Exile
On December 6, 1901, the New York Sun printed a short history of the “rise and fall” of Black Americans on Capitol Hill. The paper included a brief description of each Black Member who had served between 1870 and 1901 under the headline “No Negro Now in Congress.” The 57th Congress (1901–1903) had opened the previous day, and the absence of Black Members seemed to signal the end of a chapter in congressional history. The Sun offered a retrospective on Black Representatives and Senators, noting that during the preceding three decades, only the 50th Congress (1887–1889) had not welcomed a Black Member. Because of the “persistent efforts to disenfranchise the black voters,” the Sun acknowledged, Black Americans had “entirely lost the political vantage ground” granted by the Fifteenth Amendment. The Sun predicted future Black candidates had little chance of winning election to Congress. The article proved prescient; 28 years passed before another Black Representative was sworn in on Capitol Hill.2
Black Americans never accepted their exile from national politics. Instead, they engaged in a struggle for representation on several fronts. Black candidates ran for office. Black activists and organizations mobilized to pressure lawmakers in Congress to act on issues that mattered to them. And faced with a repressive system of segregation in the South, Black men and women sought new opportunities by migrating northward and westward in greater numbers than ever before, a movement that reestablished their communities in places where they could more freely exercise political power.
Exclusion
On the same day the Sun noted the absence of Black Members in the 57th Congress, the front-page headline described Republican efforts in the House to punish southern states for disenfranchising Black voters. In January 1901, Representative Edgar Dean Crumpacker of Indiana had raised the possibility of reducing southern influence in Congress based on Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment. Crumpacker proposed subtracting the number of disenfranchised voters from the population totals of individual states, which were used to determine the number of seats apportioned to each state in the House. The House voted down his measure. At the start of the 57th Congress, the Republican majority had increased significantly, and Crumpacker urged his colleagues to renew this effort. In early 1902, Charles William Frederick Dick of Ohio proposed an investigation to determine the relationship between the congressional representation of states that disenfranchised Black voters and the voting totals in those states’ congressional elections. Ultimately, the proposed reduction efforts were rejected by the House. During debate, Representative Thomas Spight of Mississippi, a Confederate veteran turned newspaper publisher, boasted that the Mississippi state constitution was designed to disenfranchise: “I will not deny that the leading purpose was to eliminate the negro from the political equation.” He added that the South would rather have no congressional representation than to “return again to the state of affairs existing in the reconstruction period” when African Americans exercised their right to vote.4
Amid Congress’s failure to defend Black voting rights, the Supreme Court also made several rulings that enabled discrimination at the state and local level to flourish. In 1896, the Plessy v. Ferguson decision gave legal blessing to the system of segregation crystallizing in the South. The link between political exclusion and unequal justice was underscored two years later in Williams v. Mississippi (1898), when a Black man convicted of murder by an all-White jury appealed the decision, claiming that state laws disenfranchising Black voters had also stripped them from the jury pool, which ultimately denied Black defendants equal protection of the law. The court refused to acknowledge that Mississippi’s state laws led solely to Black disenfranchisement and did not consider the juror selection process to be intentionally discriminatory. In Giles v. Harris (1903), Black voters in Alabama filed a class action suit claiming to have been discriminated against in attempting to register to vote. The Supreme Court ruled that regulating elections was beyond its jurisdiction, leaving the process in the hands of state legislators who, as its immediate beneficiaries, resoundingly approved of Black disenfranchisement.5
The Supreme Court’s rulings left southern states with immense power just as a broad movement of social, economic, and political reform emerged to challenge corruption and inequality in American life. The progressive movement was composed of a diverse array of social reformers pushing for the modernization and democratization of American society. Their efforts included regulating the quality and production of food, establishing laws for child labor and guidelines for industrial safety, and implementing conservation, temperance, and even experimental social welfare programs. From the 1890s through World War I, progressives ushered in political reforms, including direct primary elections, the popular election of U.S. Senators, and women’s suffrage.6
Black civil and political rights were not part of this agenda, however. Progressive reformers focused on the need for expertise in all fields, which provided a convenient justification for limiting the franchise to those citizens that most progressives considered qualified to vote. In practice, this movement often complemented Jim Crow, and the restrictive measures implemented in southern states at the turn of the twentieth century continued to deprive Black citizens of their civil and political rights for decades.7 State and local laws, court decisions, and the ongoing, ever-present threat of violence established formidable impediments to Black political participation.
Despite these barriers, Black candidates continued to seek elected office, particularly during the first decade of the twentieth century. In 1902, Black Republican Alexander D. Dantzler was his party’s nominee for a House seat representing the Seventh District of South Carolina against Democrat Asbury Francis Lever. Although Dantzler won just 167 votes to Lever’s 4,220, Dantzler turned to the contested election process in the House, hoping that the Republican majority would admit him or declare the seat vacant. If the Black residents of the district were able to register to vote, Dantzler asserted, he would have won. Dantzler also claimed that South Carolina’s election laws, which required literacy tests and property qualifications for prospective voters, were unconstitutional. When the House Committee on Elections dismissed the contest, it rejected Dantzler’s argument and accepted the initial vote tally. The National Negro Suffrage League submitted a memorial to Representative Joseph Weeks Babcock of Wisconsin, the head of the National Republican Congressional Committee, declaring that the Republican-led committee’s report “establishes a precedent which, until reversed, will render of no effect any future contest from any of the disfranchised States of the South.” During the next decade, Dantzler and several other Black candidates from South Carolina used the same strategy to contest the victories of their Democratic opponents. In each instance, the Committee on Elections cited the Dantzler case from 1902 as precedent and dismissed their claims, urging the contestants to take their case to the Supreme Court to rule on the constitutionality of South Carolina’s election laws.8
While state laws enabled discrimination and disenfranchisement, southern Democrats worked to expand segregation into areas of federal jurisdiction. In 1913, Democrats gained control of Congress and the White House for the first time since the mid-1890s. The administration of President Woodrow Wilson proceeded to segregate executive departments. Congress, which had the responsibility of administering the nation’s capital, also did much to promote the practice of segregation in Washington. From 1913 to 1921 and again after 1933, southerners largely controlled the committees and subcommittees that appropriated funds and oversaw the city government. In places where Congress could have overturned Jim Crow practices—in public parks, theaters, restaurants, and innumerable other locations, including the principal train depot and transportation hub of the city, Union Station—it did nothing.9
About this record During the 67th Congress (1921–1923), the House Judiciary Committee considered antilynching legislation from one of its members, Missouri Representative Leonidas Carstarphen Dyer. The committee’s records include this map of lynchings in each state from 1889 to 1921. A thick red line separates northern and southern states. According to the map issued by the Colored Women’s Clubs of Michigan, southern states accounted for 88 percent of lynchings during this period and 87 percent of southern Representatives voted against Dyer’s antilynching bill. Along the bottom of the page in capital letters the map proclaimed: “Mob violence and lynching—the only ‘industries’ the South votes solidly to protect.”
“Any Place that is North and East—And Not Dixie”
When the Republican Party acquiesced to the disenfranchisement of its southern supporters, the chances of electing Black candidates from the region swiftly vanished. The denial of Black political rights in the South, coupled with the intensifying social and economic repression, led many to leave the region. In his 1949 poem, “One-Way Ticket,” Langston Hughes described the feeling of despair that had driven many to leave the South. Hughes, whose grandfather, Charles Henry Langston, was the brother of former Virginia Representative John M. Langston, identified Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and fear as the root causes of this demographic shift. Black Americans left the South, he wrote, and headed in the direction of “Any place that is North and East—And not Dixie.”10
In 1910, nearly 90 percent of all African Americans lived in the South. Largely employed in agriculture, most faced economic uncertainty—especially as the boll weevil decimated cotton crops around the turn of the century. Crop prices fluctuated significantly during the first decades of the twentieth century, and indebtedness increased as many of the Black farmers who had been able to purchase property faced the prospect of losing their land and having to make other arrangements, such as tenant farming or sharecropping.11
In the next decade, Black migration intensified, as Black Americans sought jobs and new freedoms beyond the Jim Crow South. In the late 1910s, World War I accelerated this process. Black migrants found work in war production and other industries as wartime mobilization tightened the labor supply. Those labor shortages provided Black workers with jobs in the steel, shipbuilding, and automotive industries as well as in ammunition plants and meat-packing factories. Black communities grew rapidly in cities such as Chicago, Detroit, New York, and St. Louis, Missouri.12
Whether their motivation was economic or political, individual or communal, immense numbers of African Americans streamed northward. By one estimate, nearly 450,000 southern-born Black Americans left the South between 1910 and 1920; in the 1920s, more than 800,000 made the same trek. Between 1910 and 1930, Detroit’s African-American community grew 2,000 percent—from a population of 5,700 to about 120,000.13
Even those Black Members born and raised in the North and elected at mid-century were only one generation removed from the South. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. was born in New Haven, Connecticut, where his father was a minister, and moved to Manhattan when he was less than a year old. His father, however, had been born in Franklin County, Virginia, in 1865. In Detroit, Charles C. Diggs Jr. was elected in 1954 and John Conyers Jr. a decade later, but both had roots in the South. Diggs’s family was originally from Mound Bayou, Mississippi. Conyers’s father, John Conyers Sr., an organizer and union official in the United Auto Workers, had moved from Monroe, Georgia, to Detroit in 1926.15
Ultimately, the election of Black Representatives during the mid-twentieth century would have been all but impossible without the Great Migration. No longer subject to ubiquitous voter suppression, skyrocketing Black populations in northern cities created new constituencies and new opportunities for political activism and the pursuit of leadership.
“This Shame and Disgrace among the Nations of the World”
Lynching was perhaps the issue around which Black Americans most urgently sought legislative change. In the absence of congressional representation, the NAACP embraced the mantle of advocating for the interests of Black Americans. Founded in 1909, the NAACP began a national campaign against lynching. In 1917, the organization led a silent march down Fifth Avenue in New York City to draw attention to the ongoing crisis for African Americans across the United States. The NAACP also attempted to lobby Congress for legislation, and one of its central goals was the passage of a federal antilynching law. The organization produced a report, Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1919, to spur congressional action, and sent James Weldon Johnson to Washington to serve as its congressional lobbyist. A poet, composer, writer, and activist, Johnson pushed lawmakers debating reapportionment to reduce southern representation in Congress as punishment for the region’s disenfranchisement of Black people. He also decisively shaped the NAACP’s antilynching campaign. Of his experience, Johnson recalled, “I tramped the corridors of the Capitol and the two office buildings so constantly that toward the end, I could, I think, have been able to find my way about blindfolded.”16
Johnson and Atlanta civil rights activist and NAACP assistant executive secretary Walter White searched for allies on Capitol Hill. One potential ally was Republican Leonidas Carstarphen Dyer of Missouri. Since his election to the House in 1910, Dyer had made an effort to serve as an advocate for the Black community, particularly as the number of Black voters increased in his district. Dyer represented a thin sliver of the southern and eastern sections of St. Louis. Part of the heavily industrialized district hugged the Mississippi River and included growing African-American neighborhoods. In July 1917, in East St. Louis, Illinois, violence between White and Black residents led to 47 deaths, including 38 African-American men, women, and children. In a 1917 hearing to consider the creation of a joint committee to investigate the causes of the riot, Dyer decried the slaughter as one of “the most dastardly and most criminal outrages ever perpetrated in this country.”17
The events were part of a wave of mob violence during the war in which White vigilantes targeted Black neighborhoods, demonstrating that violence against African Americans was just as possible in major cities as it was in the rural corners of the Deep South. Dyer introduced his antilynching measure on April 8, 1918. The bill was designed “to protect citizens of the United States against lynching in default of protection by the States.” He sought to charge lynch mobs with capital murder, to try lynching cases in federal court, and to fine counties where lynchings occurred. The Dyer bill also mandated jail time and imposed a fine of up to $5,000 on state and local law enforcement officials who refused to make a reasonable effort to prevent a lynching or who surrendered a prisoner in their custody to a lynch mob. Finally, the bill sought to establish guidelines for fair courtroom proceedings by excluding lynch mob participants and supporters from juries.18
In January 1920, with Republicans now in the majority, the Judiciary Committee held a hearing on antilynching bills introduced by Dyer and several other Members. James Weldon Johnson appeared before the committee—providing statistics on lynchings and presenting newspaper coverage of these incidents. In December 1921, Dyer introduced another antilynching bill, and under the NAACP’s intense lobbying, it came before the full House in January 1922. Southern Democrats decried the measure, mustering arguments about the rights of states under the Constitution. Hatton William Sumners of Texas, a Dallas attorney who later served 16 years as chair of the House Judiciary Committee, led the opposition. Sumners positioned the South as the true victim and likened the bill to an act of legislative “mob” violence; he suggested Congress let southern states resolve the lynching issue on their own.20
On January 26, 1922, several hundred African-American spectators packed the House Gallery, intensely monitoring the debate. On several occasions they cheered loudly in violation of gallery rules. Some traded barbs with southern Members on the House Floor, whose speeches repeatedly referred to NAACP activists as “race agitators.” The Dyer bill passed the House that afternoon. The NAACP proceeded to engage in a formidable public campaign, but with southern Democrats in the Senate obstructing debate on the bill and threatening to filibuster, Senate Republicans declined to take up the fight.21
Dyer reintroduced antilynching legislation at the opening of the 68th Congress (1923–1925) and two more times before the end of the decade. Despite the setbacks in Congress, Johnson called upon “those who hold dear the institutions of our country and who feel this shame and disgrace among the nations of the world” to remain committed to federal action. He continued the NAACP campaign throughout most of the 1920s, testifying at a 1926 Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing to provide updated figures on lynchings in the South. Despite his efforts, the NAACP could not prod Congress to act definitively to protect the safety of African Americans.22
Pivotal Decade
The 1920s began with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which guaranteed women’s suffrage. Passed by Congress in 1919, the amendment made no reference to voting rights for Black Americans. In fact, southern Democrats often used congressional debates on women’s voting rights to warn of what they considered the dangerous potential for Black enfranchisement if such an amendment were to be added to the Constitution. The first woman elected to Congress, Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana, used discriminatory ideas about race to appeal for support from southern Members for the cause of women’s suffrage. She acknowledged and sympathized with the prejudices of her southern colleagues, making the case that White women were more prepared for democratic participation than African Americans. “The women of the South have stood by you through every trial,” she implored southern Representatives. “Are you going to deny them the equipment with which to help you effectively simply because the enfranchisement of a child-race 50 years ago brought you a problem you were powerless to handle?” Even in a moment of change when women across the country were guaranteed the right to vote in national elections, the possibilities for fundamental reforms designed to benefit African Americans were few and far between.23
While none of the 11 women elected to the House of Representatives during the 1920s were African American, Black women aspired to win a seat in Congress. In 1924, Lucille Randolph joined her husband A. Philip Randolph, the nation’s leading Black trade unionist, as Socialist candidates in two adjacent Manhattan congressional districts. Lucille Randolph focused her campaign on the need for federal action against lynching, pledging to support the Dyer bill if elected. But the Randolphs’ third-party bids each received just three percent of the vote. In 1933, Black women activists in New York organized the Harlem Congressional League with the goal of eventually electing a Black woman to Congress.24
With little chance of passing legislation to protect the civil and political rights of African Americans, several Members of Congress tried to use other means to address these issues in the 1920s. In 1920, Representative George Holden Tinkham of Massachusetts briefly revived the congressional apportionment reduction efforts of 20 years earlier, calling for investigations into voter disenfranchisement in the South. The House Committee on the Census held hearings on congressional reapportionment, and witnesses included the NAACP’s Johnson and White and other legal advocates. They called on the committee to penalize southern states that continued to disenfranchise Black residents by reducing their seats in the House. Tinkham repeatedly invoked Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment as a mandate for Congress to take punitive action.25
The demographic transformations of northern and midwestern cities raised the possibility that Black Americans could have political influence, and perhaps once again elect their own to speak for them in Congress. The New York Amsterdam News made a public appeal for more Black congressional candidates. The increase in New York’s Black population had made victory possible, argued the paper, but Black voters deserved to have a Black candidate to “support like the Italians support and elect Congressman Fiorello La Guardia,” who represented East Harlem in Congress.26
In the 1920s, Black candidates sought elected office in Chicago, where the city’s history of Black municipal officeholding laid the groundwork for congressional candidates. The Republican Party led the way in Chicago, with a formidable machine under Mayor William Hale Thompson and elected officials like alderman Oscar De Priest. But northern Democrats also recognized the potential in the city’s Black electorate. In 1924, the Democratic Party nominated Black attorney Earl B. Dickerson to challenge the longtime incumbent, Republican Martin Barnaby Madden, for a Chicago seat in the House.27
It was in Chicago that a Black candidate finally broke through the color line established by Jim Crow disenfranchisement. In 1928, when Representative Madden died during his twelfth term, Republicans chose the Alabama-born De Priest as their candidate for Illinois’s First District. De Priest had risen in the ranks of urban machine politicians and gathered support by helping to deliver jobs and services to the Black migrants transforming the city’s South Side. De Priest’s election to the 71st Congress (1929–1931) served as a marker for a new era in American politics, as a Black candidate had succeeded beyond the geographical boundaries of the South.
Footnotes
2“No Negro Now in Congress,” 6 December 1901, Sun (New York, NY): 5.
3W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, with an introduction and chronology by Jonathan Scott Holloway (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015): 31–32.
4“Moving Against the South,” 6 December 1901, Sun (New York, NY): 1; Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003): 238–240; Congressional Record, House, 56th Cong., 2nd sess. (8 January 1901): 748; “A Bomb in Caucus: Republican Proposition to Southern Democrats,” 18 April 1902, Washington Post: 1; Congressional Record, House, 57th Cong., 1st sess. (31 March 1902): 3484, 3486.
5Perman, The Struggle for Mastery: 121–123; J. Morgan Kousser, Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999): 321–323; David A. Bateman, Ira Katznelson, and John S. Lipinski, Southern Nation: Congress and White Supremacy after Reconstruction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018): 214.
6Arthur S. Link and Richard L. McCormick, Progressivism (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1983); Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967).
7J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880–1910 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974): 260–261.
8House Committee on Elections No. 1, Alexander D. Dantzler v. Asbury F. Lever, 58th Cong., 2nd sess., H. Rept. 1740 (1904); “Republicans Contempt Resented by Negroes,” 24 August 1904, New York Times: 7; House Committee on Elections No. 1, Aaron P. Prioleau v. George S. Legare, 59th Cong., 1st sess., H. Rept. 4779 (1906); House Committee on Elections No. 1, Isaac Myers v. J.O. Patterson, 59th Cong., 1st sess., H. Rept. 4780 (1906); House Committee on Elections No. 1, Charles C. Jacobs v. Asbury F. Lever, 59th Cong., 1st sess., H. Rept. 4781 (1906); House Committee on Elections No. 1, Alexander D. Dantzler v. Asbury F. Lever, 60th Cong., 2nd sess., H. Rept. 1817 (1909); House Committee on Elections No. 1, Aaron P. Prioleau v. George S. Legare, 60th Cong., 2nd sess., H. Rept. 1818 (1909); House Committee on Elections No. 1, Isaac Myers v. J.O. Patterson, 60th Cong., 2nd sess., H. Rept. 1819 (1909).
9Desmond King, Separate and Unequal: Black Americans and the US Federal Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995): 4, 9, 26–27, 29, 48–49, 222, 229.
10Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume I: 1902–1941, I, Too, Sing America, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002): 5–8; “One-Way Ticket,” in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, eds. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel (New York: Knopf, 1995): 361.
11Leah Platt Boustan, Competition in the Promised Land: Black Migrants in Northern Cities and Labor Markets (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007): 14; James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1989): 28–30; James R. Grossman, “A Chance to Make Good: 1900–1929,” in To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans, eds. Robin D.G. Kelley and Earl Lewis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000): 346–351.
12James N. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005): 23–24.
13Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: 14–15; Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996): 23.
14Kenneth Eugene Mann, “Oscar Stanton De Priest: Persuasive Agent for the Black Masses,” Negro History Bulletin 35, no. 6 (October 1972): 134; Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977): 146–159, 184–201; Dennis S. Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman: A Life of Arthur Wergs Mitchell (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997): 1, 16, 20–26, 33, 39; Manning, William L. Dawson and the Limits of Black Electoral Leadership: 12–13, 25; Michael E. Ruane and Edward Colimore, “Ex-Rep. Robert N.C. Nix Dies at 88,” 23 June 1987, Philadelphia Inquirer: A1; Jennifer Bihm, “Augustus ‘Gus’ Hawkins, Civil Rights Pioneer,” 30 December 2004, Los Angeles Sentinel: A1; “Oral History Interview with Augustus F. Hawkins, January 15, 1988,” by Carlos Vásquez, UCLA Oral History Program, for California State Archives, State Government Oral History Program, 1–9. The transcript is available at https://oac.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb5870096f&query=&brand=calisphere.
15Charles V. Hamilton, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.: The Political Biography of an American Dilemma (New York: Atheneum, 1991): 41; “Rep. Diggs Rouses Mississippi Rally,” 14 May 1955, Chicago Defender: 1; “Friends Remember John Conyers Sr.,” 11 January 1986, Michigan Chronicle (Detroit): 1A; Jill Day Foley, “John Conyers Sr.: Blood Sweat and Tears of the UAW,” 18 February 1989, Michigan Chronicle: 4B.
16Robert L. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909–1950 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1980): 18–19, 29–30, 37–38, 80–83, 214; William B. Hixson Jr., “Moorefield Storey and the Defense of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill,” New England Quarterly 42 (March 1969): 65–81; Robert Fleming, James Weldon Johnson (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1987); James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way (1933; repr., New York: DaCapo Press, 2000): 361–373.
17Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909–1950: 36–37, 42–43; Hearings before the House Committee on Rules, Riot at East St. Louis, Illinois, 65th Cong., 1st sess. (1917): 5.
18Congressional Record, House, 65th Cong., 2nd sess. (6 July 1918): 8826–8834; Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909–1950: 43; H.R. 11279, 65th Cong. (1918); Congressional Record, House, 65th Cong., 2nd sess. (7 May 1918): 6177.
19Congressional Record, House, 65th Cong., 2nd sess. (7 May 1918): 6177–6178.
20Hearings before the House Committee on the Judiciary, Part I, Segregation; Part II, Anti-Lynching, 66th Cong., 2nd sess. (1920): 45–62; Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909–1950: 54–56, 61–62; Johnson, Along This Way: 362–364; H.R. 13, 67th Cong. (1921); Congressional Record, House, 67th Cong., 2nd sess. (4 January 1922): 797, 799; Congressional Record, House, 67th Cong., 2nd sess. (26 January 1922): 1774–1775.
21Johnson, Along This Way: 366; “Anti-lynching Debate Heard By Big Crowds on Yesterday,” 27 January 1922, Afro-American (Baltimore, MD): 1; Congressional Record, House, 67th Cong., 2nd sess. (26 January 1922): 1784; Congressional Record, House, 67th Cong., 2nd sess. (26 January 1922): 1795–1796; Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909–1950: 66–67; Congressional Record, House, 67th Cong., 2nd sess. (21 September 1922): 13075–13079, 13082–13086.
22H.R. 1, 68th Cong. (1923); H.R. 5540, 70th Cong. (1927); H.R. 2403, 71st Cong. (1929); “Anti-lynching Campaigns Show Marked Results,” 25 October 1924, Norfolk Journal and Guide (VA): 1; Hearing before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on S. 121, To Prevent and Punish the Crime of Lynching, 69th Cong., 1st sess. (1926): 6–37.
23Congressional Record, House, 65th Cong., 2nd sess. (10 January 1918): 771.
24“Socialist Candidate Gives Program If Elected To Office,” 25 October 1924, Philadelphia Tribune: 9; “Klan Is Vital Issue, Says Woman Candidate for Congress,” 24 October 1924, Afro-American: 3; Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives, “Election Statistics, 1920 to Present”; “Harlem Women Organize To Win Seat in Congress,” 30 November 1933, Philadelphia Tribune: 7.
25H. Res. 591, 66th Cong. (1920); Hearings before the House Committee on the Census, Apportionment of Representatives, 66th Cong., 3rd sess. (1921); H. Res. 83, 67th Cong. (1921); H. Res. 116, 67th Cong. (1921); Congressional Record, House, 67th Cong., 1st sess. (6 May 1921): 1124–1131; Richard B. Sherman, The Republican Party and Black America from McKinley to Hoover, 1896–1933 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1973): 170–171.
26“Wanted—A Candidate for Congress,” 11 August 1926, New York Amsterdam News: 20.
27“Naming of DePriest Recalls Chicago’s Political Progress,” 5 May 1928, Pittsburgh Courier: 4; Rita Werner Gordon, “The Change in the Political Alignment of Chicago’s Negroes During the New Deal,” Journal of American History 56 (1969): 586–588; “Democrats Break Party Precedent in Illinois Race,” 23 June 1924, Atlanta Constitution: 6; “Illinois Democrats to Name Negro for Congress,” 5 July 1924, Norfolk Journal and Guide: 7.