For African Americans, the era of the Great Depression and World War II was one of continuing and sometimes increased difficulties, but also one of achievement and change that laid important groundwork for the postwar civil rights movement.
During and after World War I, southern blacks in significant numbers left the Jim Crow discrimination, segregation, disfranchisement, and brutality of the South for the “Promised Land” of the North and the factory jobs that offered a higher standard of living and greater autonomy from whites. This “Great Migration” forever changed the nature of black America. By the mid-20th century African Americans were becoming predominantly urban and nonsouthern, and a solid, though still small, black middle class had begun to emerge.
Urbanization was crucial to bringing down the wall restraining African Americans from full and equal access to the opportunities and benefits of American life. In 1928, Oscar DePriest, a Chicago Republican, became the first African American elected to Congress from the North and the first black member of Congress since 1901. Growing political clout was further demonstrated when in 1930
Most Americans suffered greatly during the depression of the 1930s, but blacks, especially those in rural areas, were the hardest hit. Shown here is an evicted sharecropper with her baby. (Library of Congress)
The National Association For The Advancement Of Colored People (NAACP) helped turn back President Herbert Hoover’s nomination to the Supreme Court of John J. Parker, who had made racially prejudiced statements. Parker’s defeat prompted African Americans to focus on other unfriendly politicians, often effectively. The NAACP also had some significant successes with lawsuits and Supreme Court decisions in the 1930s and 1940s that began to erode legalized Jim Crow. The NAACP and other black leaders failed, however, to get federal ANTILYNCHing legislation through Congress.
By 1932, black voters were well along in the shift that had begun in 1928 from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party, and by 1936 they had become an integral part of the “Roosevelt Coalition” that made the Democrats the new majority party of the country. Symbolic of this change in party allegiance, a black Democrat, Arthur W. Mitchell, won DePriest’s congressional seat in 1934. This shift reflected dissatisfaction with the inattention, if not open hostility, of the party of Lincoln to the racial situation in America. Where Hoover had seemingly tried to build a “lily-white” Republican Party in the South, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed more African Americans to significant government positions than any prior president. An unofficial “Black Cabinet” emerged in the Roosevelt administration to give advice on issues critical to African Americans and to recruit other blacks to government.
Indicative, however, of the ambivalent attitude and actions of the New Deal on racial issues, the Black Cabinet was sometimes rebuffed by FDR and forced to see his subordinates. At other times, they sought access through the president’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt. She made her most famous gesture of support for African Americans in 1939, when she resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution after the DAR refused to allow the singer Marian Anderson to give a concert recital in its Constitution Hall in Washington. Secretary of the Interior Harold ICKES offered an alternative site, and Anderson sang instead on Easter Sunday on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Mrs. Roosevelt was especially close to Mary McLeod Bet-HUNE, leader of the Black Cabinet and head of the National Council of Negro Women, inviting her to the White House over the protest of white southern Democrats.
Although the Harlem Renaissance that defined “the New Negro” as poised and self-reliant was winding down by the end of the 1920s, it prompted many writers to continue producing. Writer and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston published her best works during the depression decade of the 1930s, most importantly Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937. The saga of the strong-willed, independent Janie’s journey of self-discovery attracted considerable attention. Even better known was Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son, a gripping examination of the effects of racial oppression upon a hapless young man named Bigger Thomas and the black community around him. The JAZZ that flourished during the Harlem Renaissance continued to influence American MUSIC as more and more whites listened to the swing music of DuKE Ellington, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, and many others.
Despite such obvious achievements, life was often grim for African Americans. In the infamous 1931 Scottsboro Boys case, nine black youths were unjustly accused of raping two white women while riding a freight train through Alabama. Their hasty convictions and death sentences illustrated the inequalities of the justice system, especially but not exclusively in the South, where lynch law remained a problem. (Twice, however, the Supreme Court overturned the Alabama decisions and ordered retrials, and eventually all nine regained their freedom.) During the 1930s and 1940s, black workers encountered continuing resistance from labor unions in gaining admission. The new Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was often helpful, however, and black workers were able, for example, to gain increased entry in the automobile industry with the support of the United Automobile Workers.
The depression that caused so much havoc hit African Americans well before it descended upon the rest of the country. By the time the stock market crashed in 1929, many black workers were already experiencing hard times—and things then got worse, as black Americans were laid off from jobs in disproportionately high numbers. By 1932, half the black workers in the urban South were out of work. In 1934, roughly two of every five black workers were unemployed, twice the national level. Black farmers and farm workers in the South similarly saw a bad situation turn worse.
New Deal programs aided distressed blacks and reestablished federal government support of African Americans, though typically with limits and discrimination. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), for example, maintained segregated facilities but, nevertheless, employed young black men. The National Youth Administration (NYA) had programs for black youths, though kept them separate from whites. The National Recovery Administration (some blacks said NRA stood for “Negroes Ruined Again”) countenanced racial disparities in wages. Agencies granting mortgages and business loans extended them to blacks with the proviso they live and operate in segregated areas. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) gave little support to black farmers in the South. Blacks were included in New Deal RELIEE programs, though often the help given was not commensurate with need.
Given the status of race relations at the time, New Deal support of African Americans, limited and uneven though it may have been, provided an important start for government intervention on behalf of blacks. Racial discrimination in New Deal programs often came at the local level, in the North as well as the South, and New Deal officials found it difficult to overcome resistance—though many did not try. Important members of the Roosevelt administration, including Harold Ickes and Harry Hopkins, did, however, urge more attention to blacks and to racial prejudice, as did Eleanor Roosevelt.
World War II brought more and better jobs to black workers. First fired during the Depression, blacks were typically last hired during wartime economic mobilization, but the shortage of workers did eventually lead to their increased presence in the industrial work force. Roughly one million black men and women served in the armed forces, and the U. S. Army and U. S. Navy began to relax some of the discrimination and segregation that marked the wartime military. Black GIs fought with distinction under
Shown here are Negro Air Corps cadets in an advanced flying class. (National Archives)
General George S. Patton. Best known were the Tuske-gee Airmen, the “Fighting 99th” Pursuit Squadron, organized in 1941, and the 332nd Fighter Group. Trained under separate and adverse conditions, these airmen proved their abilities time and again, both as escorts and active fighters. In Europe, the army experimented with platoon-level troop integration. Despite its success, the policy was largely abandoned until President Harry S. Truman desegregated the military.
On the home front, A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, pressured Roosevelt to end discrimination in the defense mobilization effort with his 1941 March on Washington Movement (MOWM). Randolph threatened a march of as many as 100,000 black protestors in the nation’s capital if the president did not take corrective action against discrimination in defense hiring and the armed forces. Not wanting international embarrassment, FDR issued Executive Order 8802 in June 1941, banning discrimination in government and government contractors and establishing the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to enforce the order. The wartime labor shortage probably made more difference in increasing black employment, but these were important steps.
In other ways, too, black protest increased during the war. Such protest was fueled by the irony African Americans felt in the nation fighting a war against the Nazis and their master race philosophy under America’s own system of racial supremacy. Black newspapers thus publicized the “Double-V” campaign—victory abroad over the Axis but also victory at home over Jim Crow. The NAACP grew from
50,000 to 450,000 members during the war. Though some protest took place in the South, the renewed migration of blacks out of the rural South and toward the centers of defense industry in the North and on the West Coast gave blacks more opportunity for activism than in the repressive South. And given prejudice and discrimination in the North as well as the South, they had reason for protest.
Black-white tensions remained high, and sometimes increased, as African Americans moved to crowded war-boom cities. Municipal police forces often acted more like occupying armies in the “colored sections” of American cities. Whenever blacks left these ghettos, even for employment or school, they were regarded with suspicion and harassment. Vicious race riots broke out in 1943 that left many dead in Harlem and Detroit over discrimination that underscored the reluctance of white America to accede to any more than minimal racial opportunity. The massive and enormously important examination of America’s racial problem in the 1944 two-volume study by the Swedish economist CuNNAR Myrdal, An American Dilemma, put the onus for racial problems squarely on white shoulders and set the tone for racial inquiry for years to come.
The difficulties, disappointments, and frustrations of the Great Depression and World War II, and also the progress, changes, and hopes of the era, contributed to a surge of determination that World War II had provided the opportunity for equality for which blacks had long been waiting. The result was the postwar Civil Rights movement. The first signal accomplishment of the decades-long struggle to reverse legalized Jim Crow came with the unanimous Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) reversing Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) that had sanctioned racial segregation.
See also Agricultural Adjustment Act; cities and urban LIEE; POLITICS IN THE RoOSEVELT ERA; race and racial conelict.
Further reading: Dan T. Carter, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969); Richard M. Dalfiume, Desegregation of the U. S. Armed Forces: Fighting on Two Fronts, 1939-1953 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1969); John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans, 6th ed. (New York: Knopf, 1988); John B. Kirby, Black Americans in the Roosevelt Era: Liberalism and Race (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980); Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Nancy J. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1983); Neil A. Wynn, The Afro-American and the Second World War, rev. ed. (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1993).
—Howard Smead
World History
