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209 22 stars of Black and Gold When the 71st Congress (1929–1931) opened on April 15, 1929, oscar s. De Priest, a newly elected republican from illinois, prepared to take his seat. With the press and many African Americans looking on from the segregated visitors gallery, De Priest took the oath of office. He was the first black American elected to Congress in nearly three decades.1 As a House representative, De Priest regularly challenged the fixed segregationist practices on Capitol Hill, even as he endured the prejudices of some members, including those who refused to accept offices adjacent to his.2 But when the First Lady refused to invite De Priest’s wife, Jessie, to have tea with the spouses of other republican congressmen, De Priest was furious. He was quick to ensure that the snub was widely publicized, until, in a highly symbolic gesture, Lou Henry Hoover invited Mrs. De Priest to join her at the president’s residence. Also in attendance were the wives of the secretary of war and the attorney general. This marked the first time an African American woman had ever been entertained that way in the White House.3 The nation’s reaction to the unprecedented invitation was swift. The Florida House of representatives declared that the event was “both shameful and disgraceful” and that it threatened to “destroy the prestige of the Anglo-saxon race.” The Mississippi legislature condemned the tea invitation as “tending to destroy . . . racial integrity,” and in North Carolina, the local Tribune concluded that Hoover would never carry the southern vote again. All across the south, thousands threatened to pull their votes from the republican Party, claiming that Hoover had “no real regard for the feelings of southern people.” A few northern papers voiced impatience, claiming it was “high time” the south “got away from this un-American attitude,” which it argued was “nothing more or less than a state of mind,” but their views were nearly obscured by the opposition.4 Black voters had offered the republican Party overwhelming support since the Civil War, but that backing began to erode under successive 210 Stars of Black and Gold republican administrations throughout the 1920s. Disillusionment and the experiences of returning black servicemen from the recent war had awakened a new black American, one increasingly intolerant of the racial segregation still so prevalent throughout the United states. Then, in the spring of 1930, an unlikely minority of older, mostly poor, uneducated black women challenged the injustices of Jim Crow in what may have been the nation’s earliest organized civil rights protest.5 Within months of the riotous remonstrations over Mrs. De Priest, the Hoover administration announced that the mothers and wives of black soldiers killed in the First World War and buried in europe would be segregated from their white Gold star counterparts during the pilgrimages. secretary of War Patrick J. Hurley claimed that after careful consideration of the “interests of the pilgrims themselves,” the women would be split into groups. He followed with an official statement that “no discrimination whatever will be made as between the various groups. each group will receive equal accommodations, care and consideration.”6 De Priest was quick to repeat the familiar accusations of the government ’s “un-American” activity, just as another African American, Walter White, brought the intervention of his organization, the NAACP, into the maelstrom.7 White held a press conference in New York on Memorial Day weekend, just as the first ship of white women was sailing out of the nearby harbor. While addressing the press the next day in Washington , White explained that his organization had written to all eligible black Gold star mothers and widows and was receiving an increasing number of responses from them.8 Consequently, hundreds of cards were sent to the secretary of war with signatures protesting the segregation policy. Without reservation, the preprinted message stated with clarity and force the hollowness of government slogans for democracy: Thirteen years after the victory, the War department would insult, by segregation, Mothers of fallen Negro Heroes in pilgrimage to their graves in France and Belgium. This is hypocrisy, not democracy. This is might, but not right. These fallen Heroes have surely given their most precious gift— life[—]in vain, and twelve million Negro Americans and their friends vigorously protest the imposition of this odious and un-American regulation.9 A separate letter was also sent directly to President Hoover in raging protest against the government’s...

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