Question

HISTORY

What did the New Deal mean for African Americans? How did it benefit African Americans? Where did it fall short?

Answer 1

The New deal law comprised a chain of programs, reforms, and regulations introduced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt between the period of 1933 to 1939 in the United States of America. The law was enacted to provide relief for the poor and the unemployed population, to recover the economy from the losses, and reform the financial system to avert a recurrence of the Great Depression.
Although the Americans suffered huge economic losses during the period of the Great Depression, the African Americans besides the economic losses were also at the receiving end of many social ills including racism, segregation, and discrimination. African-American working population was the most vulnerable group since a majority of them were employed in unskilled jobs and therefore the first to be laid off. Because of a lack of jobs, many employers ousted African-American workers to generate jobs for white citizens.

Though the New Deal was devised to aid African Americans, few of its flagship schemes either excluded them or caused them more harm.

The following are some ways in which African Americans profited from the New Deal: -

• The New Deal law specified that about 10 percent of all the beneficiaries of the programs would be African Americans. The major programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Work Progress Administration, and the Public Works Administration in which the African-American workers participated generated employment for them. For instance, the Work Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps hired around 300,000 African Americans each. The Public Works Department was also instrumental, as it reserved spots for the African Americans who had to be hired for the construction jobs.
• Additionally, the education programs brought about by the New Deal educated more than a million African Americans. Highly proficient and educated African Americans were recruited as librarians, engineers, architects, and lawyers under the New Deal programs.

However, the impact of the New Deal policy was not uniform for all African Americans. Here are some shortfalls of the New Deal policy for an extensive section of African Americans: -

• The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) of 1933 was enacted to assist farmers by cutting down the farm production and rising food prices. However, less production led to less work for thousands of African Americans working as sharecroppers and tenants. Consequently, they did not receive the subsidies for not growing specific crops on the lands that were usually paid to white landlords.
• The National Recovery Administration (NRA) of the year 1933 that was introduced for industrial recovery did not cover the industries from which the African-American workers were generally excluded. The two sectors of farm and domestic labor where the African Americans were largely employed also were not covered under the National Industry Recovery Act’s (NIRA) provisions.
• In a similar vein, the Social Security Act (1935) excluded a considerable number of senior African American farm and domestic workers from its ambit. In the South, the impact was more pronounced.
• Furthermore, the Wagner Act of 1935 discriminated against African Americans by legalizing labor union monopolies. This encouraged the dominant union insiders to exclude African-Americans on a large scale.
• The Federal Housing Program developed to offer low-cost housing for the poor during the time of the Great Depression, however, served only the Whites and neglected the African Americans from accessing housing loans, thereby leading to their segregation.
• Due to the discrimination prevalent in hiring practices, the unemployment levels for African Americans remained high despite the employment programs offered by the New Deal policy. The African Americans who were hired received fewer wages for the same work done by their White counterparts.

In sum, though the New Deal policy led to some improvements in the position of African Americans, its impact was mixed as many organizations did not effectively implement the laws leading to severely limited actual development.