How a Laudable Lawmaking Drive Against Racial Discrimination Became Compromised

House of Diggs: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Consequential Black Congressman, Charles C. Diggs Jr‘By Marion OrrThe University of North Carolina Press, 360 pagesIn 1951, on Detroit’s east side, Charles Diggs Jr., a World War II veteran, actively involved in city politics, and son of a prominent African American funeral director, walked into an all-white bar, asked for a drink, and was refused. He sued the bartender who had broken a state law but an all white jury refused to vote for a conviction.Was that my Polish American grandfather’s bar? It is unnamed in Marion Orr’s account. In the family story I heard any black person entering the bar would be served, then told to leave because he was drunk. In 1955, Diggs would become my family’s congressman in a district 60% white that included the Polish enclave of Hamtramck.Diggs learned from such discriminatory encounters and practiced what Marion Orr calls “strategic moderation.” To get anything done he needed the cooperation of white people and their organizations such as unions and civic groups. Unlike Harlem’s flamboyant Adam Powell, Jr., and Chicago’s conservative William Dawson, the only other black congressmen when Diggs showed up in Washington, D.C., he mastered group dynamics and gained the respect of conservative white legislators like Gerald Ford.Diggs was a hard worker, persistently putting pressure on the airlines, for example, to desegregate airports in southern cities. He worked successfully to restore home rule to Washington, D.C.—a very difficult task given the prejudices of Southern legislators who expected chaos would ensue if black people were in charge.When a Chicago boy, Emmett Till was brutally murdered in Mississippi, Diggs showed up in court after narrowly escaping a threatening white group on a Mississippi road. He wanted to bear witness and to demonstrate what a black legislator looked like and was willing to confront.As Diggs became a power in Congress, he turned to foreign affairs, especially to Africa and its growing liberation movements opposed by colonial powers such as Portugal and white rulers in what was then Rhodesia and South Africa.Diggs supported Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent movement for integration and social justice, and the two men became friends and close allies. As more African Americans were elected to Congress, Diggs sought them out and was instrumental in creating the Congressional Black Caucus.While devoting much of his energy to politics, Diggs remained responsible for what came to be known as the House of Diggs, the funeral business his father had established and that at one time conducted approximately half the black funerals in Detroit. Diggs delegated much of the family business to poorly supervised employees, who pilfered equipment and ran up private expenses charged to the funeral home. Never a good businessman, Diggs compounded his financial problems by overspending and gambling.As Marion Orr shows in an authoritative biography based on archival research and interviews with many of Diggs’s friends and associates as well as with members of his family, he deflected concerns about his debts, his infidelities, and his drinking and gambling, by working all the harder on advocating a U.S. policy that opposed South African apartheid while working with the new black majority governments taking over from the colonial powers.Unable or unwilling—Mr. Orr is not sure which—to come to terms with a failing funeral business and his own mounting financial difficulties, Diggs resorted to a salary payback scheme. He inflated staff salaries and then “asked” for “voluntary” payments that went to settle personal debts. In court, he testified to his good intentions, but a majority black jury convicted him and he ended up serving a little more than a year in a minimum security prison. He died in 1998.Mr. Orr spends relatively little time on the congressman’s private failings, emphasizing how much he accomplished for the public good while recognizing that his corrupt practices ensured that his legacy would be obscured. In pursuit of laudable laws he was willing to compromise himself in ways that harmed not only his own reputation but his efforts to improve the lives of black and white people alike.Mr. Rollyson is working on a book about growing up in Detroit and the intersection of two black and white families.

How a Laudable Lawmaking Drive Against Racial Discrimination Became Compromised

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