William Levi Dawson (April 26, 1886 – November 9, 1970) was an American politician and lawyer who represented a Chicago, Illinois district for more than 27 years in the United States House of Representatives, serving from 1943 to his death in office in 1970. In 1949, he became the first African American to chair a congressional committee.
Born in segregated Georgia, Dawson attended Fisk University in Tennessee and Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago. He served as an officer in the segregated U.S. Army in World War I. Back in Chicago, he became a successful lawyer, community leader, and Democratic Party activist.
Like his two predecessors representing Illinois' 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 the Committee 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 the political machine in Chicago, collaborating often with Mayor Richard J. Daley. In this role, he focused on patronage and services for his constituents. He gave no support to the efforts of Martin Luther King Jr. to shake up city politics in the late 1960s.
Early life and education
Dawson was born in Albany, Georgia in 1886. He attended the local public segregated school and graduated from Albany Normal School in 1905, which prepared teachers for lower schools. He continued his studies at Fisk University, a historically black college in Nashville, Tennessee, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1909.
He moved to the Chicago area in Illinois in 1912 to study at Northwestern University Law School. He was initiated into Theta chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. He reached Chicago at the beginning of the Great 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.
Career
thumb|left|Dawson's official Congressional portrait
With the entry of the U.S. into World War I, Dawson served in France as a 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.
In 1949, Dawson became the first African American to serve as the chairman of a regular congressional committee, and he led the Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments in the Eighty-first and Eighty-second Congresses<!-- add year for those of us who do not count time by congresses -->. He chaired its successor, the Committee on Government Operations, in the Eighty-fourth through Ninety-first Congresses. For years, he and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. from Harlem, New York, were the only two African-American representatives in Congress.
Dawson was also leader of the African-American "submachine" within the Cook 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 as Richard J. Daley. Dawson played an integral role in Daley's rise to the mayoralty in 1955, when Daley defeated incumbent mayor Martin Kennelly in Democratic Primary. 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.
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." He was cremated, and his ashes were placed in the columbarium in the Griffin Funeral Home in Chicago.