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

Questions for Further Study

• 1.: Summarize the events and economic developments that gave rise to Weaver’s “The New Deal and the Negro: A Look at the Facts.”
• 2.: In the 1930s a number of observers referred to the New Deal as a “raw deal” for African Americans. On what basis did they make that judgment? How and why did the Great Depression disproportionately affect African Americans?
• 3.: Compare this document with John P. Davis’s “A Black Inventory of the New Deal,” written the same year. To what extent do the two writers’ positions differ? Are their arguments similar in any significant ways? Explain.
• 4.: In the modern era, African Americans have tended to heavily support Democrats for high office, particularly the presidency. Why did African American allegiance shift from the Republican Party (“the party of Lincoln”) to the Democrats during the 1930s?
• 5.: Using this document and the events surrounding it alongside Davis’s “A Black Inventory of the New Deal” and A. Philip Randolph’s “Call to Negro America to March on Washington for Jobs and Equal Participation in National Defense” (1941), prepare a time line of key economic events that affected African Americans (and all Americans) throughout the 1930s and 1940s.