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blacks had antagonized the heavily Democratic white neighborhoods by voting Republican. They were given credit for Republican mayor William Thompson’s slim victory that spring.” During the campaign, Democrats had driven calliopes playing “Bye, Bye Blackbird” through white neighborhoods and passed out a leaflet depicting Thompson as the engineer of a trainload of Negroes. “This train will start for Chicago, April 6, if Thompson is elected,” the leaflet promised.
    More importantly, blacks had their own alderman. Oscar DePriest, first elected to the city council in 1915, would become America’s most significant black politician between Reconstruction and World War II. Like many prominent blacks of that era, DePriest was of mixed race—a “quadroon,” three-quarters white. His parents had been so active in Alabama’s Reconstruction politics that they fled to Kansas after the Jim Crow laws were passed, fearing for their lives. DePriest arrived in Chicago in 1889, where he worked as a housepainter, sometimes passing for white to get jobs. Immediately, DePriest showed a talent for ward politics. A friend invited him to a meeting, where two candidates were vying for a precinct captain post. DePriest exploited the deadlock to win his first political office.
    â€œThe vote was twenty-twenty for rival candidates, and I saw right away that a deal could be made,” DePriest would recall. “So I went to one of the candidates and said, ‘Now you’re the one who ought to be captain—I’ll give you two additional votes if you make me secretary.’ The man refused. I went to his rival and made the same proposition. He accepted. I was made secretary. I kept at it because it was recreation to me. I always like a good fight; the chance, the suspense, interest me. I never gambled nor played cards so it was fun to me.”
    DePriest was one of Chicago’s great rogue politicians. Chicago’s red-light district was in his ward, having migrated south following the Great Fire of 1871. After only two years on the city council, DePriest was indicted for taking money from brothels and gambling houses, and passing it on to the cops as protection. Defended by Clarence Darrow, he was acquitted but ordered not to run again by the Republican Machine.
    DePriest kept his hand in politics by starting his own machine, the six-thousand-member People’s Movement, which backed him when his next opportunity arose. He made it back to the city council in 1927, the same year Thompson was returned to city hall with the support of Al Capone. Thompson appointed DePriest committeeman—party chief—of the Third Ward. The following year, DePriest dutifully supported the incumbent white congressman Martin P. Madden against a primary challenge from an up-and-coming black Republican named William Dawson. Madden won but died before the November election. DePriest was in Indiana, taking the baths at a spa with a group of black politicians, when he heard the news. The next morning, he was in Thompson’s office, demanding the nomination.
    â€œYou know, Oscar, I am with you,” the mayor said.
    One of DePriest’s rival candidates, William H. Harrison, was an assistant attorney general of Illinois. In July, DePriest was indicted again, this time for allowing black racketeers to operate casinos. Harrison, a black independent who stood to gain by knocking DePriest off the ballot, offered to drop the charges if DePriest dropped his candidacy. DePriest told Harrison to “go to hell” and beat his white Democrat opponent by four thousand votes. Illinois’s First Congressional District has had a black representative ever since, the longest run in the nation’s history. The Voting Rights Act was decades away, but in Chicago, blacks were so concentrated on the South Side that whites couldn’t gerrymander them out of a seat.
    Washington, D.C., had not seen a black