Exile, Migration, and the Struggle for Representation, 1901–1965

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Black Americans were cast into political exile. Discriminatory state and local laws in the Jim Crow South led to widespread disenfranchisement, while threats of violence and economic reprisals reinforced the system of segregation. Few pathways existed for Black political participation on Capitol Hill, though advocacy groups such as the NAACP tried to exert influence on legislation in the absence of Black Members of Congress.

This volume’s second section follows the massive social, economic, and demographic changes that ultimately led Black lawmakers back to Congress. In 1928, after almost three decades of no Black representation in Congress, Oscar De Priest won election to the House from a Chicago district. From 1928 to 1965, a total of eight Black Representatives were elected to the House, all from industrial cities in the North and West. Their congressional districts had been transformed by Black migrants, who had left the South in search of safer living conditions and new opportunities.

As more and more Black Americans found employment and new political freedoms outside the South, Republicans and Democrats sought ways to attract their support. De Priest was the lone Black Republican elected during this era. In 1934, Arthur W. Mitchell defeated De Priest’s bid for a fourth term in the House, becoming the first Black Democrat elected to Congress. As the nation reeled from the Great Depression, Mitchell and many Black voters embraced the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s and 1940s, and with it the Democratic Party.

On Capitol Hill, however, southern Democrats actively worked to obstruct civil rights measures and other legislation that might undermine Jim Crow. Though small in number, the Black Representatives serving in the House influenced legislation and pursued institutional advancement in ways unavailable to their predecessors. Black Members chaired committees and subcommittees and regularly played a significant role in committee hearings. Throughout this period, Black Members also consistently demanded civil rights reform; political divisions within both parties and the determined resistance of southern Democrats, however, made passing legislation extremely difficult.

During World War II and the Cold War, global conflict put the spotlight on American society and created new opportunities for Black Americans to challenge discrimination and segregation. They pointed out that the United States waged war for democracy abroad but that the persistence of racism and Jim Crow at home cast doubt on the country’s foreign policy rhetoric. At the same time, the grassroots organizing of the postwar civil rights movement created a groundswell of pressure on Congress to act. By the 1960s, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, two landmark pieces of twentieth-century legislation that laid the foundation for the election of more Black Members of Congress in the ensuing decades.

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