Jessie De Priest tea at the White House

In 1929, United States First Lady Lou Hoover invited Jessie De Priest, the wife of Chicago congressman Oscar De Priest, to the traditional tea by new administrations for congressional wives at the White House. Oscar De Priest, a Republican, was the first African American elected to Congress in the 20th century and the first elected outside the South.

Southern politicians and journalists strongly objected to the invitation of De Priest with vitriolic attacks. The White House invitation was a nexus of larger issues. At the turn of the century the Southern states had disenfranchised most blacks and excluded them from political life. Those states had imposed white supremacy and Jim Crow customs, including racial segregation in public facilities. However, Herbert Hoover had won five southern states in his landslide election to the presidency in 1928; some of these legislatures were now most critical of the tea invitation.

The White House tea followed a campaign in May and June 1929 by Congressman George H. Tinkham of Massachusetts, who tried to gain approval of a proposal, to enforce provisions of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments against racial discrimination. Tinkham proposed to reduce the South’s congressional apportionment and penalize the region for the (large) portion of their voting populations they had disenfranchised. This was defeated, but Democrats feared the reach of the Republican administration and latched on to the tea issue as a way to rally their ranks against Hoover on the issue of segregation.

During the Civil War and afterward, Republican Presidents Lincoln, Grant, Hayes, Coolidge and Cleveland had received black leaders such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth at the White House. In 1798 President John Adams had dined in the White House with Joseph Bunel, a representative of the Haitian President during its revolution, and his black wife. Black Republicans (often of mixed race) were elected to Congress from the South during and after Reconstruction. In 1901 Republican President Theodore Roosevelt had entertained Booker T. Washington, a national leader who was president of Tuskegee Institute, a historically black college, to dinner at the White House.

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