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congressman since 1901, when North Carolina’s George White gave a valediction declaring his defeat “the Negro’s temporary farewell to the American Congress.” DePriest wasn’t just the South Side’s representative. He stood for his entire race. In his maiden speech, favoring a bill to investigate American imperialism in Haiti, he scolded Democrats for caring more about West Indians than sharecroppers.
    â€œI am very glad to see the gentlemen on the minority side of the House so very solicitous about the conditions of the black people in Haiti,” DePriest said. “I wish to God they were equally solicitous about the black people in America.”
    DePriest appointed blacks to Annapolis and West Point. He fought to fund D.C.’s all-black Howard University. In the Capitol, an Alabama senator tried to prevent DePriest from using the Senate dining room. You’re not big enough to stop a black congressman from sitting where he wants, DePriest told the senator.
    In Chicago, pride in the only black congressman ran deep. DePriest was a hero when he walked down Forty-third Street, in the heart of the Black Belt (which had expanded since World War I), visiting speakeasies with his son, Oscar Jr. White Chicago may have had a Second City complex toward New York City, but black Chicago didn’t. New York wouldn’t achieve black representation until 1944, when Adam Clayton Powell Jr. was elected in Harlem. Harlem’s population was more diverse, with blacks from the South Atlantic states, the West Indies, and Africa. It lacked the political unity of Chicago, where entire families and communities had migrated up from Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi. New York also lacked factories and the fat paychecks they provided. When South Siders drove to New York to see Joe Louis fight, they paraded their sedans through Harlem to envious whistles.
    â€œThe story of how the black migrants from the South gathered their strength to fulfill George White’s prophecy is a story of machine politics—Chicago style,” wrote St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton in Black Metropolis , their study of the Black Belt.
    So it took a shady politician from the Windy City to fulfill the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the Fourteenth Amendment. The beauty of a machine is that it offers a little something for everyone, even if it’s only a free turkey for voting on Election Day.
    DePriest liked to say, “I am a Negro before I am a Republican,” but that wasn’t enough to save his career when the New Deal converted blacks to the Democratic faith. DePriest had been a Herbert Hoover congressman. In 1934, he was defeated by a Democrat, after a black committeeman reminded his constituents that “Abraham Lincoln is dead.”
    The next boss of black Chicago was William Dawson, a ghetto grandee who strutted around Bronzeville on a wooden leg, which he stomped to give emphasis to his threats. Unlike his black power predecessor, Dawson didn’t flaunt his race. If DePriest had been a Negro before he was a Republican, Dawson was a machine hack before he was a Negro.
    Like most blacks who came of age before the New Deal, Dawson began his career a Republican. He changed parties only after seeing more opportunity on the other side of the ballot. After six years as alderman of the Second Ward, he lost his bid for reelection, so he accepted Mayor Edward Kelly’s offer to become Democratic committeeman. Soon, he was a congressman, sitting in DePriest’s old seat.
    Dawson’s most generous political donors were the policy kings, the South Side numbers runners who sold poor blacks a chance at winning the rent money, at just ten cents a spin. They were a major force in the Black Belt’s economy: The most successful owned vacation homes in Paris and Mexico.
    â€œNow, if I were to run for a political office, I would have to raise campaign expenses,” Dawson