African Americans and the New Deal
African Americans and the New Deal refers to the impact of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal policies on the African American community during the 1930s. While the New Deal aimed to provide economic relief, African Americans faced discrimination and unequal access to New Deal programs. Despite these challenges, the New Deal era saw some improvements in employment opportunities and the establishment of organizations advocating for civil rights.
8 Key excerpts on "African Americans and the New Deal"
- Aaron D. Purcell(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- The Kent State University Press(Publisher)
...He described the important role of New Deal agencies in changing federal employment policies. Moreno noted that the 1930s “provide a usually unrecognized experiment with the current concept of affirmative action, which lay dormant for the next generation.” 24 Race influenced the perceptions of African Americans who benefited during the early stages of the New Deal. In urban areas African Americans received more direct relief in 1933 and 1935 than job opportunities. African American leaders warned New Deal officials that African Americans also needed access to education and training, which were part of many New Deal jobs. In Race, Money, and the Welfare State (1999), political scientist Michael K. Brown explained that the relief practices for African Americans during the New Deal contributed to the stratification of postwar society based on race and economics. Further, sociologist Stephen Pimpare revealed, in A People’s History of Poverty in America (2011), that the stigma of a “separate public welfare system for African Americans” first became an issue when Reconstruction programs served mostly African Americans. Most importantly, Pimpare argued that this stigma was rooted in the institution of slavery, one of many “repressive institutions that have disproportionately impacted African Americans.” 25 The New Deal was a period when many white liberal politicians, reformers, and activists pushed heavily for social equality for African Americans. In particular, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was a force of liberalism whose openness against discrimination motivated other liberal New Dealers. In the Pulitzer Prize–winning Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (1999), David Kennedy emphasized the influence of Eleanor Roosevelt on her husband’s racial policies...
eBook - ePub- Cary D. Wintz, Cary D. Wintz(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The New Negro and the New Deal John Hope Franklin DOI: 10.4324/9780203054772-17 When Franklin D. Roosevelt became President of the United States on March 4, 1933, the economic condition of the nation could best be described as alarming. Everywhere there were signs of economic decay and deterioration as unemployment figures mounted and as the nation’s major industries and financial houses closed their doors. 1 For some groups, such as farmers and Negroes, the suffering brought on by the crash of 1929 and the subsequent depression was not a new experience. All during the previous decade they had felt the pinch of economic privation, the farmers as a result of the collapse of world markets and declining prices and the Negroes as a result of the persistent rejection of their services as industrial laborers and the exploitation of them as agricultural workers. By 1933 the Negro’s position in American life was more than critical. It was desperate. Added to the economic sufferings were the humiliating denials of the elemental rights as American citizens, denials as old as the nation itself. 2 Now, in the midst of the worst depression in modern times, ingenious Americans had come forward with techniques by which Negroes were discriminated against, even among the unemployed. The shabby treatment they received in the improvised bread lines and soup kitchens was enough to disillusion even the most sanguine among them. 3 1 Vivid descriptions of the condition of the country during these years are given in Dixon Wecter, The Age of the Great Depression (New York, 1948), pp. 1–40 and Arthur S. Link, American Epoch (New York, 1955), pp. 352–373. 2 John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of American Negroes (New York, 1947), passim. 3 Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New York, 1943), I, 352 ff., and Franklin, op. cit., p...
eBook - ePubWhy White Liberals Fail
Race and Southern Politics from FDR to Trump
- Anthony J. Badger(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Harvard University Press(Publisher)
...The New Deal did not challenge Black disfranchisement, although liberals did push an anti–poll tax bill through the House at the start of the war. Roosevelt refused to make federal antilynching legislation a “must” piece of legislation. The Federal Housing Administration, established in 1934, effectively instituted housing segregation throughout the country. The local operation of New Deal programs, either by state government agencies or by local federal officials, routinely operated on a segregated basis. African Americans found it harder to get on the relief rolls than whites and were paid less both on relief and in federal works programs. The way jobs were classified under the National Recovery Administration, and the regional wage differentials that were allowed, directly penalized the overwhelmingly Black unskilled workers in southern industries. Agricultural laborers and domestic servants, disproportionately Black, were excluded from the Social Security Act and from the Wages and Hours legislation. When urban lib erals in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration reinterpreted the cotton contract in 1935 to prevent tenant farmers from being displaced because of crop reduction, Henry Wallace and Chester Davis responded to the planter outcry by rescinding the order and purging most of the lawyers responsible for the opinion. 32 As Alger Hiss, who survived the purge, pointed out to me, most of the lawyers who were dismissed went on to work in other parts of the New Deal. Victor Rotnem, prominent among them, was appointed the first head of the newly established Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department in 1939. Discrimination and exclusion were primarily racially motivated, but white tenant farmers and sharecroppers, whose numbers had been increasing, were also hit by the interpretation of the crop control contract. The whole thrust for social security came from national reformers whose prime concern was the male industrial worker...
eBook - ePubUnto a Good Land
A History of the American People, Volume 2: From 1865
- David Edwin Harrell, Edwin S. Gaustad, John B. Boles, Sally Foreman Griffith(Authors)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Eerdmans(Publisher)
...As early as 1932, some Republicans sensed that blacks felt neglected in the party of Lincoln. Nevertheless, Hoover had still won almost three-fourths of the black vote—this at a time when unemployment among African Americans approached 50 percent. (These were northern black votes; in the Democratic Solid South, Jim Crow laws almost entirely barred blacks from the polls.) As late as 1936, many black intellectuals believed that Roosevelt had done no better for them than Hoover. But while FDR’s record was far from strong, some New Deal agencies honestly tried to be non-discriminatory, and Eleanor Roosevelt and Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace were earnest and visible supporters of black rights. The president’s executive order in 1935 banning racial discrimination in the WPA may not have been totally effective, but it was a step in the right direction, and blacks appreciated it. African Americans clearly contributed to the Democratic landslide in 1936 by giving Roosevelt three-fourths of their votes. In mid-1938 a Fortune magazine poll revealed that nearly 85 percent of blacks considered themselves pro-Roosevelt. “Let Jesus lead you and Roosevelt feed you,” preached one black minister. It was a message born more of hope than of reality. A Faltering Recovery and Labor Unrest The economy recovered strongly in 1936; by early 1937 unemployment had fallen to between 6 and 7 million. But in the summer a major decline virtually wiped out the gains; by 1938 unemployment had risen to 11 million and other economic indicators suggested similar reversals. Long saddled with responsibility for the Great Depression, Republicans gleefully blamed Roosevelt, and to some extent they were right. During the 1936 campaign and at the outset of his second term, FDR repeatedly asserted that the New Deal was curing the Depression...
- Jerald Podair, Darren Dochuk, Jerald Podair, Darren Dochuk(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Following in the footsteps of Robin Kelley, Patricia Sullivan and others, Glenda Gilmore has delineated the challenge posed to Jim Crow by a movement of radicals, workers, social-gospel preachers and newspaper editors that began to emerge during World War I and reached its high-water mark in the late 1930s and into World War II. This radical movement was suppressed during the Cold War, Gilmore argues, but not before it had helped recast Jim Crow as “fundamentally un-American,” thereby laying the groundwork for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. 16 The New Deal By producing one-party control of the national government, inducing an atmosphere of emergency and casting into doubt old ideas about the self-correcting capacity of the economy and the proper role of the federal government, the Great Depression created the opening for one of the most remarkable bursts of policymaking in American history. In the space of a few years, the Democratic Congress enacted, and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration put into operation, a wide range of programs aimed, not only at the immediate goal of economic recovery, but also at reshaping American capitalism to make it more equitable and secure. These programs included new regulations of finance and industry, agricultural price supports, expanded rights to collective bargaining, emergency and categorical poor relief, unemployment and old-age insurance programs, conservation measures and large public works and economic development projects. For many years, historians framed the New Deal as the set of policies and programs created during the first six years of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency—beginning with the burst of lawmaking that became known as the “Hundred Days” (March–June, 1933) and ending with the enactment of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. Focusing heavily on Roosevelt’s White House and cabinet, they sought to characterize the New Deal and place it within the history of American politics...
eBook - ePubThe American Century
A History of the United States Since the 1890s
- Walter LaFeber, Richard Polenberg, Nancy Woloch(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...C HAPTER S IX 1929—1936 The Depression and the New Deal An unemployed woman sells apples in New York City, 1929. (Archive Holding, Inc./Getty Images) The Great Depression had a cataclysmic effect on all areas of American life. Producing unprecedented suffering, the economic crisis posed a severe challenge to the prevailing view of the social responsibilities of government. Within a few years that view, which sharply limited the role of government, proved a dism al failure. Yet the fear that disillusioned Americans would turn to revolution on the left, or to dictatorship on the right, proved groundless. Most people favored more moderate change, and that is exactly what the New Deal provided. Franklin D. Roosevelt's first administration erected the foundations of a welfare state. New Deal policies concerning business, agriculture, conservation, labor, and welfare, while benefiting certain interest groups considerably more than others, nevertheless enabled the Democrats to fashion a new political coalition that dominated American politics for several decades. Herbert Hoover and the Depression Perhaps no one had ever assumed the office of president with more prestige, or left it so utterly discredited, as Herbert Hoover. Entering the White House in 1929 as a renowned humanitarian who would lead the nation "to the previously impossible state in which poverty in this country can be put on a purely voluntary basis," Hoover exited four years later with his name a synonym for suffering and hard times. People who spent the night on park benches covered by newspapers said they were sleeping under "Hoover blankets." Those who hitched broken-down cars to mules or horses said they were riding in "Hoover wagons." Men who turned their trouser pockets inside out to show they were empty claimed to be waving "Hoover flags." Hoover had once symbolized the application of scientific intelligence to social problems...
eBook - ePubTeaching U.S. History
Dialogues Among Social Studies Teachers and Historians
- Diana Turk, Rachel Mattson, Terrie Epstein, Robert Cohen, Diana Turk, Rachel Mattson, Terrie Epstein, Robert Cohen(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...(1985). Fifty Years Later: The New Deal Evaluated. New York: Temple University Press. Time magazine, November 24, 2008. Essay: Teaching the New Deal in Multi-Ethnic Urban Public Schools By Shari Dickstein, with Cara Fenner and Benjamin Geballe The New Deal is a very rich topic of study that history and social studies classrooms can approach through a variety of avenues of inquiry. The “canonic” knowledge of the New Deal (assuming state and national standards define a canon) usually involves student understandings of the economic reasons for the crash of 1929; a familiarity with Hoover’s volunteerism and hands-off approach to solving the economic crisis; and characterizing the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) as a testament to the merits of executive leadership, while recognizing that such an extension of executive power may have violated separation of powers and checks and balances. Essentially, most state and national standards about the era elicit a political and economic history of the 1920s and 1930s. It is often difficult not to conceive of the New Deal without conflating the social, political, and economic accomplishments of the era with FDR’s public persona as the propelling force for change. The more interesting and engaging story, however, is the social history of the Great Depression. This chapter chronicles how a teacher educator, a social historian, and two urban secondary school teachers worked collectively to develop a unit on the New Deal that did not allow FDR to monopolize center-stage and opened up the possibility of engaging students in meaningful questions about effective social mobilization. In this collaboration, Dr...
eBook - ePub- Fiona Venn(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...FERA received around 3,000 letters a day from the two sources. Agencies prepared press handouts and other publicity material to explain their work, drawing upon the pool of unemployed journalists to staff new offices such as the NRA’s Division of Press Intelligence. In less than a year, both the NRA and the AAA issued around 5,000 handouts. The Social Security Board prepared a little pamphlet to explain social security in a very straightforward way, which seems to have worked. 14 The critical factor about the New Deal, however, was that its programmes reached directly into the lives of every American. The many personal recollections collected by Studs Terkel 15 bear witness to the degree to which the New Deal, and its various agencies, permeated the experience of Americans during the 1930s. By the end of the 1930s. those in work (with certain notable exceptions) made contributions to the social security programmes; their hours of work and minimum levels of pay were often dictated by federal legislation. The old, the disabled and single mothers received public assistance under New Deal sponsorship. Millions received relief through a federal agency, or had been given aid with credit. Even an innocuous programme like Rural Electrification affected millions of farm families. It is the vast extent of this direct relationship between the American people and the federal government which will be the focus of the remainder of this chapter. It is clearly impossible to consider every sector of the population. However, we will examine below three important groups; those on relief; the rural population; and women. In the administration of federal relief, Harry Hopkins in particular believed in the importance of tending a person’s self-esteem as well as material need. Where possible, he preferred to see those on the relief rolls receiving work relief rather than a simple dole or a food order...
