Black Americans and the New Deal

Black Americans faced discrimination everywhere but suffered especially severe legal inequality in the Jim Crow South. Despite a concerted effort to appoint Black advisors to some New Deal programs, Franklin Roosevelt did little to address Black communities’ particular difficulties. To do so openly would provoke southern Democrats and put his New Deal coalition—the uneasy alliance of national liberals, urban laborers, farm workers, and southern Whites—at risk. Roosevelt not only rejected such proposals as abolishing the poll tax and declaring lynching a federal crime, but he also refused to specifically target Black community needs in any of his more considerable relief and reform packages. As he explained to the national secretary of the NAACP, “I just can’t take that risk.” ^[2]

In fact, many of the programs of the New Deal had made hard times more difficult. When the codes of the NRA set new pay scales, they usually considered regional differentiation and historical data. In the South, where Black people had long suffered unequal pay, the new codes simply perpetuated that inequality. The regulations also exempted those involved in farm work and domestic labor, the occupations of most southern Black men and women. The AAA was equally problematic as owners displaced Black tenants and sharecroppers, many of whom were forced to return to their farms as low-paid day labor or to migrate to cities looking for wage work.

The Failures of Social Security

Perhaps the most notorious failure of the New Deal to aid Black Americans came with the passage of the Social Security Act. Southern politicians chafed at the prospect of Black Americans benefiting from federally sponsored social welfare, afraid that economic security would allow Black southerners to escape the cycle of poverty that kept them tied to the land as cheap, exploitable farm laborers. The Jackson (Mississippi) Daily News callously warned that “The average Mississippian can’t imagine himself chipping in to pay pensions for able-bodied Negroes to sit around in idleness . . . while cotton and corn crops are crying for workers.” Roosevelt agreed to remove domestic workers and farm laborers from the provisions of the bill, excluding many Black people, already laboring under the strictures of legal racial discrimination, from the benefits of an expanding economic safety net.

Critics point out that not all Americans benefited from the New Deal jobs either. Black Americans, in particular, were left out with overt discrimination in hiring practices within federal job programs, such as the CCC, CWA, and WPA. The NRA was often criticized as the “Negro Run Around” or “Negroes Ruined Again” program. The AAA also left tenant farmers and sharecroppers, many of whom were Black, without support.

Figure 1. This photo of Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary McLeod Bethune (second from left) was taken at the opening of Midway Hall, a federal building to house Black female government workers. Bethune was sometimes criticized for working with those in power, but her willingness to build alliances contributed to her success in raising money and supporting her causes.

Facing such criticism early in his administration, Roosevelt undertook some efforts to ensure equality in hiring practices for the relief agencies, and opportunities began to present themselves by 1935.

The WPA eventually employed 350,000 Black people annually, accounting for nearly 15 percent of its workforce. By the end of the CCC in 1938, this program had employed over 300,000 Black Americans, increasing the Black percentage of its workforce from 3 percent at the outset to nearly 11 percent at its close. Likewise, in 1934, the PWA began to require that all government projects under its purview hire Black Americans using a quota that reflected their percentage of the local population being served. Additionally, among several essential WPA projects, the Federal One Project included a literacy program that eventually reached over one million Black children, helping them learn how to read and write.

On the issue of race relations themselves, Roosevelt has a mixed legacy. Roosevelt had several Black appointees within his White House, although most were in minor positions. Unofficially, Roosevelt relied upon advice from the Federal Council on Negro Affairs, also known as his “Black Cabinet.” This group included a young Harvard economist, Dr. Robert Weaver, who subsequently became the nation’s first Black cabinet secretary in 1966, as President Lyndon Johnson’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Aubrey Williams, the director of the NYA, hired more Black administrators than any other federal agency and appointed them to oversee projects throughout the country.

One key figure in the NYA was Mary McLeod Bethune, a prominent educator tapped by Roosevelt to act as the director of the NYA’s Division of Negro Affairs. Bethune had been a spokesperson and an educator for years; with this role, she became one of the president’s foremost Black advisors. During his presidency, Roosevelt became the first to appoint a Black federal judge and the first commander-in-chief to promote an African American to brigadier general. Most notably, he became the first president to publicly speak against lynching as a “vile form of collective murder.”

However, despite these efforts, Roosevelt also understood the precariousness of his political position. To maintain a coalition of Democrats to support his more considerable relief and recovery efforts, Roosevelt could not afford to alienate Southern Democrats who might easily bolt should he openly advocate for civil rights. While he spoke about the importance of anti-lynching legislation, he never formally pushed Congress to propose such a law. He publicly supported the poll tax abolition, which Congress eventually accomplished in 1941. Likewise, although agency directors adopted changes to ensure job opportunities for African Americans at the federal and local levels, few advancements were made, and African Americans remained at the back of the employment lines. Despite such failures, Roosevelt deserves credit for acknowledging the importance of race relations and civil rights. At the federal level, more than any of his predecessors since the Civil War, Roosevelt remained aware of the federal government’s role in initiating meaningful discussions about civil rights, as well as encouraging the development of a new cadre of civil rights leaders.

Native Americans and the New Deal

Although unable to bring about sweeping civil rights reforms for African Americans in the early stages of his administration, Roosevelt worked with Congress to significantly improve the lives of American Indians. In 1934, he signed the Indian Reorganization Act (sometimes referred to as the “Indian New Deal”). This law formally abandoned the assimilationist policies outlined in the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887. Rather than forcing Indians to adapt to American culture, the new program encouraged them to develop forms of local self-government and preserve their artifacts and heritage.

John Collier, the Commissioner of Indian Bureau Affairs from 1933 to 1945, championed this legislation and saw it as an opportunity to correct past injustices that land allotment and assimilation had wrought upon Indians. Although re-establishing communal tribal lands would prove difficult, Collier used this law to convince federal officials to return nearly two million acres of government-held land to various tribes to move the process along. Although subsequent legislation later circumscribed the degree to which tribes were allowed to self-govern on reservations, Collier’s work is still a significant step in improving race relations with Indians and preserving their heritage.

Women and the New Deal

For women, Roosevelt’s policies and practices had a similarly mixed effect. Wage discrimination in federal jobs programs was rampant, and relief policies encouraged women to remain home and leave positions open for men. This belief was well in line with the gender norms of the day. Several federal relief programs forbade husbands and wives from drawing jobs or relief from the same agency. The WPA became the first specific New Deal agency to openly hire women—specifically widows, single women, and the wives of disabled husbands. While they did not participate in construction projects, these women undertook sewing projects to provide blankets and clothing to hospitals and relief agencies. Likewise, several women took part in the various Federal One art projects. Despite the apparent gender limitations, many women strongly supported Roosevelt’s New Deal, as much for its direct relief handouts for women as for its employment opportunities for men.

Figure 2. After leaving her post as head of the Women’s Division of the Democratic Party, Molly Dewson (a) later accepted an appointment to the Social Security Board, working with fellow board members Arthur J. Altmeyer and George E. Bigge, shown here in 1937. Another influential advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt was Frances Perkins (b), who, as U.S. Secretary of Labor, graced the cover of Time magazine on August 14, 1933.

However, Eleanor Roosevelt, more so than any other individual, came to represent the most substantial influence upon the president; and she used her unique position to champion several causes for women, African Americans, and the rural poor. She married Franklin Roosevelt, her fifth cousin, in 1905 and subsequently had six children, one of whom died at only seven months old. A strong supporter of her husband’s political ambitions, Eleanor campaigned by his side through the failed vice-presidential bid in 1920 and on his behalf after he was diagnosed with polio in 1921. When she discovered letters of her husband’s affair with her social secretary, Lucy Mercer, the marriage became less of a romance and more of a political partnership that would continue—strained at times—until the president’s death in 1945.

Figure 3. Eleanor Roosevelt traveled the country to promote New Deal programs. She visited a WPA nursery school in Des Moines, Iowa, on June 8, 1936. (credit: FDR Presidential Library & Museum)

Historians agree that the first lady used her presence in the White House, the leverage of her failed marriage, and knowledge of her husband’s infidelities to her advantage. She promoted several causes that the president would have had difficulty championing at the time. From newspaper and magazine articles she authored to a busy travel schedule that saw her regularly cross the country, the first lady sought to remind Americans that their plight was foremost on the minds of all working in the White House.

Eleanor was so active in her public appearances that, by 1940, she began holding regular press conferences to answer reporters’ questions. Among her first substantial projects was the creation of Arthurdale—a resettlement community for displaced coal miners in West Virginia. Although the planned community became less of an administration priority as the years progressed (eventually folding in 1940), for seven years, Eleanor remained committed to its success as a model of assistance for the rural poor.

Exposed to issues of racial segregation in the Arthurdale experiment, Eleanor supported many civil rights causes through the remainder of the Roosevelt presidency. When it became clear that racial discrimination was rampant in the administration of virtually all New Deal job programs—especially in the southern states—she continued to pressure her husband for remedies. In 1934, she openly lobbied for passage of the federal anti-lynching bill that the president privately supported but could not politically endorse. Despite the subsequent failure of the Senate to pass such legislation, Eleanor succeeded in arranging a meeting between her husband and then-NAACP president Walter White to discuss anti-lynching and other pertinent calls for civil rights legislation.

White was only one of Eleanor’s African American guests at the White House. Breaking with precedent, and much to the disdain of many White House officials, the first lady routinely invited prominent African Americans to dine with her and the president. Most notably, when the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) refused to permit internationally renowned Black opera contralto Marian Anderson to sing in Constitution Hall, Eleanor resigned her membership in the DAR and arranged for Anderson to sing at a public concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, followed by her appearance at a state dinner at the White House in honor of the king and queen of England. Concerning race relations, in particular, Eleanor Roosevelt could accomplish what her husband—for delicate political reasons—could not: become the administration’s face for civil rights.