first lieutenant with the 366th Infantry Regiment of the United States Army from 1917 until 1919. After returning home, he was admitted to the bar in 1920 and started a private practice in Chicago. Dawson entered politics, becoming a member of the Republican Party in 1930 as a state central committeeman for the First Congressional District of Illinois. He held this position until 1932. That year he was elected as an alderman for the second ward of Chicago, serving from 1933 until 1939. After that, he served as a Democratic Party committeeman. Dawson was elected in 1942 as a Democratic Representative from Illinois to the Seventy-eighth, and to the thirteen succeeding Congresses, serving from January 3, 1943, until his death from pneumonia in Chicago, Illinois in 1970. In addition to influencing national policy, he acted as a mentor for rising young black politicians in Chicago, such as Archibald Carey Jr., helping with their elections and federal appointments. During his tenure in the House, Dawson was a vocal opponent of the poll tax, which in practice was discriminatory against poorer voters. Since the end of the nineteenth century, poll taxes were among a variety of measures passed by southern states to disfranchise most black voters and tens of thousands of poor whites as well, particularly in Alabama through the 1940s. Dawson is credited with defeating the Winstead Amendment. Proposed by Representative William Winstead (D-Mississippi) after the Truman 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 the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (a civil rights organization), held in the all-black town of Mound 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 since Reconstruction ended in 1877. Dawson, a member of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), had the long-term goal of increasing national black support for the party. Since the Civil 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. Dawson was the first