former U.S. Representative James T. Rapier, from a lynch mob, and a black man was killed on their doorstep. The boy Oscar attended local schools in Dayton. Career Business De Priest went to Salina, Kansas, to study bookkeeping at the Salina Normal School, established also for the training of teachers. In 1889, he moved to Chicago, Illinois, which had been booming as an industrial city. He worked first as an apprentice plasterer, house painter, and decorator. He became a successful contractor and real estate broker. He built a fortune in the stock market and in real estate by helping black families move into formerly all-white neighborhoods, often ones formerly occupied by ethnic white immigrants and their descendants. There was population succession in many neighborhoods under the pressure of new migrants. Politics From 1904 to 1908, De Priest was a member of the board of commissioners of Cook County, Illinois. De Priest was elected in 1914 to the Chicago City Council, serving from 1915 to 1917 as alderman from the 2nd Ward, on the South Side. He was Chicago's first black alderman. In 1917 De Priest was indicted for alleged graft and resigned from the City Council. He hired nationally known Clarence Darrow as his defense attorney and was acquitted. He was succeeded in office by Louis B. Anderson. In 1919, De Priest ran unsuccessfully for alderman as a member of the People's Movement Club, a political organization he founded. In a few years, De Priest's black political organization became the most powerful of many in Chicago, and he became the top black politician under Chicago Republican mayor William Hale Thompson. In 1928, when Republican congressman Martin B. Madden died, Mayor Thompson selected De Priest to replace him on the ballot. He was the first African American elected to Congress outside the South and the first to be elected in the 20th century. He represented the 1st Congressional District of Illinois (which included The Loop and part of the South Side of Chicago) as a Republican. During the 1930 election, De Priest was challenged in the primary by noted African-American spokesperson, orator, and Republican Roscoe Conkling Simmons. De Priest defeated Simmons' primary challenge and won the general election afterward. During De Priest's three consecutive terms (1929–1935), he was the only black representative in Congress. He introduced several anti-discrimination bills during these years of the Great Depression. DePriest's 1933 amendment barring discrimination