In Congress in the early 1930s, he spoke out against racial discrimination, including at speaking events in the South; tried to integrate the House public restaurant; gained passage of an amendment to desegregate the Civilian Conservation Corps, one of the work programs under President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal; and introduced anti-lynching legislation to the House (it was not passed because of the Solid South Democratic opposition).

[1] After the Civil War, thousands of blacks left continued oppression by whites in the South by moving to other states that offered promises of freedom and greater economic opportunities, such as Kansas.

[2] In 1878, the year after Reconstruction had ended and federal troops been withdrawn from the region, the De Priests left Alabama for Salina, Kansas.

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.

[3] During the 1930 election, De Priest was challenged in the primary by noted African-American spokesperson, orator, and Republican Roscoe Conkling Simmons.

DePriest's 1933 amendment barring discrimination in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a program of the New Deal to employ people across the country in building infrastructure, was passed by the Senate and signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

His anti-lynching bill (House Joint Resolution 171, in 1933[7]) failed due to opposition by the white Democrats of the Solid South, although it would not have made lynching a federal crime.

Civil rights activists criticized De Priest for opposing federal aid to the poor, although they nevertheless applauded him for making public speeches in the South despite death threats.

The House accepted that De Priest sometimes brought black staff or visitors to the Members Dining Room, but objected when he entertained mixed groups there.

In a three-month-long heated debate, the Republican political minority argued that the restaurant's discriminatory practice violated Fourteenth Amendment rights to equal access.

[9] Mostly aligned with the political right, De Priest generally opposed liberal federal programs under the New Deal, instead favoring increased initiatives on the state or local level.

By the early 1930s, De Priest's popularity waned because he continued to oppose higher taxes on the rich and fought Depression-era federal relief programs under President Roosevelt.

[1] De Priest was defeated in the 1934 United States House of Representatives elections by Republican-turned-Democrat African-American Arthur W. Mitchell, who campaigned on support for the New Deal.

This included his great-grandfather's Oscar Stanton De Priest House, now a National Historic Landmark, which still held his locked political office.