Oscar DePriest lived Pisces’s call to service, unity 

By Anne M. Nordhaus-Bike 

Over the course of every year, the Sun travels through all 12 signs of the zodiac, one month at a time. So every month we have the opportunity to experience a different astrological energy, observe how its positives and negatives unfold in our lives, and integrate what we learn to achieve a new level of personal harmony. One way to make the most of this cyclical energy is to study the lives of public figures born under the sign the Sun currently occupies. Besides learning from their mistakes, we can take heart from how they overcome challenges and take inspiration from how they express the noblest aspects of their Sun signs.

            Oscar Stanton DePriest was born Mar. 9, 1871, in Florence, AL, to former slaves. His mother worked part-time as a laundress, and his teamster father, Alexander DePriest, was associated with the exodus movement, which arose after the Civil War to help blacks escape continued oppression in the South by moving to other states that offered greater freedom.

By the 1870s, Reconstruction still had not provided the economic reform freed slaves needed to gain true independence, so blacks were dependent on keeping Republican majorities in Southern legislatures to secure their interests. In Alabama, the struggle intensified when white Democrats took control in 1872 with the goal of ousting Northern carpetbaggers, eliminating any social gains blacks had made since the war, and restoring white supremacy and control. By 1876, reactionary whites had seized power and effectively barred blacks from the legislature until 1970. They also created a new constitution that disenfranchised blacks and created segregation’s Jim Crow laws.

Conditions turned increasingly violent, especially after the federal government withdrew its military forces from the South in 1877. Many black leaders advocated leaving the South as part of the exodus movement and recommended Kansas because, unlike in most Southern states, blacks could own land there. In 1878, the DePriests left for Salina, KS, after Alexander had to save a friend—a former Congressman—from a murderous mob and another black man was killed on their doorstep.

            In Kansas, Oscar studied business and bookkeeping before running away to Dayton, OH, with two white friends. By the late 1880s, he had moved to Chicago, where he worked as a house painter and decorator before starting his own contracting business. He went on to build a fortune in the stock market and in real estate by helping black families move into formerly all white neighborhoods in a practice known as blockbusting. DePriest extended his leadership by entering politics as a precinct captain and in 1904 won election to the Cook County Board of Commissioners, where he served two terms.

Like the vast majority of blacks between 1865 and 1932, DePriest allied himself with Abraham Lincoln’s Republican party because it represented opportunity and emancipation from slavery—and because the Democratic party in the South after the Civil War became entrenched as the tool of racist oppression. In 1915, Chicago’s Republican machine backed DePriest for alderman of the 2nd Ward, and he became the first black elected to City Council, where he focused on civil rights and patronage. He stepped down in 1917 after being indicted for alleged involvement with the South Side’s black mob but was acquitted after hiring Clarence Darrow to defend him.

            In 1919, DePriest ran unsuccessfully for alderman as a member of the People’s Movement Club, a political organization he founded in a former Jewish social club at 3140 S. Indiana Ave. to wrest control of black wards from the white dominated machine. By the 1920s, DePriest’s became the most powerful of Chicago’s many black political organizations, and he became the top black politician under Republican mayor William Hale Thompson. So when Republican congressman Martin B. Madden of the First Congressional District died in 1928 while running for re-election, the party bosses chose DePriest to replace him. Despite being under indictment again for ties to organized crime, DePriest beat his white opponent and became the first black in Congress since 1901 and the first elected from a northern state. Prosecutors later dropped corruption charges against him for lack of evidence.

            During his three terms in Congress, DePriest introduced numerous bills to fight racial discrimination; most failed, but a later Congress passed his proposal permitting transfer of jurisdiction for defendants who believed they could not get a fair trial because of their race or religion. His greatest achievement was a 1933 amendment that barred discrimination in the Civilian Conservation Corps, a key source of jobs in the Depression. He also won important financial support for black colleges.

            While in office, DePriest endured continual racial discrimination. When a Mississippi congressman insisted on taking DePriest’s office because it was the biggest in Congress, he had to accept a smaller one next to a North Carolina congressman who, on hearing about his new neighbor, told his secretary to “vacate immediately…[and] remove my name” from the doors. He became a hero to blacks across the country for trying to integrate the House restaurant and for informing an Alabama senator he was “not big enough” to prevent DePriest from eating in the Senate dining room. An impressive orator, DePriest spoke out against lynching and Jim Crow laws, even taking his message to the South despite death threats and being burned in effigy by Ku Klux Klan members.

            In 1929, DePriest made national news when First Lady Lou Hoover invited his wife to the last of four teas at the White House to welcome Congressmen’s wives. Racist editorials in both Northern and Southern newspapers called the invitation a social scandal and vilified Mrs. Hoover and the DePriests, but after a threatened boycott by Southern legislators’ wives collapsed, Jessie Williams DePriest became a celebrity—especially in the black community—as the first black woman entertained by a first lady at the White House.

            By the early 1930s, however, DePriest’s own popularity plummeted along with the economy because he continued to oppose taxes on the rich and fought Depression-era federal relief programs. In 1934, he lost his seat in Congress to black Democrat Arthur W. Mitchell, and his 1936 attempt to regain his seat failed. DePriest then returned to his lucrative real estate business and remained active in Republican politics. In 1943, he won another term as alderman, this time of the 3rd Ward.

            As for his personal life, DePriest and his wife had two sons: Laurence, who died in 1916, and Oscar Stanton DePriest. In 1929, the DePriests bought an eight-flat at 4536 S. Grand Blvd. (now 4536–4538 S. King Dr.) and from then on lived in one of its apartments. DePriest died from a kidney ailment on May 12, 1951, in Chicago and was buried in Graceland Cemetery on the North Side. The family’s apartment building now is a National Historic Landmark. 

Living Pisces’s artistry, business acumen, idealism 

DePriest’s life exhibits many Piscean characteristics, starting with the sensitivity, attraction to beauty, and artistic talent that drove him to work as a painter and decorator. In starting his own business, he expressed this sign’s preference for self-employment to avoid the discord of climbing someone else’s corporate ladder.

Like many born under Pisces, DePriest enjoyed gifts of emotional perception and intuition that made him popular and successful in business and managing money. Because he could sense future trends such as business changes and the growth of Chicago’s black community during the Great Migration, he was able to grow rich in the stock market and real estate. In his later years, however, his financial success blunted his empathy for those less fortunate, keeping him allied with the Republican party long after most blacks had abandoned it for the progressive Democratic party of Franklin Roosevelt.

DePriest also appears to have carried Pisces’s negative traits of deceit, weakness, and a changeableness that can make for a slippery personality. As a young man, he sometimes passed as white to get jobs. Also, he chose to enter Chicago’s corruption-riddled machine politics and soon gained recognition as shrewd and street smart—and a natural in the kind of compromises and dissembling so often required to succeed in such a worldly career.

He also exhibited Pisces’s tendency to attract unsavory companions and fishy circumstances. Throughout his political career, alleged ties to black organized crime—including payoffs from gambling interests in return for political protection or an agreement to look the other way—followed him. Although he resigned his aldermanic post after his first indictment, his wealth allowed him to hire a leading defense lawyer, and in later years he stayed in office despite the many corruption charges he faced.

            Yet DePriest remained true to his ideals of justice. He served three terms in Congress despite daily personal humiliations because of his race and repeatedly stood up against lynching, discrimination, and segregation in the face of grave personal risk. He also proposed innovative remedies for racial injustice such as pensions for former slaves older than 75 and reducing the number of seats in Congress for states that discriminated against blacks. Although most of his proposals went down in defeat, his efforts brought enough symbolic victories to inspire others and pave the way for future civil rights successes. 

Making the most of Pisces energy

DePriest’s life as a child of Pisces shows the temptations faced by those born under the sign of the Fish as well as the good they can achieve when they dedicate their lives to public service. During the Sun’s journey through this sign, all of us can make the most of Pisces’s gift for compassion and universal love by empathizing with all who are poor and oppressed and heeding the inner call to help.

To live in happiness, we must recognize that we are connected to all creation and that, when one being suffers, all are diminished. By cultivating the Fish’s deep intuition and spirituality, we can heighten our sensitivity and fulfill the Piscean desire to heal the world by serving others.

As we learn to honor our higher self, we will understand that we are spiritual beings and that life’s true success comes at the level of the soul. Only then can we experience the universal love that links us to all humanity and gives us life’s greatest power and deepest joy.