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

Questions for Further Study

• 1.: What impact did the Great Depression have on African Americans? How did that impact differ in kind or degree from the impact felt by white Americans?
• 2.: Did the New Deal of President Franklin Roosevelt alleviate the plight of African Americans? Why or why not?
• 3.: Davis discusses the concept of self-help for African Americans. In what way was this message similar to that advocated by, for example, John S. Rock in “Whenever the Colored Man Is Elevated, It Will Be by His Own Exertions” (1858)?
• 4.: In what sense did Davis’s report prefigure that arguments made in A. Philip Randolph’s “Call to Negro America to March on Washington” (1941)?
• 5.: Discuss the history of trade unionism as it affected African Americans in the pre–World War II era.