John P. Davis: “A Black Inventory of the New Deal”

Context

In November 1932 Americans elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt as their new president. The nation was in the grip of the Great Depression, and former President Herbert Hoover’s strategy for turning the economy around seemed one of complete failure. As America anxiously watched the new administration form its own ideas for bringing the nation back to financial health, most felt a renewed sense of optimism.

Living in a segregated society in the Jim Crow South and many places in the North, African Americans suffered immensely during the depression. Black tenant farmers in the South languished as crop prices fell, and black workers in the industrial North were the first to be let go as the unemployment rate climbed. Although most black voters had supported the Republican Party in the 1932 election, Roosevelt’s Democratic administration showed signs of promise for the plight of African Americans. In the summer of 1933, Roosevelt created a position for a special adviser on “the economic status of negroes” to serve under the secretary of the Department of the Interior, Harold Ickes. Roosevelt would go on in later years to create what became known as the “Black Cabinet,” an advisory group of prominent African American community leaders who counseled his administration regarding the concerns of black Americans. In a more direct show of support, for the first time, the government initiated programs to provide direct relief to the public. Two of these important programs were initiated, respectively, by the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) and the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), both passed in 1933. These sweeping initiatives were intended to help farmers and industrial workers through government intervention.

Not long after their creation, however, it became apparent that these two programs had considerable flaws. One component of the NIRA was to develop industry-specific standards that would govern competition, pricing, wages, and work hours in each industry. The idea was to promote efficiency and fairness in practices and to provide workers with a minimum wage and maximum work period for every given job category. However, as business leaders worked with government representatives to develop these industrial codes, it became clear that African Americans were being systematically discriminated against, especially in the South. Black workers in Atlanta, Georgia, protested against the industrial codes in August of 1933, but, despite such protests, southern business interests won concessions from the government that perpetuated racial discrimination.

Similarly, the AAA resulted in appalling consequences for black farmers, because many did not own their land but farmed as tenants, or sharecroppers. In order to increase farmers’ income, the government paid farmers incentives to leave land fallow. Unfortunately, southern landowners fired their black tenant farmers first, as fewer crops grown meant fewer farmers needed. Just as black workers in the North protested against the NIRA, tenant farmers in the South, black and white, joined together to form the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in 1934, bringing the plight of African American farmers to the public’s attention.

In 1935 economic recovery in the United States seemed nowhere in sight. Unemployment was a staggering 20 percent, and the promises of the Roosevelt administration appeared unfulfilled. Still, African Americans remained loyal to the Democratic Party; in the 1934 midterm elections, Democrats won formerly Republican seats largely because of the increase in black voters. In Chicago, Arthur W. Mitchell became the first black Democrat ever elected to Congress. Nevertheless, while African Americans might have supported Roosevelt and his party, many were growing more and more disillusioned with the administration’s unproductive policies. John P. Davis’s “A Black Inventory of the New Deal” gave voice to the increasingly urgent demand from the black community for tangible strides to be made in America’s move toward racial equality.