From: Hardman, John. “The Great Depression and the New Deal.” Ethics of Development in a Global Environment (EDGE), Stanford University, 26 July 1999, web.stanford.edu/class/e297c/poverty_prejudice/soc_sec/hgreat.htm.
The following passage is taken from a web post written by a Stanford student about the Great Depression and the New Deal. While it is not a professional history, it is representative of common misconceptions about the New Deal and its effects on different groups of people. Footnotes are not allowed in this text editor, so I’ve added them as italicized parentheticals.
Blacks in the Depression and the New Deal
The Great Depression of the 1930s worsened the already bleak economic situation of black Americans (This is true). African Americans were the first people to be fired from their jobs as they suffered from an unemployment rate two to three times that of whites. In early public assistance programs blacks often received substantially less aid than whites (yup), and some charitable organizations even excluded blacks from their soup kitchens. It was an extremely poor and desperate time for most African Americans (mmhmm).
The black American’s economic struggles sparked major political developments among the blacks. Beginning in 1929, the St. Louis Urban League launched a national “jobs for Negroes” movement by boycotting chain stores that had mostly black customers but hired only white employees. Efforts to unify black organizations and youth groups later led to the founding of the National Negro Congress in 1936 and the Southern Negro Youth Congress in 1937.
The Roosevelt Administration’s accessibility to black leaders and the New Deal reforms strengthened black support for the Democratic party Roosevelt bad many black leaders, members of a so-called “black Cabinet,” were served as advisers to him. Among them were the educator Mary McLeod Bethune, who served as the National Youth Administration’s director of Negro affairs; William H. Hastie, who in l937 became the first black federal judge; Eugene K. Jones, executive secretary of the National Urban League; Robert Vann, editor of the Pittsburgh Courier; and the economist Robert C Weaver.4
Blacks benefited greatly from New Deal programs though discrimination by local administrators was common. Low-cost public housing was made available to black families ( I need to tell you the story of how I “benefited greatly from New Deal programs.” Two years ago, I lost my job at the meatpacking plant. It wasn’t a fun job; I’ve seen my coworkers and friends lose fingers to the spinning saws, and I myself have a scar running from the tip of my elbow down and around to the base of my thumb, ripped open by a jagged shard of leg bone three months after I started work. When I lost my job, I didn’t panic. I’d seen in the Defender that the economy was in a downturn, but at that point I think we all thought that it would be over soon. It’s lasted so much longer than any of us expected. We’ve found ways to turn salt pork, beans, and the occasional chicken foot into email, but it honestly doesn’t resemble what we used to eat. No matter, Alma doesn’t seem to remember what we used to eat, and my wife and I would eat stones to keep a roof over our heads.
I saw my buddy Frank from the plant the other day. I was in line at the government office down on Michigan, hoping beyond hope that I’d get enough to make it through the week. Frank was taking the streetcar East to the lake from the white neighborhood he lives in, but when he saw me he got off and we got to talking.He told me what he’s been up to and my mind was blown. Two weeks after being laid off, he found a job on a WPA construction project digging a tunnel along State under the Loop for a subway. I couldn’t believe it. Nobody in my neighborhood had even heard of such a thing. From what he said, I guess they have some Blacks on the job, but they’re the kind of people who lived up North before the crash, who used to work in the skyscrapers downtown. Nobody from my neighborhood was working there. There’s no end in sight for me. But at least Frank’s doing well.). The National Youth Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps enabled black youths to continue their education. The Work Projects Administration gave jobs to many blacks, and its Federal Writers Project supported the work of many authors, among them Zora Neale Hurston, Arna Bontemps, Waters Turpin, and Melvin B. Tolson.
The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO); established in the mid-1930s, organized large numbers of black workers into labor unions for the first time. By 1940, there were more than 200,000 blacks in the CIO, many of them officers of union locals.
Process Notes:
I originally set out to write about the debate over past political debates, looking for descriptions of the New Deal debate, but I found this. In a class entitled Introduction to Black Chicago, we just learned about Black Chicagoans during the Depression. Although the City of Chicago did benefit greatly from New Deal programs, Black Chicagoans were generally excluded from reaping most of the benefits. I decided to write about the daily life of one of those Chicagoans, how the Depression was experienced by different people, and how he would have learned this in an extremely segregated city.