Robert Clifton Weaver: “The New Deal and the Negro: A Look at the Facts”

Context

When U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the oath of office in 1933, the nation was in the depths of the Great Depression. Unemployment figures were staggering, reaching nearly 50 percent in urban areas such as Chicago, Illinois, and Detroit, Michigan, and as high as 90 percent in Gary, Indiana. In the South, farmers faced continued crop price deterioration; following the stock market crash of 1929, cotton prices slipped from eighteen to six cents per pound. While all Americans were affected by the depression, African Americans suffered substantially for a variety of reasons. Employed primarily as domestic and agricultural workers, blacks were the first to be laid off when jobs were cut, as these positions were either temporary or expendable in a weak economy. White workers crowded out black workers for increasingly scarce jobs. By 1932 urban black unemployment was over 50 percent, and tenant farmers in the South found themselves increasingly without any means of earning a living.

At the same time, the black intellectual class spawned by the Harlem Renaissance movement began to exert its influence in the political sphere in new ways. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a prominent civil rights organization, began to turn its focus from fighting for rights within the court system to working with the federal government for more direct intervention to help the public. The incoming Roosevelt administration signaled that it was interested in addressing the concerns of the African American community. In 1933 Roosevelt began to bring in a series of black advisers to his cabinet to provide him with guidance regarding the status of African Americans. Robert Weaver was one such adviser, hired to serve as a member of the Department of the Interior’s staff. These and other key appointments, later known as Roosevelt’s “Black Cabinet,” led many observers to believe that this administration would not forget the plight of the African American.

In the early years of his presidency, Roosevelt enacted a wide range of relief programs aimed at countering the effects of the Great Depression. These included direct relief payments to the public through federal grants to states, work programs designed to create jobs, farm subsidies and land-use reforms, rural development and housing projects, and plans for industrial organization and control to instill order on wages, prices, and competitive practices. Many of these programs held out particular promise for African Americans locked in rural poverty, unemployed owing to patterns of segregation and exclusion from certain job categories, or suffering from wage discrimination if employed.

The increasing prominence of black intellectuals and like-minded white progressives turned the public spotlight on Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. The black community itself was involved in a very heated debate over the direction of the civil rights movement, notably the issue of segregation. African American journals such as The Crisis and Opportunity carried numerous articles about segregation. The black scholar, editor, and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois of the NAACP advocated a position of voluntary segregation for blacks, stating that desegregation would not become a reality for a long time. In the meantime, argued Du Bois, blacks should gain the resources they needed in order to unite and have power in the present. Others in the NAACP, including Walter White, took the opposite position, stating that succumbing to segregation was a mistake that only perpetuated the legacy of Jim Crow “separate but equal” discrimination in the South as well as continued segregation in areas of the North.

As African Americans within the Roosevelt administration and in outside organizations evaluated the impacts of various New Deal programs, it became apparent that there were some glaring problems with the implementation and, in some cases, design, of the recovery efforts. African Americans were excluded from certain relief programs entirely, prevented from legitimately claiming benefits in certain cases, and actually grew worse off because of the ways in which various New Deal programs were implemented. Some black intellectuals became increasingly disaffected with the Roosevelt administration. In May 1935 black activists held a conference at Howard University in Washington, D.C., during which most presenters attacked New Deal programs for their negative impacts on African Americans. For instance, Weaver’s longtime friend and fellow Harvard graduate John P. Davis—a black activist, lawyer, and founding member of the National Negro Congress—had penned a sharp condemnation of the Roosevelt administration’s representation of blacks in New Deal recovery programs. Titled “A Black Inventory of the New Deal,” Davis’s article, which was published in the May 1935 issue of The Crisis, argued that the relief efforts under President Roosevelt had actually worsened the plight of the African American community. In addition, frustrated blacks in Harlem had rioted in March of the same year, signaling the growing dissatisfaction with government’s ability to deal with the problem of African American poverty. In this tension-filled environment, Robert C. Weaver served as a public spokesperson for the White House, writing articles such as “The New Deal and the Negro: A Look at the Facts” to both champion and reveal the inadequacies of the New Deal programs with which he was personally involved.