THE GREAT DEAL- AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY

To counteract the effects of the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt initiated a domestic program called the New Deal. Roosevelt's New Deal was a series of government programs designed to adjust the economy in ways that would increase employment. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt encouraged the organization of a 'Black Cabinet' composed of notable African Americans to help shape New Deal programs.

Generally these black advisers were not politicians but community leaders, such as educator Mary McLeod Bethune, social worker Lawrence A. Oxley, and poet Frank S. Horne. Some held official positions in the Roosevelt administration. William H. Hastie, dean of the Howard University Law School, was appointed assistant solicitor in the Department of the Interior and later became aide to the Secretary of War. Ralph Bunche worked in the State Department, and Bethune was director of the Division of Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration. By the mid-1930s, Roosevelt had appointed 45 African Americans to serve in his New Deal agencies.

The New Deal had mixed results in the black community. Federal relief programs provided financial aid to desperately poor blacks, jobs for many, and government-financed housing. Some black workers benefited from administration efforts to protect industrial workers when New Deal policies guaranteed unions the right to strike. Many more benefited from consumer strikes and boycotts that black leaders organized to force white businesses to hire black workers. In New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and other cities, thousands of blacks participated in “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns. In New York’s Harlem, for example, boycotts led to many more clerical, sales, and executive jobs for African Americans. Working together during the New Deal strengthened long-standing alliances between blacks and white liberals. These alliances were a foundation for subsequent civil rights reforms.

Yet, New Deal programs maintained racial segregation, especially in the South, and by the end of Roosevelt's second term, black unemployment was still extremely high. Further, the Roosevelt administration was reluctant to confront the legal segregation faced by Southern blacks, and New Deal programs did not help those hurt by the decline in agricultural prices. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) aided farm owners but did little for farm workers, some of whom were fired when the federal government provided financial incentives to cut farm production.

The Social Security Act brought assistance to many workers, but it excluded farmers and domestics—65 percent of all African American workers. Similarly, the bulk of black workers were not covered by National Recovery Administration codes (see National Industrial Recovery Act). Additionally, many federal housing programs perpetuated residential segregation. Roosevelt also declined to support proposed federal legislation against lynching and did little to relieve discrimination against blacks in federal relief programs.

One of the most dramatic developments that took place during the 1930s was the realignment of black voters. Blacks in large numbers switched their votes to the Democratic Party, deserting the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln that blacks had supported since Reconstruction. This shift took place partly as a result of blacks’ involvement in labor unions that generally supported the Democrats, and partly in response to Republican efforts to attract Southern segregationists. By the 1934 congressional elections, two years after Roosevelt won the presidency, most blacks voted Democratic for the first time.

During the 1930s, the NAACP led a vigorous legal battle against discrimination, concentrating on ways to end legal segregation, especially in education. The legal strategy for this battle was formulated by Charles Houston, former dean of the Howard University Law School, and Thurgood Marshall, a former student of Houston’s. The NAACP focused on the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision which had allowed separate facilities for blacks as long as they were equal to those provided for whites. Since they were almost never equal, the NAACP attempted to force Southern states to make them so.

The NAACP gained an initial victory in 1938 when the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the admission of a black man to the University of Missouri law school because the state had failed to provide such facilities for blacks. The next year, attacks on legal segregation were intensified as the NAACP Legal Defense Fund was created, and Marshall became its director.

Blacks and their white allies demonstrated their determination to fight segregation when the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow internationally acclaimed black singer Marian Anderson to appear at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. In protest, civil rights advocates arranged for Anderson to give an outdoor concert at the Lincoln Memorial. The symbolism was clear to over 75,000 blacks and whites who attended the concert on Easter Sunday 1939.