De Priest Sequelac

De Priest Sequelae

Congressman Oscar De Priest of Illinois continued last week to be the most conspicuous Negro in the U. S. The race issue raised by Mrs. De Priest's acceptance of a perfunctory invitation to tea at the White House (TIME, June 24) where, according to her husband she made "some fine contacts," was politically prodded from all sides, kept alive.

Under the De Priest auspices, a musicale was given at Washington Auditorium to which were invited all Republican members of Congress. Congress adjourned, emptied Washington, gave white invitees a good excuse to decline. In the crowd of 3,000 only a dozen white faces appeared, of which only one, that of Illinois Representative Richard Yates, belonged to a House colleague. Congressman De Priest announced that he would give another musicale next winter to test the sincerity of his Republican friendships on the race issue.

Still badgered about his wife's White House visit, he made another public statement:

"It's all a lot of moonshine to suggest that a question of social equality was involved in my wife's going to a White House tea. My wife was not invited because she was white or black, Republican or Democrat. . . . She was invited because she happened to be the wife of a Congressman. . . . These Southern Democrats, these haters, are trying to stir up prejudice and help themselves politically. . . . There can be no question of social equality between races. . . . It is a matter of individual taste."

Undismayed, last week at the failure (because of a visual defect) of his Candidate Charles E. Weir to pass the physical examination for the U. S. Naval Academy, Congressman De Priest said he would continue to appoint Negroes to fill his district's vacancies in the service schools.

In Georgia, Bishop W. N. Ainsworth, of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, deaf to the bellowings of his diocesans, spoke out in defense of the De Priest affair: "There is no more justification for the exclusion of a black man and his wife from such a function than there is to exclude a red, yellow, brown or white one. The President and his wife do not select any of them; the constituency does. It is about time for everybody to quit seeing black only. . . ."

Arrayed against Congressman De Priest was many a southern politician. Virginia's Republican Representative Joseph C. Shaffer, refusing the De Priest musicale invitation, warned the Negro congressman: "You are now embarking on a perilous course which will, if you continue, disturb relations which have long been amicably settled in the South." Democratic Representative Robert Alexis Green, wearer of flowing Windsor ties, announced that he would never again attend a White House function as long as the Hoovers were there. On the floor of the Senate, South Carolina's Senator Blease, coarsely harangued Mrs. Hoover, had the clerk read into the Congressional Record a vulgar doggerel, concluding:

There is trouble in the White House

More than you can tell;

Yelling like wild men

Niggers raising hell.

Outraged Northern Senators protested. "The brayings of Blease," as they were called by the Negro press, were expurged from the Record.

In a storm of nationwide editorial comment, the Jackson (Miss.) Daily News led Southern shouters by declaring that "The De Priest incident has placed President and Mrs. Hoover beyond the pale of social recognition by Southern people." It advised them not to visit the South.

Said Chicago's Republican Tribune: "If Mrs. Hoover's Southern tea party has driven the Southern fanatics away from union with Northern fanatics, it has been the best use of tea since the night it was thrown into Boston Harbor."

The Pittsburgh Courier (Negro weekly) sneering at Southern solicitude for racial purity, stated: "Everyone knows that the percentage of white blood flowing in the veins of Mr. and Mrs. De Priest is due to the direct violation of Negro womanhood by avaricious Southern white men, who should have remembered in the heat of their unbridled illicit intercourse that Mother Nature does not know how to discriminate in the production of offspring." Pointing squarely at the politicians who fanned the fire, the Courier predicted: "In 1932 they will be parading Mrs. De Priest's photograph to keep the South solid, Democratic and undefiled."