Gentleman from Illinois

RACES

For six long years hot-blooded Congressmen from the South have smouldered at the presence of a lone Negro on the Republican side of the House of Representatives. He was Oscar De Priest of Chicago and he did not hesitate to speak up boldly for his race. As a result of last fortnight's election, when Southern Congressmen return to the Capitol on Jan. 3, they will find Representative De Priest gone. But their racial embarrassment will be more rather than less because they will find sitting squarely in their Demo cratic midst another Chicago Negro by the name of Arthur W. Mitchell. They may object to the color of their new col league's skin but they can find no legitimate fault with his politics.

Negro Mitchell got his chance when Negro De Priest's white Democratic op ponent in Chicago's Black Belt died during the campaign and Mr. Mitchell was named in his place. A native of Alabama, Arthur Mitchell went to Tuskegee Institute, served as the late great Booker T. Washington's office boy, became a Washington, D. C. lawyer. He married a Negro woman who operates a Government accounting machine. They put their boy through the University of Michigan. The Mitchells moved to Chicago in 1928, there working for the G. O. P. and Herbert Hoover's election. Arthur Mitchell had switched parties by 1932. Campaigning against Representative De Priest on the platform that the New Deal was a boon to blacks and whites alike, he declared: "I would work harder for my people than any other Congressman, but I would not keep thinking about the fact that I was colored." Blacks and whites in his neighborhood liked this conciliatory line, gave him a 3,000 majority on election day.

Never in history have Southern Democrats had to open ranks to admit a blackamoor into the party's Congressional organization. Since Democrat Mitchell's vote will count as much as anyone's in the election of a Democratic Speaker, he will be offered committee assignments, invited to party caucuses. Nothing can prevent his occupying a suite in the House Office Building along with white Representatives from Georgia and Alabama. He is entitled to eat with them in the House Restaurant, sit beside them on the House floor.

In 1929 there was a great pother of excitement when Republican Oscar De Priest's wife in a blue chiffon dress, grey hat and coat and on Mrs. Herbert Hoover's invitation, went to the White House one afternoon to drink tea with white Congressmen's ladies (TIME, June 24, 1929). Mrs. Mitchell will expect a similar tea-date with Mrs. Roosevelt. "There is no prejudice against my people in the present Administration.'' the black Gentleman from Illinois told his constituents. "This is a new day under a New Deal."

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