Democrat

"My mother was cook for white families. My father had died when I was seven years old. While I was trying to raise money to help Negro schools in Louisiana, a white man slapped me and told me I'd be lynched before I was 15. With the consent of my mother, I left home and went to Galveston, Tex., and worked for a barber there. His wife inspired me to seek education."

Thus did Joseph L. McLemore, 32, of St. Louis, Mo., first Negro in a border state or southern state to be nominated for Congress by the Democratic Party, tell voters of some of his qualifications for office. He is an intelligent lawyer, a onetime student at Fisk, Howard and New York Universities.

Last week, he optimistically predicted that he would be elected to Congress, said that three-fourths of the voters of his St. Louis district are Negroes. His opponent, Representative Leonidas Carstarphen Dyer, white, Republican, denied that more than one-third of the voters are Negroes. A bitter battle loomed.

There have been 19 Negro Representatives and two Negro Senators, most of them members of the Reconstruction Congresses and men of little education. In northern cities, Republicans have made profitable political use of Negroes.* Democrats, cramped by party tradition, have only recently allied themselves with Negroes (particularly in New York City).

* In Chicago, Mayor William Hale Thompson's machine secured last May the nomination of Negro Oscar De Priest for U. S. Representative (TIME, May 14).