African American life during the Great Depression and the New Deal

The Great Depression of the 1930s worsened the already bleak economic situation of African Americans. They were the first to be laid off from their jobs, and they suffered from an unemployment rate two to three times that of whites. In early public assistance programs African Americans often received substantially less aid than whites, and some charitable organizations even excluded Black people from their soup kitchens.

This intensified economic plight sparked major political developments among African Americans. 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 African American organizations and youth groups later led to the founding of the National Negro Congress in 1936 and the Southern Negro Youth Congress in 1937.

Virtually ignored by the Republican administrations of the 1920s, Black voters drifted to the Democratic Party, especially in the Northern cities. In the presidential election of 1928 African Americans voted in large numbers for the Democrats for the first time. In 1930 Republican Pres. Herbert Hoover nominated John J. Parker, a man of pronounced anti-Black views, to the U.S. Supreme Court. The NAACP successfully opposed the nomination. In the 1932 presidential race African Americans overwhelmingly supported the successful Democratic candidate, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The Roosevelt administration’s accessibility to African American leaders and the New Deal reforms strengthened Black support for the Democratic Party. A number of African American leaders, members of a so-called “Black cabinet,” were advisers to Roosevelt. 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 1937 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.

African Americans benefited greatly from New Deal programs, though discrimination by local administrators was common. Low-cost public housing was made available to Black families. The National Youth Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps enabled African American youths to continue their education. The Works Progress Administration gave jobs to many African Americans, and its Federal Writers’ Project supported the work of many Black 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 African Americans in the CIO, many of them officers of union locals.

World War II

The industrial boom that began with the outbreak of World War II in Europe in 1939 ended the Depression. However, unemployed whites were generally the first to be given jobs. Discrimination against African Americans in hiring impelled A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, to threaten a mass protest march on Washington. To forestall the march, scheduled for June 25, 1941, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 banning “discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government” and establishing a Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to investigate violations. Although discrimination remained widespread, during the war African Americans secured more jobs at better wages in a greater range of occupations than ever before.

In World War II as in World War I, there was a mass migration of Black Americans from the rural South; collectively, these population shifts were known as the Great Migration. Some 1.5 million African Americans left the South during the 1940s, mainly for the industrial cities of the North. Once again, serious housing shortages and job competition led to increased racial tension. Race riots broke out; the worst occurred in Detroit in June 1943.

During the war, which the United States had entered in December 1941, a large proportion of African American soldiers overseas were in service units, and combat troops remained segregated. In the course of the war, however, the army introduced integrated officer training, and Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., became its first African American brigadier general. In 1949, four years after the end of World War II, the armed services finally adopted a policy of full integration. During the Korean War of the early 1950s, Black soldiers for the first time fought side by side with whites in fully integrated units.