Oscar Stanton Depriest

At 80 years old, Oscar Stanton Depriest physical status not available right now. We will update Oscar Stanton Depriest's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Oscar Stanton De Priest (March 9, 1871 – May 12, 1951) was an American politician and civil rights advocate from Chicago.

He was the first African American to be elected to Congress in the 20th century as a member of the Illinois Republican Party.

He was the first African American to serve in Congress during his three terms.

From 1929 to 1935, he served as a U.S. Representative from Illinois' 1st congressional district.

De Priest was also the first African-American Representative from outside the southern states, the first since the Reconstruction Era and the first since the deposition of North Carolina representative George Henry White from Congress in 1901.

De Priest was born in Alabama to freedman parents and was raised in Dayton, Ohio.

He studied finance and made a fortune in Chicago as a contractor, as well as in real estate and the stock market before the Crash.

In 1914, he was elected to the Chicago City Council, becoming the first African American to hold office.

He protested racial discrimination in Congress, including at speaking out in the South; sought to eliminate the Civilian Conservation Corps, one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal's job services; and introduced anti-lynching legislation to the House (but it was not passed because of the Solid South Democratic opposition).

Arthur W. Mitchell, the first African American to be elected as a Democrat to Congress in 1934, defeated De Priest.

De Priest reconnected to Chicago and his lucrative business ventures, before returning to politics in the 1940s when he was first elected Chicago alderman.

Early life

In 1871, De Priest was born in Florence, Alabama, to freedmen, or mixed slaves. Robert was his brother. Martha Karsner, a laundress, worked part-time as a laundress, and Neander, a teamster with the "Exodus" campaign, was a teamster. Thousands of blacks in the South were left behind by the Civil War, escaping to other states that provided promise of independence and greater economic opportunities, such as Kansas. Others came later in the century.

The De Priests left Alabama for Dayton, Ohio, 1878, the year after Reconstruction began and federal troops were withdrawn from the area. The elder De Priest had to rescue his friend, former United States Representative James T. Rapier, from a lynch crowd, and a black man was killed on their doorstep, as white supremacy had resurgent white supremacy in Alabama. The boy Oscar was a student at the Dayton elementary school.

Personal life

Jessie L. Williams, a widow born in 1870, married De Priest on March 31, 1961. They had two sons together, Laurence W. (1899-1966), who died at the age of 16, and Oscar Stanton De Priest, Jr. (May 24, 1982) After his grandmother's death in 1992, they became the administrator of his estate after his grandmother's death. This included his great-grandfather, Oscar Stanton De Priest House, which is now a National Historic Landmark, but it also held his locked political office. This had not been touched since about 1951. "A veritable treasure chest" has been working to restore the office and house, as well as reviewing the political archives.

Source

Career

De Priest attended Salina Normal School in Kansas to study bookkeeping, which was also responsible for teacher preparation. In 1889, he immigrated to Chicago, Illinois, which had been burgeoning as an industrial city. He began his career as an apprentice plasterer, house painter, and decorator. He became a very successful contractor and real estate broker. He made a fortune on the stock market and in real estate by assisting black families in their formerly all-white neighborhoods, many of which had previously been occupied by ethnic white immigrants and their descendants. In several communities that were under the pressure of new immigrants, there was a population decline.

De Priest was a member of Cook County's board from 1904 to 1908.

In 1914, De Priest was elected to the Chicago City Council, as an alderman from the 2nd Ward of the South Side from 1915 to 1917. He was Chicago's first black alderman. De Priest resigned from the City Council in 1917 after being charged with alleged graft and resigning from it. Clarence Darrow, a nationally recognized defense lawyer, was disapproved by him, and he was exiled from office. Louis B. Anderson replaced him in office.

De Priest unsuccessfully for alderman as a member of the People's Movement Club, the People's Movement Club, which he founded in 1919. De Priest's black political group became Chicago's most influential black legislator in a few years, and he became Chicago's top black legislator under Chicago Republican mayor William Hale Thompson.

Mayor Thompson appointed De Priest to replace him on the ballot in 1928, when Republican congressman Martin B. Madden died. He was the first African American to be elected to Congress outside of the South and the first African American to be elected in the twentieth century. As a Republican, he represented the 1st congressional District of Illinois (which included The Loop and part of the South Side of Chicago). During the 1930 election, De Priest was criticized in the primary by well-known African-American orator, and Republican Roscoe Conkling Simmons. Afterward, De Priest defeated Simmons' primary challenge and gained the general election. He was the only black representative in Congress during De Priest's three terms (1929-1935). During the Great Depression's years, he introduced several anti-discrimination bills.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Depriest's 1933 bill, which prohibits discrimination in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a New Deal initiative to recruit people across the country in building infrastructure. The anti-lynching bill (House Joint Resolution 171, 1933) died due to resistance by the Solid South's white Democrats, although it would not have committed lynching a federal offense. (Previous anti-lynching bills failed to pass the Senate, which was also controlled by the South after the disenfranchisement of blacks at the turn of the century.) He introduced the legislation in a long and detailed speech in which he read newspaper reviews and legal opinions: he included the names of victims of lynchings from 1927 to 1981, as well as graphic representations of these murders. A third bill, which would authorize a change of jurisdiction if a plaintiff argued that he or she did not have a fair trial due to race or faith, was passed by a later congress.

Civil rights campaigners in the South chastised De Priest for opposing federal assistance to the homeless, but they also applauded him for making public speeches in the South in the face of death threats. De Priest was also praised for not informing an Alabama senator that he was not large enough to barre him from dining in the private Senate restaurant. (Some congressmen dined in the Senate restaurant to avoid De Priest, who usually dined in the Members Dining Room designated for congressmen.) The House and Senate restaurants' public areas had been segregated. When De Priest hosted mixed groups in the Members Dining Room, the House accepted that he admitted that he brought black employees or visitors to the Members Dining Room occasionally.

De Priest defended the right of students of Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, D.C., to eat in the House's public section rather than a section in the basement that was mainly used by black employees and visitors. He brought the subject of racial discrimination against the students (and other black visitors) to a special bipartisan House commission. The Republican political party argued that the restaurant's discriminatory activity in a three-month debate challenged the restaurant's 14th Amendment right to equal access. The Democratic majority skirted the issue by claiming that the restaurant was a private establishment and not open to the public. Throughout much of the 1940s and maybe even as late as 1952, the House restaurant remained segregated.

De Priest, who are largely aligned with the political right, has opposed liberal federal services under the New Deal, favouring new initiatives at the state or local level. He was also vocal in his condemnation of communism, afraid that its clout would reach disgruntled blacks. He unsuccessfully attempted to install a special committee that would look into the Communist Party of the United States.

When First Lady Lou Hoover invited Jessie De Priest, a national celebrity in 1929, he made national news.

Benjamin O. Davis Jr. was sent by De Priest to the United States Military Academy at a time when Davis's father was the only African-American line officer in the Army.

De Priest's fame dwindled by the early 1930s, as he continued to oppose higher taxes on the wealthy and campaigned in President Roosevelt's Depression-era federal disaster programs. Arthur W. Mitchell, a Republican-turned-Democrat who ran in the 1934 United States House of Representatives, defeated De Priest in the New Deal's defeat. De Priest was elected again to the Chicago City Council in 1943, after returning to his occupations and political life in Chicago. He died in Chicago at the age of 80 and is buried in Graceland Cemetery.

Source