Oscar Stanton De Priest was born in 1871 in Florence, Alabama, to freedmen, former slaves of mixed race. He had a brother named Robert. His mother, Martha Karsner, worked part-time as a laundress, and his father, Neander De Priest, was a teamster, associated with the "Exodus" movement. After the Civil War, thousands of blacks left continued oppression by whites in the South by moving to other states that offered promises of freedom and greater economic opportunities, such as Kansas.
Educated in a Congregational church school for freedmen in Florence and in the public schools in Salina, Kansas, De Priest led his classmates in schoolboy pranks, hustled odd jobs, and responded aggressively to racial taunts. After graduating from elementary school and a two-year business and bookkeeping course at Salina Normal School, he ran away to Ohio at the age of seventeen.
De Priest went to Chicago, where he worked as a house painter. By 1905 De Priest owned a flourishing painting and decorating firm, and within another decade he had accumulated a fortune managing South Side real estate.
De Priest had also entered Republican politics in Chicago. Able to deliver the black vote concentrated in the Second and Third Wards, he was elected Cook County Commissioner in 1904 and 1906 but lost the nomination in 1908. Thereafter he aligned himself with various Republican factions (and, on occasion, with Democrats), adroitly endorsing the organization's white nominees for alderman against black independents in 1912 and 1914.
Backed by forty-nine of the Second Ward's fifty precinct captains, he became the successful Republican candidate for the City Council in 1915. He was the first black to hold that post. For sponsoring an ordinance banning discrimination (later tabled and forgotten), De Priest gained a reputation as a crusader that was enhanced during the race riot of 1919, when he twice daily strapped on pistols and rode to the stockyards for meat for his people. Indicted in 1917 for demanding protection money from the underworld, De Priest submitted to pressure from Republican party regulars and did not seek reelection to the city council that year.
With Clarence Darrow as his attorney, he was acquitted and ran unsuccessfully as an independent in the 1918 and 1919 aldermanic contests, losing to black Republican candidates. De Priest then conciliated the party and served as a delegate to the 1920 Republican Convention. He later earned an appointment as Assistant Illinois Commerce Commissioner and election as committeeman of the Third Ward, with the power of patronage.
In the 1928 Republican congressional primary, De Priest supported the white incumbent, Martin B. Madden, over a young black attorney, William L. Dawson. When Madden died shortly after the primary, De Priest used his influence with Mayor Thompson to obtain the nomination another criminall indictment, for "aiding, abetting, and inducing" racketeers to operate gambling houses on the South Side with police protection, he defeated a white Democrat and a black independent to become the first black to sit in Congress in twenty-eight years and the first black congressman from the North.
De Priest claimed that the indictment was engineered by local political enemies to prevent the election of a black representative, and the charges were dropped after the election because of insufficient evidence. Viewing himself as the representative of twelve million black Americans, De Priest introduced an antilynching measure, further amendments to the Constitution enforcing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, a bill to provide pensions for aged former slaves, and antidiscrimination legislation regarding the Civilian Conservation Corps. With the exception of the latter, none of his bills became law.
Dining freely in the House restaurant, De Priest fought to win that privilege for his staff and other members of his race. He urged northern blacks to use their ballots to aid their southern brothers and, although threatened by local dignitaries and the Ku Klux Klan, he traveled widely in the South, advocating political organization. Chastized by a southern newspaper for preaching social equality, De Priest retorted: "They have Jim Crow theatre laws and Jim Crow streetcar laws, but what they need is Jim Crow bedroom laws. " When the superintendent of West Point asked him to replace a black appointee with a white candidate, he replied that until a black graduated, he would send them "bigger and blacker each time. "
Although many of his black constituents became Democrats during the New Deal, De Priest retained their support in spite of his opposition to federal relief (a position he reversed in 1932) and "soak-the-rich" legislation. Twice reelected, he lost his seat in 1934 to a black Democrat, Arthur W. Mitchell. He continued to serve the Republican party, as vice-chairman of the Cook County Republican Central Committee from 1932 to 1934, as delegate to the 1936 Republican Convention, and as alderman from the Third Ward from 1943 to 1947. After returning to the real-estate business with his son Oscar Jr. , De Priest died in Chicago.
De Priest was a member of the Republican Party.
Capitalizing upon Republican factionalism to gain leverage, he supported a Democrat for mayor in 1923, but in 1927 contributed personal funds as well as black votes to the election of Republican William Hale Thompson as mayor.
In 1897 De Priest married Jessie L. Williams of Rockford, Illinois. They had two sons together: Laurence W. , who died at the age of 16, and Oscar Stanton De Priest Jr.
