William Levi Dawson (April 26, 1886 – November 9, 1970) was an American politician and lawyer who represented aChicago,Illinois district for more than 27 years in theUnited States House of Representatives, serving from 1943 to his death in office in 1970. In 1949, he became the firstAfrican American to chair a congressional committee.[1]
Like his two predecessors representingIllinois' 1st District, when Dawson was first elected in 1942, he was the only African American in Congress. He was active in the civil rights movement and sponsored registration drives. In the late 1940s he successfully opposed efforts to re-segregate the military.
Dawson was the first African American to chair a standing committee in the United States Congress, when he chaired theCommittee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments. He served as chair of that committee and its successor for most of the years between 1949 and 1970. After 1952, Dawson also became closely aligned with thepolitical machine in Chicago, collaborating often with MayorRichard J. Daley. In this role, he focused on patronage and services for his constituents. He gave no support to the efforts ofMartin Luther King Jr. to shake up city politics in the late 1960s.[2]
He moved to theChicago area in Illinois in 1912 to study atNorthwestern University Law School. He was initiated into Theta chapter ofAlpha Phi Alpha fraternity. He reached Chicago at the beginning of theGreat Migration of hundreds of thousands of African Americans from rural areas of the South to industrial cities in the North and Midwest - more than 1.5 million migrated up to 1940, and millions more after that.
Dawson entered politics, becoming a member of theRepublican Party in 1930 as a state central committeeman for theFirst Congressional District of Illinois. He held this position until 1932. That year, he was elected as analderman for the second ward of Chicago, serving from 1933 until 1939. After that, he served as aDemocratic Party committeeman.
Dawson was elected in 1942 as a Democratic Representative from Illinois to theSeventy-eighth, and to the thirteen succeeding Congresses, serving from January 3, 1943, until his death from pneumonia inChicago, Illinois in 1970. In addition to influencing national policy, he acted as a mentor for rising young black politicians in Chicago, such asArchibald Carey Jr., helping with their elections and federal appointments.
During his tenure in the House, Dawson was a vocal opponent of thepoll tax, which in practice was discriminatory against poorer voters.[3] Since the end of the nineteenth century, poll taxes were among a variety of measures passed by Southern states todisfranchise most black voters and tens of thousands of poor whites as well, particularly in Alabama through the 1940s.[3]
Dawson is credited with defeating the Winstead Amendment. Proposed by RepresentativeWilliam Winstead (D-Mississippi) after theTruman administration integrated the United States armed forces following World War II, it would have allowed military members to opt out of racially integrated units.
In 1952, Dawson was the featured speaker at the first annual conference of theRegional Council of Negro Leadership (a civil rights organization), held in the all-black town ofMound Bayou, Mississippi. He was invited by Dr.T.R.M. Howard, who headed the RCNL. Dawson was the first black congressman to speak in the state sinceReconstruction ended in 1877.
Dawson, a member of theDemocratic National Committee (DNC), had the long-term goal of increasing national black support for the party. Since theCivil War, most blacks had been allied with the Republican Party, as it had emancipated the slaves and led the movement for amendments to grant them citizenship and the franchise. T.R.M. Howard, who had moved to Chicago, challenged Dawson as a Republican opponent in the 1958 election, but Dawson won and kept his seat.[4]
Dawson was also leader of the African-American "submachine" within theCook County Democratic Organization. In the predominantly African-American wards, Dawson acted as his own political boss, handing out patronage and punishing rivals just as leaders of the larger machine did, such asRichard J. Daley. However, Dawson's machine continually had to support the regular machine in order to retain its own clout. He chose to work on city politics from this stance, rather than to conduct open civil-rights challenges, and he did not support the work of Dr.Martin Luther King Jr. in Chicago in the 1960s.[2] Dawson undercut the nascent efforts of the Chicago Housing Authority in the early 1950s to integrate black residents into white neighborhoods because those neighborhoods were outside Dawson's district and, hence, not votes that he could deliver to the machine.[5]
Dawson advised 1960 presidential candidate John F. Kennedy not to "use the phrase 'civil rights' in his speeches because it might hurt the feelings of Dawson's Southern friends in Congress -- friends who had given Dawson control over many jobs in federal agencies."[5]PresidentKennedy offered Dawson the position ofUnited States Postmaster General as a reward for his work on Kennedy's1960 election campaign. Dawson declined, as he believed that he could accomplish more in the House.
Dawson died of pneumonia in Chicago on November 9, 1970.[6] He was cremated, and his ashes were placed in thecolumbarium in the Griffin Funeral Home in Chicago.
^abLemann, Nicholas (1991).The Promised Land : The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (1st ed.). New York: A.A. Knopf. pp. 74–75.ISBN0-394-56004-3.OCLC22240548.
Manning, Christopher.William L. Dawson and the Limits of Black Electoral Leadership. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009
"William Levi Dawson", inBlack Americans in Congress, 1870-2007, Office of History & Preservation, U. S. House of Representatives. Washington: Government Printing Office, 2008.
Vaz, MatthewRunning the Numbers: Race, Police, and the History of Urban Gambling University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 2020
