Jessie DePriest tea at the White House
In 1929, US First Lady Lou Hoover invited Jessie DePriest, the wife of black Republican Chicago congressman Oscar DePriest, to tea at the White House. Southern politicians and journalists responded with vitriolic attacks.
Background
Blacks, including leaders such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, had been received at the White House by Presidents Lincoln, Grant, Hayes, Coolidge and Cleveland. In 1798 John Adams had dined in the White House with Joseph Bunel, a representative of the Haitian President, and his black wife,[1][2] and in 1901 Theodore Roosevelt had had Booker T. Washington to dinner.[1]
The Chicago district represented by Oscar DePriest had a reputation for corruption, and until then the couple had been shunned by Washington's high society. It was a White House tradition, though, for the first lady to entertain congressional wives at tea, and she and the president never considered snubbing DePriest. She invited DePriest to the last of a series of five teas, and made sure the other guests were women who would deal kindly with her.[2]
Reception
The Texas, Florida, Georgia and Mississippi legislatures issued condemnations. Texas's only female state legislator, Margie Neal, raged, "Mrs Hoover has violated the most sacred social custom of the White House, and this should be condemned,"[2] and South Carolina Democratic Senator Coleman Blease inserted a poem entitled "Niggers in the White House" into a resolution which was read aloud on the floor of the United States Senate — though the resolution, including the poem, was by unanimous agreement excised from the Congressional Record due to protests from Republican senators.[3][4]
The Houston Chronicle, the Austin Times and the Memphis Commercial Appeal published scathing editorials. The Mississippi Jackson Daily News declared, "The DePriest incident has placed [the] President and Mrs. Hoover beyond the pale of social recognition for the Southern people."[2]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Lusane, Clarence (23 January 2013). The Black History of the White House. City Lights Publishers. pp. 253–4. ISBN 9780872866119.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Jeansonne, Glen (2012). The Life of Herbert Hoover: Fighting Quaker, 1928-1933. USA: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 306. ISBN 9780230103092.
- ↑ "Offers "Nigger" Poem". Evening Tribune. June 18, 1929. pp. 7–.
- ↑ "Blease Poetry is Expunged from Record". The Afro-American. 22 June 1929. Retrieved 16 September 2013.
Further reading
- Day, Davis S. (Winter 1980). "Herbert Hoover and Racial Politics: The De Priest Incident". Journal of Negro History (Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Inc.) 65 (1): 6–17. doi:10.2307/3031544. JSTOR 3031544.
External links
- "‘A Tempest In a Teapot’ The Racial Politics of First Lady Lou Hoover’s Invitation of Jessie DePriest to a White House Tea". The White House Historical Association. Retrieved 30 August 2014.