Powerbroker of Black Chicago
William Dawson fought against segregation in the armed forces
On the final day of World War I, William L. Dawson was overcome with the conflicting emotions he felt as a Black lieutenant in a segregated U.S. Army, fighting for democracy in France. “O, Father God, if you will just take me home, I will give my life to teaching my fellow man to use the ballot so these kinds of things, these atrocities will not happen again,” he reportedly cried out, as the clock ticked down on an armistice agreed to by the two sides.
A law student at Northwestern University, Dawson was on a psychological roller coaster in France. Black soldiers who spoke French, as he did, were warmly welcomed by France’s young women. At his alma mater, Fisk University in Nashville, students studied French or German plus Latin and Greek.
The generals couldn’t care less. They confined Black troops to isolated billets and excused their own incompetence on the battlefield by claiming Black soldiers were cowardly. The French gave them medals for standing fast, as Dawson’s unit did under a German artillery attack on Nov. 11, 1918.
Born in Albany, Georgia, Dawson worked after school in his father’s barbershop. When a white customer complained about a haircut, Dawson suggested they duke it out. As a confrontation in the South could prove fatal to an African American, his parents sent him off to Fisk, according to “William L. Dawson and the Limits of Black Electoral Leadership” by Christopher Manning.
From there, Dawson followed his older brother, Julian, a medical student at Northwestern, to Chicago. Dawson passed the bar exam without getting a degree and apprenticed himself to Oscar De Priest, a Republican congressman.
Black Chicagoans generally supported the GOP, Abraham Lincoln’s party. The Democrats bore the stigma of being the party of the Jim Crow South.
Dawson began as a precinct captain and was elected alderman of the 2nd Ward as a Republican in 1933. He was a powerful orator, contemporaries reported.
“Dawson built his following among us by the most vigorous anti-white speeches you have ever heard, his theme was ‘No black who has to lick from a trough fed by white hands can be effective,’ ” a colleague once noted.
Yet Dawson was one of several Black Republican politicians competing for power and influence in Chicago, where former Mayor Anton Cermak had united Chicago’s immigrant groups to form the powerful Democratic machine that would rule the city for decades to come.
Dawson quit the Republican Party before losing his aldermanic seat in the primary election of 1939, the end of a decade during which Blacks nationwide shifted their allegiance to the Democratic Party under President Franklin Roosevelt. Dawson clearly understood which way the wind was blowing but his exact motivations are not known — he rarely gave interviews and once told Harvard University historian James O. Wilson that he never put anything important on paper.
In 1942, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Democrat. Reelected 13 times, he died in office in 1970. At first he was the only Black in the chamber, surrounded by segregationist Southerners and northern Democrats. Even the liberals were cautious on racial issues.
“Sometimes if I am offered a cigarette — particularly by a white Southerner — I’ll take it. Then I’ll stand there and make him light it,” he said.
He submitted bills dealing with equal economic opportunity, desegregation of public accommodations in Washington, against the incitement of racial hatred and lynching. None were enacted. He was more successful in preventing further loss of civil rights and blocking federal appointments of unabashed segregationists.
In 1944, President Roosevelt sought Dawson’s blessing for his choice of James Byrnes as running mate for a fourth term. Byrnes was a former Supreme Court justice. Later as governor of South Carolina, Byrnes said he would abolish the public schools rather than give up segregation.
Realizing that this kind of attitude would repel Dawson, Chicago’s Mayor Ed Kelly brought them together at the Blackstone Hotel.
After they talked for three hours, Dawson said: “Mr. Justice, you cannot be my candidate.”
Abandoning Byrnes, FDR made Sen. Harry Truman his running mate. Still, the race was a toss-up. The Republican candidate, New York Gov. Tom Dewey, was a supporter of Black rights.
So the Democratic Party had Dawson campaign in northern cities where the party that got the Black vote would likely get the state’s Electoral College delegation.
When Dewey was asked about integrating the armed forces, he said he wasn’t a military expert, but added: “It doesn’t take
a ‘military expert’ to know that segregation in the armed forces is against the full rights of Negro Americans and not in accord with the freedom guaranteed by the Constitution,” Dawson replied.
Roosevelt won the election.
When Roosevelt died, Truman became president, and the issue of a segregated military reemerged.
Truman integrated the armed forces. Rep. William Winstead of Mississippi countered with an amendment that would allow inductees to serve in a segregated unit.
“How long, how long, my conferees and gentlemen from the South, will you divide us Americans on account of color?” Dawson asked when the amendment was
debated. “Give me the test that would make anyone a full-fledged American, and by the living God, if it means death itself, I will pay it — only give it to me.”
The chamber rang with cheers, and the amendment was defeated.
A decade later, Dawson’s clout was fading in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 1954 outlawing of school segregation. Younger activists considered him passe, and thought he was too conservative on issues of race.
The generational clash played out at the Democratic Party’s 1960 Convention, where Sen. John F. Kennedy was nominated for president. His team cloistered Dawson in an office they called ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’
It was a riff on a novel that had been the abolitionist movement’s sacred text. Uncle Tom was a long-suffering slave. But by 1960, “Uncle Tom” had become a putdown for Blacks who deferred to the establishment.
Throughout political life, Dawson operated within the white power structure. For example, Mayor Richard J. Daley insisted that no public housing be built in white neighborhoods. Dawson didn’t object, not wanting to weaken his own political base of solidly Black neighborhoods on the South Side. He figured maintaining his own power was the way he could help his people.
“I have helped to get good jobs for qualified colored people,” Dawson said, “and many of the big posts we hold in government today were obtained through this technique.”
Theoretically, a job isn’t supposed to be awarded because someone brings a note from a precinct captain. But patronage jobs had lifted immigrants out of poverty, and Dawson tried to use them to help the Black community.
For Black Chicagoans there was a bonus: a congressman speaking for their rights. Blacks further afield had a champion who would listen when democracy failed.
So when Dawson died in 1970, flags were lowered on federal buildings in Washington. The Defender pronounced it “the first time in the history of this country that so much acknowledgment has been given to a Black man.”
At Dawson’s funeral in Chicago, Mayor Daley and gospel singer Mahalia Jackson shared memories of Dawson. As his coffin was carried out of the Progressive Baptist Church, a Tribune reporter made note of mourners singing:
“Walk together, children, and don’t get weary, there’s a great camp meeting in the Promised Land.”
An onlooker explained that Dawson would end ward meetings with those very words.