Oscar Stanton DePriest was a Republican Party leader and real estate investor in Chicago early in the 20th Century. He was the first African American elected to the Cook County Board in 1904 and the first African American elected to the Chicago City Council in 1915. He was also the first African American elected to Congress from any Northern state in 1928. Before DePriest, almost all black members of Congress had been elected by reconstruction governments in the South. When he took office in March 1929, Congressman DePriest was the first African-American to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives since the retirement of Rep. George Henry White (R-North Carolina) twenty-eight years before in 1901. The vast majority of African-American elected officials at any level in the North between 1865 and 1932 were members of the Republican Party which they saw then as the party of Emancipation, the party of Lincoln, and the party of what was then called Negro opportunity.