In 1929, First Lady of the United States Lou Hoover invited Jessie De Priest, wife of Chicago congressman Oscar De Priest, to the traditional tea hosted 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 Southern United States.
Southern politicians and journalists strongly objected to the invitation of De Priest with vitriolic attacks. The White House invitation served as a nexus of larger issues; at the turn of the century, the American South had disenfranchised most African Americans and excluded them from political life. Those states had also imposed white supremacist Jim Crow laws, 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 on June 12 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 largely Black portion of their voting populations they had disenfranchised.[a] 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.[1]
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