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

Impact

Weaver wrote numerous articles that were published in prominent black magazines such as The Crisis and Opportunity, as well as pieces for scholarly publications such as the Journal of Education. As an insider in the Roosevelt administration, he wrote as an advocate of the president’s New Deal programs, but he also pointed out their flaws. In this essay and others, Weaver was careful not only to demonstrate the positive attributes of recovery initiatives but also to indicate where improvements were already being made and could be made in the future.

Weaver’s essay provided an effective counter to the more critical articles on the New Deal appearing in black periodicals during the 1930s. African Americans shifted their electoral support to the Democratic Party in 1936, voting overwhelmingly for Roosevelt in that year’s presidential election, despite having voted primarily Republican just four years earlier. Many historians believe that even with the criticisms of Roosevelt’s New Deal in The Crisis and Opportunity, African Americans believed, for the most part, that the recovery programs had helped them. Articles such as Weaver’s, showing the tangible benefits of New Deal programs as well as the reality of their flaws and limitations, helped to maintain Roosevelt’s overwhelmingly positive image in the black community.