Did the New Deal improve life for African Americans?

The first historians to write about the New Deal thought it was wonderful.  They either ignored the impact on African Americans, or highlighted the good points.  In 1959, historian Carl Degler wrote:

“Negroes got their share … Negro youths were welcome in the CCC and NYA just as whites were … Even-handedly distributed federal relief funds were a gift from heaven to the black man”. 

EEven when instances of discrimination came to light, the argument ran: ‘Had not African Americans switched in huge numbers from voting Republican to voting Democrat?  They must have been happy with the New Deal’. 

A modern historian of the New Deal, Mary-Elizabeth Murphy (2020), comments: p class="style88">“While black participation in New Deal programs was uneven, there was no question that it marked a new era for African Americans and enabled them to recast their ideas about citizenship and belonging in the United States.  By 1935, 30 percent of African Americans were recipients of New Deal relief programs and many turned their political allegiances in these shifting times.”

MMany African Americans undoubtedly benefited from Roosevelt's New Deal programs such as the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC), each of which employed more than 300,000 Black Americans.  African Americans were hired as engineers, librarians, lawyers, and architects for New Deal programs.  New Deal education programs – a routine element of many New Deal measures – taught more than 1 million African Americans how to read and write and were enthusiastically received; meanwhile, the WPA was also building schools in African American areas – so by the end of the 1930s, Black illiteracy had fallen by 10%.  One third of the 51 PWA slum clearance projects were set aside for African Americans, giving them a new life in affordable, modern housing. 

Most New Deal administrators liked to think they were ‘color-blind’ – they designed New Deal programmes to help people in general, and expected the Black population would benefit along with everyone else.  But some New Deal leaders – notably Harold Ickes at the Public Works Administration (PWA) and Will Alexander at the Farm Security Administration (FSA), along with the President’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, were out-and-out allies. 

AAt the PWA, Ickes appointed a ‘Special Advisor on the Status of Negroes’, and built an 'Interdepartmental Group Concerned with the Special Problems of the Negro Population'.  In 1933, after lobbying by the NAACP, the PWA inserted a non-discrimination clause into all contracts, including a quota system whereby construction crews had to employ black workers in proportion to the local population.  In 1934, it was added that contractors had to guarantee a specific percentage of their payroll to Black workers. 

Two WPA initiatives – the Federal Theater Project (FTP) and the Federal Writers Project (FWP) – had ‘Negro divisions’ to promote Black projects.  The FTP’s Negro Division staged productions written by Black playwrights and hired black actors and directors.  The FWP supported Black authors, and also paid interviewers to travel to the South and interview thousands of former slaves, which provided a Black voice for historians of slavery.  Meanwhile, Alexander’s FSA hired photographers, including Black photographers, to travel across the country and capture the lives of ordinary Americans.   Historian Lauren Sklaroff (2009) has identified these New Deal initiatives as vital in creating a national consciousness of African American culture, which in turn formed the basis for the Civil Rights successes of the 1960s. 

On the other hand, however, it is hard to ignore the fact that – in racist times – the New Deal was shot through with racist discrimination. 

Roosevelt’s own role in this was far from positive.  He brought forward no civil rights legislation, and spent a good deal of his time pandering to the racist Southern Democrats (whose votes he needed to get his New Deal legislation passed by Congress).  He met with the NAACP about lynching, and condemned it in public … but did not introduce an anti-lynching bill.  When he became President, he insisted that half the servants in the White House were Black, and he assembled a group of Black advisers who were known as the ‘Black Cabinet’ … but his actual Cabinet was wholly white. 

The CCC – despite an ‘equal treatment’ requirement – was run by a white director from Tennessee, who believed that white men needed jobs more than Black men, capped the number of African Americans at 10%, housed them in segregated dormitories, and barred them from most administrative positions.  Things were even worse at local level, where boards tried to get away with not hiring African Americans at all. 

TThe Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) similarly discriminated against Black labour, and – when it flooded land for a dam – gave compensation to the landowners (usually white) but not the tenants (usually Black).  The National Recovery Administration (NRA) not only offered whites the first crack at jobs, but authorized separate and lower pay scales for blacks.  The WPA put Black women onto domestic service and sewing training courses, both of which paid low wages, but provided opportunities for white women in clerical work, gardening, and nursing.  Domestic and agricultural workers were not eligible for New Deal unemployment insurance, but those were the main occupations of most African Americans in the South – so this rule ended up excluding 55% of all Black workers and 87% of wage-earning Black women from the most important benefit of the New Deal. 

Federal Housing Authority (FHA) housing programmes were segregated.  And because they almost always started by levelling Black housing areas, they created a crisis of overcrowding in the remaining Black housing, and actually worsened the slum conditions they were trying to improve.  The FHA refused to guarantee mortgages for blacks who tried to buy in white neighbourhoods

EEven at the PWA, Icke’s ‘Special Advisor on the Status of Negroes’, Clark Foreman, was white (though he agreed to the job only on condition that he would be replaced by an African American as soon as possible), and the PWA built segregated housing estates. 

Worst of all, however, were the innumerable instances of times where New Deal programmes, genuinely trying to do good, in fact actually harmed – sometimes greatly – African Americans. 

The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) paid farmers to take fields out of production; the idea of this was to stop over-production and to drive up prices.  But only a fifth of Black farmers owned their land – they worked as tenants or sharecroppers.  So the immediate consequence for African Americans was that, with a financial incentive to reduce the amount of land being farmed, the first thing white landowners did was to throw Black farmers off their land – it is estimated that the AAA's policies forced more than 100,000 Africa Americans off the land 1933-34.  Secondly, because the government gave the money directly to the landowner, with a requirement to pass on a proportion – two-thirds to tenants, half to sharecroppers – you can guess how fairly that was administered. 

TThe National Industrial Recovery Act (which set up the NRA) gave businesses the right to form cartels, set their own codes of conduct, and force up prices, as long as they promised to pay good wages and allow workers to join a union.  The National Labour Relations Act (1935) and Fair Labour Standards Act (1938), likewise set hours and conditions of work, fixed a minimum wage, and protected workers’ right to join a union.  The problem with this was that Black workers – most of whom were unskilled, and almost all of whom were less skilled than the equivalent white workers – were only employed because they were cheaper than white workers.  So the result of the minimum wage was that thousands of firms promptly sacked their Black workers and employed white workers instead.  Small firms, which had survived by employing low-waged Black employees, went bankrupt, and those jobs went with them.  The Chicago Defender labelled the NRA the ‘Negro Removal Act’ – one estimate is that half a million African Americans lost their jobs, and the NRA thus created a Black-white employment gap which still exists today. 

In the meantime, measures to protect working conditions also backfired on many African Americans, who often kept their jobs only because they were prepared to accept worse conditions than white workers.  An NRA regulation limiting hairdressers to daytime hours, for instance, hurt Black hairdressers, most of whom worked a job during the day and met their clients (who also worked) at night. 

MeMeanwhile, the requirement to recognise the unions also harmed African American workers.  Many unions, especially the huge AFL, did not allow Black workers to join, and many white union members hated the African Americans, whom employers had in the past used to break strikes.  The AFL openly used the NRA provisions to secure jobs for white workers and keep out African Americans. 

Even the provisions which set quotas for assistance to African Americans could end up working against them – in one scheme in Florida, relief was distributed by racial proportion of population even though African Americans were three times more likely to be on relief; thus, 15,000 Black families received 45% of the funds, and 5,000 white families received 55%.  p class="style101">There can be no blame on the New Deal that these unintended consequences happened.  The blame is that – when they were told and lobbied about them – the Roosevelt administration did not correct them. 

NeNevertheless, even when all those negatives are taken into account, it is clear that many African Americans – even if it did not immediately and directly improve their lives – saw the New Deal as a way to improve their lives. 

We may be horrified, but we surely cannot be surprised that the New Deal was shot through with embedded racism and discrimination – 1930s America was shot through with embedded racism and discrimination!  What was different was not that the Africans were getting a raw deal, it was that for the first time they were being regarded as equal enough to get a deal at all … and they responded to it.  p class="style101">YeYes the New Deal improved the standard of living for hundreds of thousands of African Americans, but it also raised their self-belief and activism.  The shift to voting Democrat was the least of it.  The NAACP successfully lobbied the government, took up complaints, and won court cases which established a Black American’s legal right to go to College (Murray v.  Maryland, 1936) and sit on a jury (Hale v.  Kentucky, 1938).  From 1934 Negro Workers' Councils raised trade union awareness among Black workers, sought improvements to the New Deal, and supported ‘Don't Buy Where You Can't Work’ campaigns.  In 1936, John P.  Davis and Ralph Bunche formed the National Negro Congress (NNC) which fought to broaden New Deal programs, improve living conditions, promote Black unionism, demand the vote, and protest lynching and police brutality.  In many places in the South, African Americans joined the Communist Party to fight the system. 

Comments Mary-Elizabeth Murphy: class="style88">“The New Deal … reshaped the 20th-century trajectory of black life in the United States.”