The Great Depression was particularly tough for Americans of color. “The Negro was born in depression,” one Black pensioner told interviewer Studs Terkel. “It didn’t mean too much to him. The Great American Depression . . . only became official when it hit the white man.”^[1] Black workers were generally the last hired when businesses expanded production and the first fired when businesses experienced downturns. As a National Urban League study found, “So general is this practice that one is warranted in suspecting that it has been adopted as a method of relieving unemployment of White people without regard to the consequences upon Negroes.”^[2] In 1932, with the national unemployment average hovering around 25 percent, Black unemployment reached as high as 50 percent, while even Black workers who kept their jobs saw their already low wages cut dramatically.^[3]

In rural areas, where large numbers of Black Americans continued to live despite the Great Migration of 1910–1930, Depression-era life represented an intensified version of the poverty that they traditionally experienced. Subsistence farming allowed many Black Americans who lost either their land or jobs working for White landholders to survive, but their hardships increased. Life for Black Americans in urban settings was equally trying, with Black and working-class White people living in close proximity and competing for scarce jobs and resources. As the prices for cotton and other agricultural products plummeted, farm owners paid workers less or simply laid them off. Landlords evicted sharecroppers, and even those who owned their land outright had to abandon it when there was no way to earn any income.

In cities, Black Americans fared no better. Unemployment was rampant, and many White people felt that any available jobs belonged to White people first. In some Northern cities, White people would conspire to have Black American workers fired to allow White workers access to their jobs. Even jobs traditionally held by Black workers, such as household servants or janitors, were now going to White people.

Figure 1. The accusation of rape brought against the so-called Scottsboro Boys, pictured with their attorney in 1932, generated controversy across the country.

Racial violence also began to rise. In the South, lynching became more common again, with twenty-eight documented lynchings in 1933, compared to eight in 1932. Since communities were preoccupied with their own hardships, and organizing civil rights efforts was a long, difficult process, many resigned themselves to, or even ignored, this culture of racism and violence. Occasionally, however, an incident was notorious enough to gain national attention.

The Scottsboro Boys

One such incident was the case of the Scottsboro Boys. In 1931, nine Black boys, who had been riding the rails, were arrested for vagrancy and disorderly conduct after an altercation with some White travelers on the train. Two young White women, who had been dressed as boys and traveling with a group of White boys, came forward and said that the Black boys had raped them. The case, which was tried in Scottsboro, Alabama, reignited decades of racial hatred and illustrated the injustice of the court system. Despite significant evidence that the women had not been raped at all, along with one of the women subsequently recanting her testimony, the all-White jury quickly convicted the boys and sentenced all but one of them to death. The verdict broke through the veil of indifference toward the plight of Black Americans, and protests erupted among newspaper editors, academics, and social reformers in the North.

The Communist Party of the United States offered to handle the case and sought a retrial; the NAACP later joined in this effort. In all, the case was tried three separate times. The series of trials and retrials, appeals, and overturned convictions shone a spotlight on an unjust system that provided poor legal counsel and relied on all-White juries. In October 1932, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed with the Communist Party’s defense attorneys that the defendants had been denied adequate legal representation at the original trial, and that due process as provided by the Fourteenth Amendment had been denied through the exclusion of any potential Black jurors. Eventually, most of the accused received lengthy prison terms with the possibility of parole, but avoided the death penalty. The Scottsboro case ultimately laid some of the early groundwork for the modern American civil rights movement. Alabama granted posthumous pardons to all defendants in 2013.

Figure 2. The trial and conviction of nine Black boys in Scottsboro, Alabama, illustrated the numerous injustices of the American court system. Despite being falsely accused, the boys received lengthy prison terms and were not officially pardoned by the State of Alabama until 2013.