Question

What racial problems did Mrs. Roosevelt identify in American society?

Answer 1

Lynching and mob violence spiked at the beginning of the 1930s as racial tensions heightened during the Great Depression.i With growing public concern over the treatment of black Americans, President Franklin D. Roosevelt faced increasing domestic and international pressure to curtail mob violence. Even German Chancellor Adolf Hitler wrote to FDR in “protest against an uncivilized custom of broiling helpless victims by mobs,” and encouraged FDR to deplore mob violence. “I would consider it a great favor,” he wrote, “if you would use your own good and powerful office to better protect your defensless [sic] black people.”ii Similarly, leading American civil rights activists pressured the President for a federal solution to lynching throughout the decade. Recognising FDR’s willingness to push through legislation to aid national recovery in the wake of the economic crisis, prominent organisations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) hoped that the President would also lend his powers to aid the campaign for civil rights.

In theory the liberalism espoused by the FDR aligned with the liberalism championed by the NAACP as both advocated greater state intervention to remedy social inequalities: the Association maintained that it was the federal government’s responsibility to protect black lives and the New Deal offered hope to reformers who sought greater federal intervention in problems such as poverty, poor housing, and unemployment. But in practice, FDR remained silent on the bills and did not accede to the NAACP’s demands.4But as FDR’s White House staff tried to keep White and the controversial subject of anti-lynching from the president’s attention, the NAACP corresponded with Eleanor Roosevelt in order to develop an alternate route through which to reach the president. There is wide-sweeping academic agreement regarding Eleanor Roosevelt’s part in the 1930s anti-lynching movement.

most black people were struck with the genuineness and the feeling that she was for real, not only just her statements, not only the so-called sympathetic statements. Her statements were empathetic rather than sympathetic. She showed empathy. And she appeared to be thoroughly convinced and progressively, as time went on, that America could not live up to its promise of being a democracy unless it did something about the racial problem in this country.World War II exposed a great contradiction in American life. Here you were fighting Hitler, the world's premier ideologue of racism. And in your own country, if you were a black soldier in a uniform, you had to be very cautious about your life. They were still lynching African Americans, hanging them up, setting them on fire, shooting them like they were garbage and dogs, during World War II. You couldn't even get an anti-lynching bill passed during World War II. Franklin Roosevelt, the new great emancipator, never made a speech attacking lynchings, the way he should have. He might have mentioned in passing, but not directly. Roosevelt never made an outstanding reference to black people in any kind of pro-black speech, as did later Lyndon Baines Johnson. He never addressed the NAACP, as Truman did later. The tensions and the definitions of black and white were so sharply desperate that it wasn't advisable for him to ever do that.FDR's Popularity Amongst Blacks:- Mrs. Roosevelt became Franklin Roosevelt's secret weapon. Many people assumed that he felt correctly toward us but didn't consider it advisable -- his dependency on the solid South -- to state it.