest’s libertarianism and stale Republican rhetoric. “I am in sympathy with… and stand 100% for the New Deal,” Mitchell claimed, but “this does not mean that the program has been perfect in every respect.” Most importantly, the black Democrat denounced DePriest’s beloved Party of Lincoln, which “sought the destruction of this program without offering any substitute which promises any kind of relief.”58

The Mitchell campaign forwarded a series of difficult questions to Congressman

DePriest, whose record of race pride meant little amidst the deepening depression.

Mitchell pressed the Republican incumbent to go on public record against major aspects of New Deal policy and emerging liberal statecraft. “Would you close the relief stations and stop feeding the hungry?” the New Dealer asked, “stop all public work… repeal the guarantee to labor of the right of collective bargaining?” Mitchell’s inquisition continued,

“Would you restore the old banking methods… recall to power the old time financiers… allow the unregulated sale of stocks and bonds by which the investors, including the estates of widows and orphans, were plundered?” “Have you any program by which you plan to hasten recovery,” the Democratic challenger asked, “if so, what is it?”59

Mitchell’s offensive placed the Republican incumbent in a defensive posture.

Congressman DePriest dodged debate challenges and hid from his stalking rival during a contentious campaign. The Chicago World reported that DePriest’s refusal to debate

57 Arthur W. Mitchell to Oscar S. DePriest, Oct. 4, 1934. AM Papers, Box 2.

58 Citizens’ New Deal – Mitchell for Congress to Oscar S. DePriest, Oct. 3, 1934. AM Papers, Box 2.

59 Ibid.

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stirred undecided voters and was “sure proof he is afraid to discuss the issues… with the able Democratic candidate.” DePriest offered “no logical reason for not going to the platform,” just “those old flimsy excuses… resorted to by one who fears that he may be shown up by an opponent.” Furthermore, the World argued that the incumbent’s political cowardice meant he clearly could not “hold his own on the floor of Congress when trying to put forth any bill that might benefit his constituents.”60

“Fear of Mitchell Strikes Terror to DePriest Cohorts,” the Pittsburgh Courier reported, the “leather-lunged, silver-haired Republican representative… has his back against the wall.” The Courier argued that Mitchell’s candidacy boasted “the unqualified support of the regular Democratic party of Chicago and Cook County” and “seems to bear out an early campaign prediction that a Negro would be found who would ‘take’

Oscar.” On October 4, a Courier correspondent observed Congressman DePriest

“almost with tears in his eyes” at a Republican meeting, where he “beseeched the folks” to stand by the Republican “ship, all else the sea.” The Courier believed “Mitchell seems to have everything his way” because “under FDR and the New Deal a lot has been done for Negroes living in Chicago’s normally Republican wards.” Public works projects and relief has “taken thousands out of the breadlines and made them real men and women again. It is still doing it and these folks here at least seem to be waking up.”61

Congressman DePriest revised his refusal to debate upon negative publicity. “I wish you would clear up some matters in the minds of the people before I consider a

60 “DePriest Refuses to Meet Mitchell in Open Debate,” Chicago World, Oct. 6, 1934. AM Papers, Box 2.

61 “Fear of Mitchell Strikes Terror to DePriest Cohorts,” Pittsburgh Courier, Oct. 6, 1934. AM Papers, Box 2.

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debate,” DePriest requested in an open letter. “If you will kindly publish your correspondence with Congressman McDuffie… your principal sponsor in this campaign… I will then seriously think about going on the platform with you,” he assured

Mitchell.62 Mitchell replied, “You adroitly side-step the matter of answering me… whether or not you are willing to go before the people… and discuss the issues of the campaign… I am not surprised by your refusal, for that is really what it is.” Arthur

Mitchell enclosed “a verbatim copy” of a letter from McDuffie, which he falsely implied was the only one in the furtherance of public office. “It is too bad you did not ask for this information before you bruised yourself,” he retorted. “Your voting record on many of the outstanding New Deal measures has been against the interest of the people you represent,” Mitchell proclaimed. The emboldened challenger reiterated his demand that

DePriest confront him in open debate. He concluded, “You are not afraid are you?”63

Arthur Mitchell effectively fought Congressman DePriest into a corner, but the young politician struggled to fund his campaign. “I am in need of some financial assistance in order to win,” Mitchell wrote to DNC Chairman James Farley, whose recent endorsement letter was “a big help” to his campaign. “I have spent more than

$2,000 of my own money and now find myself somewhat handicapped,” Mitchell confessed in a humble plea for DNC funds (which included newspaper clippings of his success on the campaign trail). By October, the Cook County Democratic Party provided Mitchell with just $250 and he lacked the finances to “wage the vigorous campaign necessary… to educate colored voters on the issues and to expose the

62 Oscar S. DePriest to Arthur W. Mitchell, Oct. 14, 1934. AM Papers, Box 2.

63 Arthur W. Mitchell to Oscar S. DePriest, Oct. 15, 1934. AM Papers, Box 2.

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hypocrisy of our present Congressman.”64 “I am pleased to write you to offer my aid and services in your fight for the suffrage of your people,” Farley replied to the ambitious

Democrat.65 However, the DNC chairman did not facilitate funds for Mitchell’s campaign, even after Congressman McDuffie made multiple requests.

McDuffie, a devoted patron, was personally unable to contribute to funds in the furtherance of his client’s historic endeavor. “Unfortunately, I have had so many burdens in the last year… it is difficult to keep my head above water,” he explained, “If I could possibly do so, it would be a pleasure to contribute to your campaign.” McDuffie suggested that Mitchell approach the Democratic National Congressional Committee

(DNCC).66 “I am exceedingly sorry that I am not in a position to make a contribution,”

Congressman Joseph W. Byrns (D-TN), DNCC chairman, wrote to Mitchell, “My

Committee has no funds.” “I am even compelled to pay my own personal expenses,”

Byrns complained, “which will undoubtedly amount to a great many hundred dollars.” 67

“I am taking no part in political issues outside of my own state,” DNCC secretary,

Congresswoman Isabella Greenway (D-AZ) responded to Mitchell.68 Congressman

Patrick Drewry (D-VA), Chairman of the DNCC’s Executive Committee definitively stated, “This Committee has no campaign funds and has no allotment from the National

Committee.”69

64 Arthur W. Mitchell to James A. Farley, Oct. 3, 1934. AM Papers, Box 2; Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman, 66.

65 James A. Farley to Arthur W. Mitchell, Oct. 4, 1934. AM Papers, Box 2.

66 John McDuffie to Arthur W. Mitchell, Sep. 21, 1934. AM Papers, Box 2.

67 Joseph W. Byrns to Arthur W. Mitchell, Oct. 8, 1934. AM Papers, Box 2.

68Isabella Greenway to Arthur W. Mitchell, Sep. 24, 1934. AM Papers, Box 2.

69 Patrick Drewry to Arthur W. Mitchell, Sep. 28, 1934. AM Papers, Box 2.

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In the final weeks of the campaign, Mitchell sent more urgent pleas to the DNC.

“I am sure you realize the far reaching importance of my election,” the Democratic candidate wrote to James Farley, “There are more than a dozen states north of the Ohio river in which Negroes hold the power and my election to Congress… doubly assures… the renomination of President Roosevelt.” “I believe that the Party is fully cognizant of just what the election of a Negro to Congress on the democratic ticket means,” he concluded, “the outlook for my election is exceptionally good.”70 Less than a week later,

Mitchell desperately followed up with Farley’s assistant, Emil Hurja, the administration’s pioneer of political polling and public opinion research. Despite bright prospects, the

Chicago candidate confessed “my resources are being completely exhausted. I must have some financial aid or lose the fight.” A month before the election, the Democratic aspirant told Hurja that he personally financed all but $500 of his congressional bid.71

“It seems to me that if the party realized the importance of defeating DePriest, and electing a colored democrat to succeed him, there would be no hesitancy on the part of those in power” to offer financial support, he presumed. Mitchell reiterated to

Hurja, “You… are aware of the fact that there are a dozen states north of the Mason and Dixie line in which Negroes hold the balance of power.” The black candidate promised his victory would mean “volumes for the democratic party in ’36” and

“throughout the country in local elections.”72 In the end, neither the DNC nor the DNCC

70 Arthur W. Mitchell to James A. Farley, Oct. 8, 1934. AM Papers, Box 2.

71 Arthur W. Mitchell to Emil Hurja, Oct. 13, 1934. AM Papers, Box 2.

72 Ibid.

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contributed to Oscar DePriest’s defeat. By November, a victorious Mitchell exhausted his liquid assets, but he retained his investment in Mutual Housing Company.73

Mitchell mustered the funds to defeat DePriest in a referendum election that overwhelmingly endorsed Roosevelt’s New Deal. Oscar DePriest did not meet Mitchell on the debate platform, which allowed the Democratic challenger to merely rubber- stamp a popular New Deal. Moreover, the DePriest campaign did not engage in substantive opposition research that may have revealed Mitchell’s fraudulent past – the many lies behind campaign propaganda that boasted of the selfless educator’s degrees from Tuskegee, Harvard, and Columbia.74 The shameless Black Belt principal argued that DePriest was “a political huckster” whose conduct “has been reprehensible and detrimental to the best interests of his constituents.”75 Arthur Mitchell, without proper vetting by journalists, emerged as a respected Rooseveltian Democrat promising Black

Chicago a “New Deal.”

The token Democrat professed that Black America and the South Side “should enjoy the same wholesome benefits to be derived from the higher standards of living, increased wages, and better housing conditions in the National program… enjoyed by other racial groups.” Mitchell pledged to fight for southern suffrage, anti-lynching legislation, and black access to civil service positions and public works projects. The challenger remarked, “I believe in making America first… those born under our flag and those who have sworn allegiance to our flag should have preference” in the New Deal bureaucracy and private sector. The black Democrat’s racialized, nativist tack even

73 Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman, 66.

74 Ibid., 61.

75 Press Release, “Untitled,” Sep. 1934. AM Papers, Box 2.

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undercut Congressman DePriest’s xenophobic plan to address the unemployment crisis with immigration restriction.76

DePriest’s desperation magnified as the election approached. The three-term congressman was reduced to general solicitation letters in a fevered search for campaign contributions and votes. One solicitation read, “I have endeavored to… bring back prosperity,” fought for “the re-establishment of… private employment for millions of our people” that will “take them off the dole systems.” “Prosperity cannot come through

ARTIFICAL MEANS,” the Republican warned, the federal government “cannot keep on spending money… without bankrupting the people of America.”77 Another mass- circulated letter remarked: “It is needless to discuss with you his merits. The brilliant record he has made through courage and fortitude in his fight for the rights of all his people at all times and in all places, would of itself justify his re-election.” In the final weeks of the campaign, DePriest rushed out impersonal solicitations to South Side voters that ignored the Depression, but explicitly stated the incumbent’s vow to “protect the interest of those in this community and particularly… the people of my racial group.”78 After receiving four letters from the DePriest campaign, one South Side voter angrily wrote to confirm that he was “downright opposed” to the Republican’s re-

76 Press Release, “Specific Things for which I Shall Stand and Work,” Nov. 1934. AM Papers, Box 2.

77 Oscar DePriest Campaign Letter, 1934. AM Papers, Box 2.

78 Citizens Oscar DePriest for Congress Committee to Rev. D. Z. Jackson, Oct. 10, 1934. AM Papers, Box 2.

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election. He was “one hundred percent for Arthur W. Mitchell.” “I hope you will be good to convey this information to DePriest,” the Democratic sardonically responded.79

An unpopular tour of New Jersey revealed Congressman DePriest’s declining status on the national state – a stature, decades in the making, nearly consumed by

New Deal liberalism and the incumbent’s stubborn commitment to free-market solutions and his parent’s Republican Party. In Montclair, black Republicans promised to accelerate their bolt from the GOP after rumors surfaced that a desperate DePriest was speaking for pay. Then DePriest impolitely “attacked Communists and Uncle Toms” at an address before New Jersey’s Afro-American Baptist Convention. The presiding pastor advised the Chicagoan that “politics have no place here,” especially the shameless politics of red-baiting and racial chauvinism. In Elizabeth, DePriest’s mere appearance on stage was immediately met with public scorn, followed by an impromptu debate challenge, which he wisely declined. On October 20, the “Tall Sycamore of the

Prairies” summoned his “usual fiery manner” amidst a rancorous audience of nearly three hundred. After excoriating the National Recovery Act, the Republican congressman condemned the New Deal’s core elements. An ANP reporter on the scene remarked, “It became necessary to have a police escort to avert possible bodily harm” to a besieged DePriest. Nevertheless, the Race Man managed to utter a final insult to New Jersey voters, “Any colored person voting a Democratic ticket is a skunk.”80

79 Rev. D. Z. Jackson to Albert B. George, Citizens Oscar DePriest for Congress Committee, Oct. 16, 1934. AM Papers, Box 2.

80 “DePriest Calls Negro Democrats, ‘Skunks’ – New Jersey Cops Guard DePriest and Son in Campaign Speech,” Plaindealer, Oct. 26, 1934, 2.

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Arthur Mitchell basked in DePriest’s humiliating fall from grace. On October 26,

“I contend that you are a real coward, with a record of no worthwhile achievements, and that you are actually afraid to meet me on the platform,” he charged. “If you possess one-tenth of the courage you would like to have the people think you have, you will not refuse,” an emboldened Mitchell insisted.81 On October 27, the Chicago World reiterated their endorsement of the black Democrat and reiterated his platform,

“FORWARD WITH ROOSEVELT AND RECOVERY.” That evening, Committeeman Joe

Tittinger’s Second Ward Democrats “staged one of the biggest mass meetings… that has ever been witnessed” for Mitchell, whose remarks “received wild applause.”82

Behind the scenes, Mitchell begged party leadership for campaign funds. “In these final days when last minute literature and special workers must be provided, I find

I need a few hundred dollars,” he wrote to Pat Nash. Mitchell reminded the Cook

County boss, “I paid all of my expenses and made a $300 contribution to the Second

Ward organization.”83 Yet, Nash did not devote any more of the machine funds to

Mitchell’s congressional bid, just the $250 he received early in the campaign. The machine aimed to benefit from Mitchell’s token candidacy, and gain the First District, as cheaply as they could. The Chicago Democrat reminded Emil Hurja that his election

“will mean volumes… in states where Negroes hold the balance of voting power – such as Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, New York, Michigan, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, California,

81 Arthur W. Mitchell to Oscar S. DePriest, Oct. 26, 1934. AM Papers, Box 2.

82 “VOTE FOR MITCHELL FOR CONGRESS” and “Democrats to Sweep Colored District,” Chicago World, Oct. 27, 1934. AM Papers, Box 2.

83 Arthur W. Mitchell to Patrick A. Nash, Oct. 31, 1934. AM Papers, Box 2.

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and other states.” Nonetheless, Hurja, and Chairman Farley provided no DNC funds for election week.84

By November 1934, Arthur Mitchell was nearly broke, but he was the clear favorite. The pompous former principal relished in presumed victory and poked a final barb at Oscar DePriest. “I’m greatly disappointed in not having the chance to meet you in open, public debate,” he lamented. “You would like to have people think you are the champion of Negro rights” but “Your record is of such nature that you should be retired to private life.” “You are finishing up your last year in Congress,” Mitchell argued, “You have been able to fool the people in the past but you can’t do it this time.”85 On

November 6, the Black Belt principal toppled the “Tall Sycamore of the Prairies” by

3,134 votes. DePriest won forty-seven percent of the First District votes. Nevertheless,

Depression-era poverty, New Deal jobs and relief, the strength of the machine’s straight ticket, and FDR’s coattails, assured the recent migrant’s victory.

Congressman-elect Mitchell reiterated his campaign pledges for New Deal jobs, antilynching legislation, and southern black suffrage in press release, “Specific Things for which I shall Stand and Work.”86 The victor told ANP reporters, “I accept the mandate of the people… by white as well as by colored people, for new leadership under the New Deal.” The former principal promised “to be on the alert and use all the power that resides in me to protect the interest of my group… to do my full duty without

84 Arthur W. Mitchell to Emil Hurja, Oct. 31, 1934. AM Papers, Box 2.

85 Arthur W. Mitchell to Oscar S. DePriest, Nov. 3, 1934. AM Papers, Box 2.

86 Press Release, “Specific Things for which I Shall Stand and Work,” Nov. 1934. AM Papers, Box 2.

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fear or favor of man, but by trust in God.”87 Mitchell received congratulatory remarks from across the country, but no well-wisher was more poignant than Attorney John H.

Clinton, a friend from the nation’s capitol. “Like Caesar, you may well exclaim: ‘Veni, vidi, vici,’” he exclaimed, “Old hero, nurtured by the turgid waters of the historic

Mississippi… save this grand and glorious experiment in the popular endeavor to govern themselves.”88 Arthur Mitchell’s victory was at the forefront of Black America’s membership in the Roosevelt coalition, but DNC leaders invested few dollars toward

DePriest’s defeat. Furthermore, New Dealers were not eager to provoke the Solid

South with “race politics” that could derail social welfare legislation, complicate congressional appropriations, and jeopardize economic recovery. Two days after the election, DNC Chairman Farley declined to comment when Capitol Hill reporters asked

Roosevelt’s trusted strategist if Mitchell’s victory was the beginning of an alliance with urban Black America.89

The 1934 election marked the beginning of the South Side’s political realignment, but Roosevelt Democrats did not intend to broker a “new deal” in Black Chicago. As ghettoization, intensified by depression, continued in the thirties, the Democratic

Machine was aggrandized by New Deal jobs and relief. Furthermore, Nash and Kelly polished Big Bill Thompson’s politics of symbolism, underworld “protection,” and patronage. The traffic of black migrants to Chicago slowed in the face of depression- era poverty, but the southern exodus continued. Nearly fifty-thousand blacks migrated

87 Press Release, ANP, Nov. 1934. AM Papers, Box 2.

88 John H. Clinton to Arthur W. Mitchell, Nov. 7, 1934. AM Papers, Box 2.

89 Press Release, “Silent on Choice of Negro Solon – Farley Declines Comment on Election of Negro Democrat,” Nov. 8, 1934. AM Papers, Box 2.

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to Chicago in the thirties, growing their overall number to 277, 731.90 Most southern migrants found housing in the segregated Second and Third Wards, where they became loyal Democrats. In 1935, eighty percent of Black Chicago voted for Mayor

Edward Kelly’s election. The Kelly-Nash machine eagerly embraced Mitchell’s re- election campaign, a rematch with Oscar DePriest. In 1936, the Republican Race Man still gained a majority of the black vote, but Mitchell, fueled by Roosevelt’s popularity, dominated white districts and improved his showing in Bronzeville.91

By 1938, Congressman Mitchell finally received the support of the Chicago

Defender and won a majority of votes in Black Chicago. Most importantly, the

Democratic Machine produced black aldermen and committeemen in the Second and

Third Wards, the first black Democratic county commissioner, and claimed Bronzeville’s seat in the Illinois State Senate. In 1940, Mitchell won his final term, and for the first time, a majority of Black Chicagoans voted for President Roosevelt.92 Congressman

Mitchell’s four terms marked the Democratic machine’s consolidation of the South Side bloc vote, which proved a paralyzing political foundation for a new generation of migration and ghettoization – the ugly underbelly of empowered lobbying and civil disobedience campaigns in the postwar era.

According to Nancy Weiss, the fear of DePriest’s Republican generation that “the

New Deal would leave the race in worse straits than before” was “not a parochial black

90 Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 17.

91 Gordon, “The Change in the Political Realignment of Chicago’s Negroes During the New Deal,” 592-593, 598. In 1936, FDR received 40 percent of Black Chicago’s vote, which grew to 53 in the 1940 race.

92 Ibid., 601-602. In 1939, four out of every ten persons on relief were black, and five out of every ten families were dependent upon some type of government assistance. Cayton and Drake, Black Metropolis, 88.

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complaint.”93 Roosevelt’s New Deal was a liberal exercise in coalition politics in Jim

Crow America. The modern social welfare state emerged from FDR’s compromises with segregationists and required diplomatic relations with pragmatic urban machines.

The primary recipients and managers of New Deal funds were northern Democratic machines and Bourbon Southerners, not black voters and disfranchised Dixie residents.

Yankee Democrats used material aid and social welfare institutions to shore up black bloc votes in urban ghettos as the Federal Housing Authority’s (FHA) support for “red- lining” created a segregated, suburban refuge for white Chicagoans sick of the city’s

“Negro Problem.” The Solid South used federal subsidies from the Agricultural

Adjustment Administration (AAA) and Farm Security Administration (FSA) to maintain sharecropping plantations and begin a mechanization process that displaced disfranchised black tenant farmers.94

Patricia Sullivan argues that “discrimination against black workers under NRA codes was widespread” because southern businessmen, driven by textile lobbyists, obtained a regional wage differential. The short-lived NRA, or the “Negro Removal

Agency,” was largely obstructed and many black workers were fired when manufacturers actually met federal wage guarantees for white laborers.95 The FHA,

AAA, FSA, and NRA, chief among New Deal agencies, accelerated the socioeconomic forces driving Roosevelt-era ghettoization on Chicago’s South Side. The Democratic machine’s provision of jobs, patronage, and elected offices produced a lasting

93 Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln, 178.

94 On racial discrimination in the AAA and FSA, see Sullivan, Days of Hope; and on the FHA, see Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto. Regarding New Deal politics and policies, David M. Kennedy, Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (New York, 2005).

95 Sullivan, Days of Hope, 46.

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accommodation with Black Chicago. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the

Works Progress Administration (WPA) were the most popular New Deal agencies on a

South Side ravaged by unemployment. The CCC (1933) and WPA (1935) emerged at a time when half of domestic workers, a third of semiskilled laborers, and a fourth of the unskilled class were jobless. Nevertheless, the Chicago machine used New Deal jobs to reward South Side ward heelers and discipline black voters.96

According to his biographer, Congressman Mitchell was a self-professed perfect

“organization man” who “made no objections to the Machine’s racism.”97 The black

Democrat was a crucial conduit between the emerging New Deal bureaucracy and the

Kelly-Nash machine. He monitored Washington activities regarding jobs, contracts, and appropriations and then “tipped-off” Chicago insiders. Mitchell merely rubber-stamped the Democratic machine’s hand-picked job candidates as the New Deal state expanded their metropolitan domain. The congressman’s voluminous manuscript collection is littered with letters from poverty-stricken blacks pleading for work. Nearly every desperate petitioner received a standardized, frank response in the negative – unless they possessed a letter of recommendation from a precinct captain or ward committeeman. “All of the patronage of our Ward is in the hands of Mr. Tittinger,”

Congressman Mitchell explained to a constituent, “I know he would help you if he could, but there are so many calls he finds it impossible to take care of everyone.”98

96 Gordon, “The Change in the Political Realignment of Chicago’s Negroes During the New Deal,”594-595.

97 Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman, 95, 98.

98 Arthur W. Mitchell to Mrs. Charles Warfield, April 9, 1937. AM Papers, Box 30.

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In November 1939, Chicago journalists revealed longstanding machine cronyism that resulted in federal civil service (Hatch Act) violations. The Chicago Better

Government Association (BGA) argued, “Politics is being played with human misery systematically and ruthlessly by the Kelly-Nash machine.” Taxpayer dollars “which are supposed to bring relief to the needy, are being used to build and maintain an impregnable political organization.” Mitchell kept quiet as Cook County Democrats scrambled to assuage critics with appropriation bills that boasted strengthened penalties for graft and political malfeasance. The only black New Dealer on Capitol Hill promised to make South Side jobs a priority, but his top concern proved machine loyalty and reelection.99

Congressman Mitchell largely ignored residential segregation during his tenure – a historic moment marked by federal housing legislation in 1934 and 1937. The FHA intensified South Side ghettoization by incentivizing white flight with low-interest, government-backed loans. In the postwar era, federal construction of low-income housing produced vibrant civil rights crusades and a violent white backlash.100 A

“token” Mitchell did not fight for “open housing” as a new era of urban and suburbanization segregation unfolded. Similar to his Republican predecessor, the

Democratic congressman “protected” and benefited from underworld activities. Mitchell maintained close ties with infamous Chicago mobsters and Bronzeville racketeers who

99 Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman, 96; quotations from Chicago Daily News, Nov. 17, 1939.

100 On postwar ghettoization, the role of the FHA in suburbanization, and “homeowners politics,” see Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race & Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (Chicago, 1998); Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, 2006); Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, 2006); Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, 2005); Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, 1996), and Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York, 2008).

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simultaneously entertained and exploited ghetto voters. The black congressman did personal favors for the privileged vicelords as many black neighborhoods faced unemployment rates over fifty percent. In 1934, Mitchell’s First Precinct captain was

Julius Benvenuti, a Sicilian immigrant and well-known South Side racketeer.101

Benvenuti, who partnered with the late Daniel Jackson and “Policy Sam” Young, was a financier of black politics and “numbers” syndicates during the interwar years.102

Congressman Mitchell’s loyalty to Benvenuti was as absolute as his commitment to the Democratic machine. In July 1935, he personally addressed the Liberty Bond of one of Benvenuti’s Italian associates at the Treasury department. He also expedited the transfer request of a post office worker on the mobster’s behalf.103 Benvenuti rewarded these services with tickets to high-profile boxing matches that featured Joe

Louis, Max Baer, and “Cinderella Man” James J. Braddock. On July 2, Mitchell thanked

Benvenuti, “for the fight ticket and the big time you gave me. Please remember me to all friends.” In October 1935, the nation’s lone black congressman ignored Fascist

Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia – a mere matter of deference to his Sicilian confidant.

Mitchell’s secretary reported, “I saw Mr. Julius Benvenuti… and he said all his friends were well pleased with your analysis of the Italian and Ethiopian situation.” Three weeks after Mussolini’s invasion, the black Democrat was advised that “a number of prominent Italians” were anxious to meet him.104

101 Precinct Captain List, Sep. 22, 1934. AM Papers, Box 2.

102 Robert M. Lombardo, “The Black Mafia: African-American Organized Crime in Chicago, 1890- 1960,” Crime, Law, & Social Change 38 (2002): 33-65; see 47-50.

103 Arthur W. Mitchell to Julius Benvenuti, July 2, 1935; Alton B. Harris to Arthur W. Mitchell, July 6, 1935; Mitchell to Harris, July 9, 1935. AM Papers, Box 12.

104 Claude Holman to Arthur W. Mitchell, Oct. 25, 1935. AM Papers, Box 12.

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Al Capone’s Chicago Outfit survived the Roosevelt-era death of prohibition by established new rackets as modern organized came of age. The opportunistic New

Dealer profited from the Democratic machine’s routine “protection” of the Outfit’s criminal enterprises, especially ties to Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik, formerly Capone’s chief “bagman” for protection payments and bribes. In 1930, Guzik and Capone were charged with income tax evasion. A syphilis-ridden “Scarface” never reclaimed power.

After a $17,500 fine and nearly four years behind bars, Guzik resumed underworld activities and maintained his stature in the Outfit. However, “Greasy Thumb” could not shake dogged IRS agents, who demanded the mobster pay $629,000 in back taxes

(1924-1928), or serve more prison time.105 “I am at sea entirely as to what to do next,”

Guzik confessed to Congressman Mitchell, “Wish you would look into this and get me expert advice as to what to do and how to do it.”106 From 1939 to 1941, the black congressman negotiated the gangster’s IRS debt to a more manageable $100,000 – for the small price of a $50,000 bribe. Guzik, with Mitchell’s aid, reached the pinnacle of his criminal career. In 1941, the Chicago Crime Commission named “Greasy Thumb” public enemy number one.107

Robert Lombardo estimates that the Kelly-Nash machine collected over $12 million annually from “protected” vice activities in the 1930s.108 In 1938, the Chicago

Daily News reported that $18 million a year was bet in the city’s 38 policy wheels. The

105 “Guzik Rose With Capone,” Chicago American, Feb. 22, 1956, 4. AM Papers, Box 48.

106 Jake Guzik to Arthur W. Mitchell, Nov. 10, 1941. AM Papers, Box 48.

107 Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman, 105.

108 Lombardo, “The Black Mafia,” 52; “15 Racket Kings Enriched by Poor, Chicago Daily News, Aug. 29, 1938.

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Daily News targeted rackets dominated by the Jones Brothers – Edward, George, and

McKissack – who proved essential in the Democratic machine’s consolidation of the

South Side. The “Jones Boys,” Great Migration-era transplants from Vicksburg,

Mississippi, developed an underworld empire in the thirties – twelve gambling houses, policy wheels that spanned the South Side, four hotels, and several apartment buildings, and the beloved Ben Franklin Department Store. The Jones Boys and their competitors employed thousands during the Great Depression, and “numbers runners” were essential to Democratic victories at South Side precincts.109 Horace Cayton and

St. Clair Drake estimated that black gambling syndicates employed over 5,000 with a weekly payroll of approximately $25,000 in 1938. Moreover, “front” status, which usually meant a quarter of gambling profits, often kept struggling black business alive.110

Arthur Mitchell was a “token” representative for a Chicago Democratic machine that seized upon ghettoization and New Deal programs to wield unprecedented metropolitan power. Congressman Mitchell was loyal to President Roosevelt, the Kelly-

Nash regime, and himself – not Black America. Mitchell presented himself as a moderate statesman, unlike his bombastic, race-proud predecessor. The black

Democrat told reporters he would “not… make a lot of noise” because he agreed with

“the great humane program which the President is putting across.” Despite Roosevelt’s compromises with Southern Democrats, which racialized New Deal programs, Mitchell argued “the powers that be in Washington are not responsible… they have the good of

109 Ibid., 49; Mark H. Haller, “Policy Gambling, Entertainment, and the Emergence of Black Politics: Chicago from 1900 to 1940,” Journal of Social History, 24 (Summer 1991): 719-739; on Jones Boys, see 729.

110 Clayton and Drake, Black Metropolis, 480-482.

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our group at heart.” “Our Race has needed someone to hear the cries of the man at the bottom,” the black congressman professed, which “has been done” by President

Roosevelt and Mayor Kelly.111

Oscar DePriest used racial pride and white racism to deflect attention from criminal associations, corruption, and his “blockbusting” real estate firm. Nevertheless, the Republican Race Man shepherded the early Chicago NAACP branch and used his stature to advocate on behalf of the association’s revolutionary lobbing campaigns. The first black Democratic congressman in American history was not only hostile to the

NAACP, but also treated the diverse liberal-left of the Popular Front era with disdain.

Arthur Mitchell’s token services to Democratic Party entailed not only subduing activist threats to the Chicago machine, but also collegiality and compromise with segregationist southerners. In late 1934, the NAACP’s national office contracted

Claude Barnett to investigate Mitchell’s past. The ANP founder reported that most blacks were inclined to “discount” the former principal because he was “a four-flusher and an Uncle Tom.” The Jackson Daily News was elated to have “a white man’s nigger” representing Illinois’s First District.112

In May 1935, the Cleveland Gazette wondered, “Mitchell an Uncle Tom? Have

‘Cracker’ Members of Congress Captured Him?” The Gazette carried a nationally syndicated column by Marguerite Young, Washington correspondent for New Masses, which revealed Mitchell’s selfish ambition and sheepish loyalty to white power brokers.

“I’d be a mighty big fool talking about Negroes around here,” Mitchell told Young, “Why I

111 “Congressman-Elect Mitchell and Missouri Party Drive to Western University,” Plaindealer, Aug. 31, 1934, p. 1.

112 Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman, 71.

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got more than two white votes to one Negro vote… I don’t represent a Negro district.”

“There are 9,000 Italians in my district and 1,000 Chinese,” the South Side congressman explained, “my district takes in all of the Chicago Loop, the richest district in Chicago.” Young challenged Mitchell’s staunch partisanship and his rosy racial portrait of Capitol Hill, where the congressman claimed “there is no discrimination against me.” She noted what Arthur Mitchell, a Washington real estate dealer and former civil servant, knew all too well – the nation’s capitol and federal government were intensely segregated. That year, it was even difficult for segregated black journalists to cover the failure of the Costigan-Wagner anti-lynching bill with Jim Crow press credentials.113

Marguerite Young’s column countered Congressman Mitchell with gripping statistics. Between October 1933 and January 1935, the number of unemployed blacks and their dependents increased from 2,117,000 to 3,500,000. Moreover, the AAA displaced 800,000, mostly blacks, from farm work, while the NRA earned its reputation as the “Negro Removal Act.”114 Young relied upon research conducted by the Joint

Committee on Economic Recovery (1933), which was at the forefront of civil rights lobbying and black interest-group politics. The Joint Committee was the brainchild of

John P. Davis, a future official in the Southern Conference for Human Welfare and the

National Negro Congress (NNC), and Robert C. Weaver, a member of Roosevelt’s

“Black Cabinet” and the first Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. In

September 1933, Davis and Weaver’s incipient Negro Industrial League, which

113 “Mitchell an ‘Uncle Tom’? Have Southern ‘Cracker’ Members of Congress Captured Him?,” Cleveland Gazette, May 25, 1935, p. 1.

114 Ibid., 1.

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investigated the AAA and NRA, rallied thirteen other black organizations – most importantly the NAACP and Rosenwald Fund. They formed the Joint Committee as a

Capitol Hill interest group that researched discrimination in the emerging social welfare state and lobbied for remedial legislation.115 Congressman Mitchell did not rely upon the Joint Committee for policy research in a legislative fight to improve the New Deal as it institutionalized white privileges. Instead, he ignored civil rights politics and red-baited the NAACP and its liberal allies.

The NAACP’s crusade for antilynching legislation began in the 1920s, when a bill sponsored by Congressman Leonidas C. Dyer (R-MO) died on the shoals of southern opposition.116 Civil rights activists expected to pass antilynching legislation in a New

Deal era marked by large Democratic majorities and Roosevelt’s overwhelming political mandate. In 1934, a “lame duck” Oscar DePriest supported the NAACP’s fight for the

Costigan-Wagner antilynching bill. However, Congressman Mitchell introduced a competing, weaker bill that divided liberals who favored federal action. The Costigan-

Wagner bill was destined for failure, smothered by southern opposition and without a pragmatic President Roosevelt’s firm support. Nonetheless, the antilynching fight

115 Sullivan, Days of Hope, 46-50.

116 On the Dyer antilynching bill, see William Fitzhugh Brundage, ed. Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South (Chapel Hill, 1997); William B. Hixon, Jr., “Moorfield Storey and the Defense of the Dyer Anti-Lynching bill,” New England Quarterly, 42 (March 1969): 65-81; and Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, The End of American Lynching (New Brunswick, 2012); On lynching, see William Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 (Urbana, 1993); Crystal Nicole Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge, Mass., 2009); Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jesse Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching (New York, 1993); Jonathan Markovitz, Legacies of Lynching: Racial Violence and Memory (Minneapolis, 2004); James R. McGovern, Anatomy of a Lynching: The Killing of Claude Neal (Baton Rouge, 2013); Michael J. Pfeifer, Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874-1947 (Urbana, 2004); Jacqueline Jones Royster, Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900 (New York, 1996); Walter F. White and Kenneth Robert Janken, Rope & Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (South Bend, 2002); and Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (Chapel Hill, 2009).

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sparked a power struggle between the Arthur Mitchell and Walter White, who spent their energies as enemies instead of as allied, empowered black leaders. The unscrupulous machine politician presented himself as a distinguished patriot as he red-baited the

NAACP’s committed activists. “Nearly everything the NAACP does is vicious,”

Congressman Mitchell proclaimed.117

In October 1935, Mitchell told a Windy City audience that he was an early

NAACP booster and “for a considerable time the only member in Alabama.” He even

“sent subscriptions to the Crisis anonymously to white friends.” The former principal was never a member of any Alabama NAACP branch. He was too busy defrauding black sharecroppers. Congressman Mitchell was more than willing to prevaricate to

Chicagoans to prove his selfish point. The NAACP’s antilynching campaign was

“insincere.” “I can say only that the NAACP today is not seeking to aid the race but intends only to feather the nests of its officials at the expense of the black public,” the black representative explained. Mitchell maintained that the NAACP “is not honest in its efforts and has deteriorated into a bunch of communists.” The machine politician argued that the NAACP’s efforts to unseat segregationist politicians, or “non supporting legislators,” were “silly and foolish.” The anti-Parker campaigns did not produce revolutionary exertions of unified black political power, as Oscar DePriest suggested.118

“Congressman Mitchell is one man who ought not be re-elected,” William Pickens wrote to Arthur B. Spingarn at the NAACP’s national office, “I think he’ll be defeated – but my wishes may be the creators of such thinking.”119 In 1936, the NAACP field

117 “Arthur W. Mitchell; Norfolk,” Cleveland Gazette, Sep. 21, 1935, 2.

118 “Congressman Mitchell Airs His View; Defies Foes,” Plaindealer, Oct. 4, 1935.

119 William Pickens to Arthur B. Spingarn, Jan. 6, 1936. AM Papers, Box 73.

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director was confident that “colored people are rather against his [Mitchell] record.”

Nevertheless, Pickens recognized that Spingarn was “doubtlessly wise” by advising against a crusade to oust the nation’s only black congressman, a New Deal

Democrat.120 The line “seems to be clearly drawn between you and Mitchell,” the

Chicago branch’s executive secretary, A. C. MacNeal, exclaimed to Walter White, “he may as well be exposed as public enemy number one among Negroes.” “You may as well discard powder puff and use musket gas tanks and ten-ton buck,” read MacNeal’s brief primer on Chicago-style politics.121 Walter White privately ruminated to Roy

Wilkins that DNC Chairman James Farley “is trying to drive intelligent Negroes away from Roosevelt,” but the NAACP leader was a political pragmatist.122 He ultimately agreed with Roy Wilkins, who strongly advised “against doing anything out in the open or by confidential communication that could be interpreted as fighting Mitchell’s place as a Democrat in the Democratic set-up.” Wilkins argued an anti-Mitchell campaign “would be correctly resented by the voters… interpreted as chagrin over the defeat of the antilynching bill” and used by “other Democrats to turn the tables on us.” “Politicians are supposed to tell lies and they are supposed to get away with it,” Wilkins lamented.123

In 1937, the feud between Congressman Mitchell and the NAACP resumed when the association’s newest bill, sponsored by Representative Joseph A. Gavagan (D-NY), received a favorable hearing on Capitol Hill. The black representative continued to press his own measure as the Gavagan bill steadily gained support in the House.

120 Ibid.

121 A.C. MacNeal to Walter White, May 8, 1936. AM Papers, Box 73.

122 Walter White to Roy Wilkins, Aug. 4, 1936. AM Papers, Box 73.

123 Roy Wilkins to Walter White, Aug. 5, 1936. AM Papers, Box 73.

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“Effect of Mitchell’s action is to confuse congressmen and block signatures to Gavagan petition,” Wilkins wrote to the Chicago branch. White privately expressed frustration

“due to the egomania, treachery, and trickery of Congressman Mitchell.”124 On April 7, southern representatives watered down Mitchell’s antilynching bill and brought it to the floor for a vote. Segregationist Democrats were well-aware the measure would fail, but

Dixie congressional leaders aimed to defuse a looming vote on the Gavagan bill.125

“The Branch naturally rejoices in the fact that the Mitchell bill was defeated,” MacNeal wrote to White, emboldened by Mitchell’s high-profile failure.126

On April 15, the House passed the Gavagan antilynching bill, but the measure did not survive a Senate filibuster.127 “It appears to us, Mr. President, “that your intervention and your intervention alone can end this disgraceful filibuster,” Walter White pled in vain to Roosevelt. As fascism increased its grip on Europe, the NAACP leader argued “there is no national emergency more pressing than the protection of the lives of citizens.” “We applaud your speaking out… against the oppression of the Jewish population in Europe,” White explained, because “this gives us hope that you will speak out… unequivocally for the protection of your own citizens against mob violence.”128

The NAACP spent its entire existence fighting in vain for antilynching legislation and met its grandest failure fighting Bourbon Southerners, the only black congressman on

Capitol Hill, and the most beloved president since the Great Emancipator.

124 Roy Wilkins to A.C. MacNeal, March 11, 1937; White to MacNeal, April 5, 1937. AM Papers, Box 73.

125 NAACP, 28th Annual Report, 1937. AM Papers, Box 73.

126 A.C. MacNeal to Walter White, April 8, 1937. AM Papers, Box 73.

127 NAACP, 28th Annual Report, 1937. AM Papers, Box 73.

128 Walter White to Franklin D. Roosevelt, Sep. 16, 1937. AM Papers, Box 73.

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By 1938, White was willing to leverage the looming threat of war – and black loyalty – over a pragmatic Roosevelt that bargained with segregationists and machine politicians. “A nation which cannot within its own territory protect the lives of its citizens against violence from lawless mobs cannot command the same devotion… as a government which protects the fundamental citizenship of its citizens,” White remarked.129 According to Nancy Weiss, New Deal-era civil rights lobbyists “remained far behind other groups in the political power they could muster” because they lacked the money, numbers, and influence of their competitors in public office, partisan organizations, advocacy groups, and private industries.130 The Depression-era NAACP also suffered because of anti-communism. The association dueled with the Communist

Party over Scottsboro, red-baited the National Negro Congress (NNC), and did not embrace left-leaning CIO unions. In 1939, Roy Wilkins suggested to Walter White that the association must embrace “a popular manner to reach the masses of the people.”131

“Our cautious conservatism has kept us standing still,” the executive secretary humbly admitted, urban Black America demanded “a leadership of uncompromising action instead of the temporizing of the past.”132 In 1940, A. Philip Randolph resigned from the NNC and joined the NAACP’s Board of Directors at Walter White’s insistence, which signaled the venerated association’s embrace of “civil rights unionism” and civil disobedience. White and Randolph’s orchestration of the March on Washington

129 Ibid.

130 Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln, 62-63.

131 Beth Tompkins Bates, “A New Crowd Challenges the Agenda of the Old Guard in the NAACP, 1933-1941,” American Historical Review, 102 (April 1997): 340-377; quotation from 370.

132 Ibid., 370.

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Movement (MOWM) gave birth to a new civil rights politics which combined the electoral strength of ghetto black votes with mass, direct-action protest, a tool available to disfranchised southerners, as well.133 In 1940, Arthur Mitchell, who treated the MOWM with studied indifference, was re-elected for his final term. By World War II, the Chicago

Democratic machine no longer needed Mitchell’s “token services.” He ultimately retired as a southern gentleman on a large Virginia estate outside Petersburg.

The Kelly regime elevated a genuine Democratic Race Man, Congressman

William L. Dawson, a former Republican and DePriest protégé for a long tenure (1943-

1970). Dawson’s South Side regime accumulated unprecedented power with the postwar expansion of the social welfare state and the Second Great Migration.

Between 1940 and 1944, 60,000 black workers migrated in hopes of finding jobs in

Chicago’s wartime industries. The World War II southern exodus to the Windy City proved longer and larger than the previous generation. The Chicago Community

Inventory observed an average annual increase of 27,000 in the nonwhite population between 1940 and 1950, destined for growing ghettos on the South and West Sides.134

Congressman Dawson’s public service marked the passage of the historic civil rights legislation that restored the integrity of Reconstruction-era constitutional measures.

However, ghettoization was part of a paralyzing political process that was integral to the electoral success of midcentury civil rights legislation – an anti-democratic urban arrangement that grew worse as the black freedom struggle climaxed.

133 Ibid., 372-375. See William P. Jones, The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights (New York: 2013).

134 Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 17.

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Patricia Sullivan’s recent chronicle of the NAACP credits the association with “the making of the civil rights movement.” The NAACP’s influence in Washington developed tremendously by the New Deal era. Between two world wars, Walter White solidified lobbying activities in Washington and cultivated a personal relationship with President

Roosevelt as a racial advisor. The rise of black interest-group politics relied upon segregated bloc voters, many of whom needed material aid and racial justice immediately. The pragmatism of partisan-driven politics and the gradualism of

American jurisprudence turned the suffering of northern ghetto dwellers into torture and rage in the postwar era. Northerners have been commemorated as courageous activists that traveled into Dixie, none more so than Andrew Goodman, Michael

Schwerner, and Bob Moses. Nevertheless, northern ghetto voters, who organized on behalf southerners, and the machine-driven Race Men they elected, were structural necessities for a civil rights politics that ended Jim Crow’s wicked reign.

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CHAPTER 7 CONCLUSION: A CENTURY OF GHETTOIZATION & THE “LONG CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT”

Weeks before Pearl Harbor, Joseph Bibb, Chicago editor of the Pittsburgh

Courier, used his weekly “Double V” campaign column to reflect upon Oscar

DePriest’s place in black politics – a stature emboldened by the Second Great

Migration. The nationally syndicated black journalist wrote:

In these times when most of our spokesmen are quaking and trembling, bowing and scraping, seeking to be ‘unobtrusive,’ Oscar DePriest stands out in bold relief as a symbol of undaunted Americanism… He cut a wide swath through the ranks of his enemies… a symbol of fearless and courageous leadership.1

Popular black military soared to new heights with the March on Washington

Movement (MOWM) and the opening of defense jobs under the Fair Employment

Practices Committee (FEPC). However, Joe Bibb argued, “We need more men like Oscar DePriest,” who “should be heralded as one of the most colorful men of his time.” As World War II sparked a southern exodus and another generation of ghettoization in Black Chicago, Bibb believed “in the life of Oscar DePriest there is hope to be found for the next generation.”2 The “Tall Sycamore of the Prairies” never returned to Capitol Hill, but the Race Man’s legend persisted.

In 1943, a 72 year-old DePriest reclaimed his hegemony in the South

Side’s Third Ward as alderman and Republican committeeman. As the postwar civil rights movement took shape, the Race Man joined Chicago Democrats in a successful fight for a metropolitan FEPC. Elmer W. Henderson, Regional

Director of the FEPC, praised Alderman DePriest for Chicago’s milestone and

1 Joseph D. Bibb, “Oscar DePriest – ‘Tall Sycamore of the Prairies’ Gets Fitting Tribute,” Pittsburgh Courier, Jan. 3, 1942, p. 13.

2 Ibid.

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claimed it “will be of great value to us in our efforts to administer [the] presidential executive order.” Oscar C. Brown, President of the Windy City’s NAACP branch, personally thanked DePriest. “The passage of such a badly needed measure will be of tremendous benefit” to black Chicagoans “who otherwise might not have a fair opportunity for employment in our city,” Brown wrote to the alderman.3

L. Virgil Williams, assistant director of the Urban League’s Industrial

Relations Department, praised the veteran politician for “excellent and effective engineering” of the city ordinance. Williams believed Chicago’s FEPC was

“definitely a forward step in the spirit of democracy for the equality of all peoples.”4 In 1951, Oscar DePriest died of natural causes. The Republican trailblazer is now forgotten, but his peers aimed to preserve his legacy. In the end, the Alabama-born Kansas migrant was a political relic of Black America’s once beloved Party of Lincoln. The South Side’s Negro Chamber of Commerce donated a bust of Congressman DePriest for posterity which rests at the George

C. Hall public library.5 In 1975, his Bronzeville home became a national landmark on South Side streets that witnessed a century of ghettoization.6

Despite DePriest’s historic achievements, and the contemporary resonance of his path to power, the black politician has never been the subject of an in-depth academic investigation.

3 Oscar Brown to Oscar S. DePriest, Aug. 22, 1945; Elmer Henderson to DePriest, Aug. 23, 1945, and L. Virgil Williams to DePriest, Aug. 23, 1945 in Oscar S. DePriest Papers, Chicago Historical Society (Chicago, IL), Box 2. Hereafter, OD Papers.

4 Williams to DePriest, Aug. 23, 1945. OD Papers, Box 2.

5 Resolution of the Chicago Negro Chamber of Commerce, June 12, 1951, OD Papers Box 1.

6 National Register of Historic Places, form prepared by Marcia M. Greenlee, Historical Projects Director, Afro-American Bicentennial Corporation, (Dec. 1974), OD Papers, Box 2.

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Chicago, Black America, and the Democratic Party have gladly reduced

Arthur Mitchell to the dust-bin of history. Mitchell’s legacy of shameless service to white planters and politicians is a tale most liberals and both races would rather forget – if they have even heard of the paradoxical trailblazer. Dennis

Nordin, author of Congressman Mitchell’s only full-length biography, argues that the unscrupulous former principal “blazed a trail for several other self-serving black officeholders” who depended on Democratic machines, ghetto voting blocs, and “fickle white electoral majorities for their positions.”7 In 1942, Second Ward alderman and Democratic committeeman, William L. Dawson, a DePriest protégée, forced Arthur Mitchell into an unwelcomed political retirement. A restless, 60 year-old Mitchell enjoyed financial comfort on a lush farm, Rose-

Anna Gardens, or the “Land of a Thousand Roses,” outside Petersburg,

Virginia.8

A prideful Mitchell was humbled by one of the nation’s most powerful metropolitan machines, but he did not accept political defeat. He aimed to resurrect his career as a New South statesman with the first stirrings of postwar civil disobedience and voter registration campaigns. In 1943, the aging huckster earned a position among the south’s leading black professionals and white liberals as a co-founder of the Southern Regional Council (SRC). The SRC allied with the NAACP for lobbying, studies of racial discrimination, public relations, and

7 Dennis S. Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman: A Life of Arthur Wergs Mitchell (Columbia, Mo., 1997), x.

8 According to an obituary, Mitchell’s estate was open to the public and hundreds visited his award-winning rose garden, free of charge, each year. He died at his residence at 85 years old on Thursday evening, May 10, 1968 – as the nation’s ghettos still reeled from post-King assassination riots. “Former Congressman Dies in Dinwiddie,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, May 10, 1968, in Arthur W. Mitchell Papers, Chicago Historical Society (Chicago, IL), Box 71. Hereafter, AM Papers.

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voter registration efforts that established civil rights as a site for interest-group politics. The SRC was vital to historic midcentury legislation and produced several members of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division under

Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson.9 In the 1950s, Mitchell, a member of the

SRC’s Board of Directors, advocated for civil rights legislation across the South, but his true aim was raising his profile with churchgoers and NAACP members.10

The former principal survived a tragic tenant farming youth, which bore a relentless, craven ambition.11 In 1968, Arthur Mitchell, unloved and forgotten,

9 On the Southern Regional Council, see David L. Chappell, Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement (Baltimore, 1994), 190-197.

10 See NAACP New York Headquarters to Arthur W. Mitchell, Jan. 20, 1945; Mitchell to Moses A. Riddick, Research Director for the Virginia Independent Voters League (VIL), Feb. 6, 1945; SRC Executive Director George S. Mitchell to A. Mitchell, May 22, 1947; VIL President Riddick to Mitchell, Feb. 17, 1948. AM Papers, Boxes 68-69. Also, see George Mitchell to Mitchell, Aug. 30, 1950, Nov. 22, 1950, Dec. 13, 1950; A. Mitchell to G. Mitchell, Oct. 30, 1950, Nov. 16, 1950, Dec. 31, 1950, Jan. 5, 1951, Feb. 2, 1951; A. D. Beittel, President of Talladega College and Chairman of the Alabama SRC to A. Mitchell, Dec. 27, 1950, Jan. 19, 1951, Jan. 31, 1951, Mitchell to Beittel, Jan. 25, 1951, Mar. 15, 1951; A. Mitchell to J. M. Tinsley, President of the Richmond, VA NAACP branch, Jan. 12, 1951, Tinsley to Mitchell, Jan. 26, 1951; A. Mitchell to William B. James of Sumter, SC NAACP branch, Mar. 24, 1951, James to Mitchell, Mar. 29, 1951; Rev. C. J. Smith, President of the Salem, VA NAACP branch to A. Mitchell, June 20, 1951, July 2, 1951, Mitchell to Smith, June 23, 1951, June 23, 1951; Mitchell to L. C. Moore, Chairman of the Fairfax, VA NAACP branch, June 23, 1951; Lott Carey Baptist Church Foreign Mission Convention (Durham, NC) to Mitchell, May 19, 1951, May 29, 1951. AM Papers, Box 70. Last, see A. Mitchell to G. Mitchell, Feb. 18, 1952; Dinwiddie, VA NAACP to A. Mitchell, Nov. 16, 1955, Nov. 30, 1955 ; Mitchell to E. B. Henderson, VA President of NAACP branches, Mar. 14, 1951; A. Mitchell to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, May 11, 1961. AM Papers, Box 71.

11 Arthur Mitchell never found a white political patron as generous and powerful as Congressman and Judge John McDuffie, but he also never trying, regardless of party lines. See Arthur W. Mitchell to longtime Chairman of the Democratic National Committee Congressman Patrick H. Drewry (VA), Aug. 9, 1944. AM Papers, Box 68; Mitchell to Republican House Speaker Joseph W. Martin (MA), Jan. 20, 1947; Mitchell to Republican Senator Robert Taft, Jan. 20, 1947. AM Papers, Box 69. Also see President Harry Truman to Mitchell, Apr. 16, 1951. AM Papers, Box 70. Last, see Mitchell to Democratic and Senator John Sparkman (AL), Aug. 9, 1952, Sparkman to Mitchell, Aug. 28, 1952; Mitchell to Democratic House Speaker Sam Rayburn, Aug. 28, 1952, Rayburn to Mitchell, Sep. 1, 1952; Vice Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Congressman William L. Dawson to Mitchell, Sep. 9, 1952, Sep. 29, 1952, Nov. 17, 1952. AM Papers, Box 71.

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died of natural causes as Black America’s allegiance to the Democratic Party was solidified.12

Most civil rights scholars are committed to traditional movement origin points, such as the Second World War, the MOWM, Brown decision, Emmett Till murder, and Montgomery Bus Boycott.13 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s “long civil rights movement” paradigm challenges scholars to locate the postwar struggle’s origins among a vibrant liberal-left in the New Deal era.14 Historians influenced by Hall’s frame have effectively located the ideological and strategic forerunners of sixties activists. However, they have not resurrected Oscar DePriest and Arthur

Mitchell, whose grasp of political power also calls into question liberal narratives of twentieth-century racial progress. The black congressmen’s position in the

“long” origins of the postwar movement demonstrates that ghetto voting blocs were at the heart of a paralyzing politicization process. In hindsight, DePriest and Mitchell were the bitter pills that southern migrants swallowed as they made it to a “Land of Hope” that did not liberate them in Jim Crow America.

In The New American History, Thomas C. Holt argues that the civil rights movement was not a product of World War II, or the Brown case, but “had roots in the three previous decades of political and cultural change.” Holt argues that

12 “Former Congressman Dies in Dinwiddie,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, May 10, 1968. AM Papers, Box 71.

13 See Clayborne Carson, “Civil Rights Reform and the Black Freedom Struggle,” in Charles W. Eagles, ed., The Civil Rights Movement in America (Jackson, 1986); David J. Garrow, “Hopelessly Hollow History: Revisionist Devaluing of Brown v. Board of Education,” Virginia Law Review, 80 (Feb. 1994): 151-160; and Steven F. Lawson, “Freedom Then, Freedom Now” (1991), in Civil Rights Crossroads: Nation, Community, and the Black Freedom Struggle (Lexington, 2003).

14 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History, 91 (March 2005): 1233-1263.

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“a case can be made that the origins of its leadership and the basis of its mobilization owe much to the dramatic urbanization of the black population” in the generations that followed emancipation.15 The major flashpoints of the postwar civil rights fight were cities, from Greensboro to Los Angeles, where decades of southern migrants sought socioeconomic mobility and full citizenship.

The national percentage of black urbanites grew from 22 to 40 percent between

World War I and the onset of the Great Depression, which Holt claims “laid the basis for the greatest political mobilization of black Americans since

Reconstruction.”16

Civil rights scholars have produced extraordinary studies in an increasingly specialized field that now explores the dialectics between grassroots protests, the social welfare state, the post-industrial economy, suburbanization,

New Right conservativism, and the criminal justice system.17 In many ways, civil

15 Thomas C. Holt, “African-American History,” in The New American History: Revised and Expanded Edition, ed. by Eric Foner (Philadelphia, 1997), 311-330, quotation from 325.

16 Ibid., 325.

17 The most referenced grassroots studies include, William H. Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (New York, 1980); John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana, 1994); Greta de Jong, A Different Day: African American Struggles for Justice in Rural Louisiana, 1900-1970 (Chapel Hill, 2002); Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York, 2009); J. Todd Moye, Let the People Decide: Black Freedom and White Resistance in Sunflower County, Mississippi, 1945-1986 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004); Paul Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (Berkeley, 2005); Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley, 2007); and Nan Elizabeth Woodruff, American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta (Cambridge, Mass., 2003). On postwar liberalism and civil rights organizing, see Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York, 1995); and Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, Mass., 2009). Contemporary case studies have integrated urban, political, and social history. On the relationship between suburbanization and modern conservatism, see Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton, 2007); Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, 2006); Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, 2006); Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New 274

rights scholarship is a victim of its own success. Holt asserts, “The present challenge of African-American history is to reintegrate these important materials on the internal world and the black perspective on that world into the larger social, economic, and political forces that shaped it.”18 The postwar civil rights movement – a cacophonous concert of civil disobedience, legal dramas, rogue political candidacies, voter registration campaigns, and Washington lobbying – was a product of millions of individual Great Migrations from the Jim Crow South.

It is difficult for historians to agree on the movement’s origins, but an interdisciplinary audience of scholars can benefit from an interrogation of the paralyzing relationship between deepening ghettoization and a politically empowered Black America. This dissertation proposes that Black America’s migratory patterns, from the Underground Railroad through prolonged southern exoduses, forms the basis for a civil rights narrative that captures both the heroic achievements of twentieth-century liberals and their ultimate failure to complete a genuine reconstruction of racial democracy. In 1945, Horace Cayton and St.

Clair Drake lamented the “Phoenix-like” return of black representation to Capitol

American Right (Princeton, 2005); Becky Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965 (Chicago, 2002); and Thomas J. Sugrue, “Crabgrass-Roots Politics: Race, Rights, and the Reaction against Liberalism in the Urban North,” Journal of American History, 82 (Sep. 1995): 551-578. On the relationship between black power, the Great Society, and postwar ghettoization, see Curtis J. Austin, Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party (Fayetteville, Ark., 2008); Matthew J. Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 2007); Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, 2005); Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York, 2008); and The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: 1996). Last, on prison privatization and the War on Drugs, see Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York, 2012); Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prison, Torture, and Empire (New York, 2011); and Heather Ann Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History,” Journal of American History, 97 (Dec. 2010), 703-734.

18 Ibid., 330.

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Hill in the guise of Oscar DePriest and Arthur Mitchell. The Black Metropolis authors continued research on Chicago for revisions that tracked the ghettoization process. In 1962, Cayton and Drake argued, “The norms and values, and the styles of living described… have changed but little… Changes have been in the direction of a more intensive elaboration of Bronzeville’s separate sub-culture, not toward its disappearance.”19

“America’s Bronzevilles” have “become the structures which ‘protect’ white

America from ‘social contact’ with Negroes and which simultaneously provide a milieu for Negro Americans in which they can imbue their lives with meaning,” the famed sociologists regretted. Jim Crow faced certain extinction, but Cayton and

Drake shrewdly recognized America’s “‘race problem’ has in no way been solved.” “The rise of a vigorous national concern for civil liberties and support for integration,” could not reverse the inertia driving decades of ghettoization.20 In

2011, a noted South Side historian, Christopher Robert Reed, revisited Black

Metropolis and repackaged its wisdom for the twenty-first century. Reed argues that the Black Metropolis fostered racial pride but accepting segregation from the

White City was “a mistake, a substitute for the real American Dream of complete integration into American life.” “The world of American racism distorted the

American Dream so much that it essentially took on surreal qualities,” Reed concludes.21 The surreal existence of the South Side ghetto’s political power

19 Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (Chicago, 1993), xliii.

20 Ibid., xlvi.

21 Christopher Robert Reed, The Rise of Chicago’s Black Metropolis, 1920-29 (Urbana, 2011), 23-24.

276

amidst its material suffering is evidenced by the strange careers of Oscar S.

DePriest, Arthur W. Mitchell, and Barack H. Obama, a Hawaiian-born Chicago migrant and America’s only black president. In the late 1980s, Obama, a recent graduate of Columbia University, organized black voters and workers on a near twenty-mile segregated South Side that was ravaged by the post-industrial economy.22

Suburbanization, automation, and capital flight to anti-union southern states and foreign nations, dispossessed Black Chicago during a second, larger

Great Migration from the 1940s to the 1960s. In the three Chicago community areas that represent historic Bronzeville – Douglass, Grand Boulevard, and

Washington Park – a majority of adults were gainfully employed in 1950. By

1990, only four in ten worked in Douglass, one in four in Grand Boulevard, and one in three in Washington Park. Between 1950 and 1980, Chicago lost one-fifth of its population, but white flight depopulated Bronzeville at historic rates. In these postwar decades, Washington Park lost 44 percent of its residents, while

Douglass and Grand Boulevard witnessed rates of 55 and 50 percent, respectively.23 By 1987, when Obama’s community organizing projects matured, only 29 percent of Chicago’s inner-city males born between 1956 and 1968 were working in manufacturing industries. In 1969, more than half of this demographic, 51 percent, had been gainfully employed in the Windy City’s manufacturing trades.24

22 Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New York, 2004), 223-295.

23 Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, xlviii, l.

24 Ibid., l.

277

Despite a century of ghettoization, Chicago has been a focal point of black political power, producing three of the race’s seven U.S. Senators since

Reconstruction (President Obama, Carol Moseley Braun, and Roland Burris). In the Windy City, a martyred President Abraham Lincoln’s aspiration for a “new birth of freedom” was realized on murderous, segregated streets populated by displaced laborers and enfeebled voters dependent on ruthless partisan machines. Obama’s “post-racial” America has been characterized by a high-tech service sector, the continued displacement of industrial laborers, gentrification, and the proliferation of private prisons and gated communities. This dissertation suggests that contemporary debates regarding urban and suburban racism, police brutality and corruption, black identity, and white privilege are only profitable if they are rooted in a twentieth-century that not only segregated communities, but also racialized the “American Dream” of political participation, capital accumulation, and Franklin Roosevelt’s promise of “freedom from fear.”

278

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Michael Edward Brandon is originally from New York City, but was raised in

Raleigh, North Carolina. In 2007, he completed undergraduate studies in history, philosophy, and political science at Elon University. Two years later, he received a master’s degree in American history from the University of North Carolina at

Greensboro. In April 2015, he was awarded a doctorate from the University of Florida.

His work is inspired by W. E. B. Du Bois, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Paul Robeson, and Bruce

Wayne.

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