President Roosevelt’s New Deal programs are often looked back upon fondly by Black Americans. That was not true of the Black leaders who had to deal with them at the time.
Here are excerpts from my book “Who Put Black Americans in that PLACE? The Long Sad History of the Democratic Party’s Oppression of Black Americans … to this day.”
The Roosevelt Civil Rights Legacy
“Though the debate rages about the effectiveness of Roosevelt’s New Deal policies in bringing America out of the Great Depression, the record is clear that economic recovery never benefited the Negro community—and was never designed to do so. Despite his promises, Roosevelt never integrated the armed forces. His appointments of Blacks were largely symbolic and into positions that had little real influence.
Statistics well establish that Negroes faired much more poorly from the Roosevelt policies than did White America. What is less understood is that it was not an unanticipated outcome but a matter of intent. Between his racist New Deal programs and his strategy of generational welfare dependency, Roosevelt did more to block Black access to integration and upward mobility than any post-Civil War president.
The New (Raw) Deal for Negroes
Despite Roosevelt’s later popularity among Black Americans, most civil rights leaders of the New Deal era opposed Roosevelt’s programs. Civil rights advocate and author William Pickens stated that “the New Deal’s legislative innovations for relief and recovery … either provided little or no assistance for Negroes or worked to their disadvantage.”
The online Equal Justice Initiative, which highlights the major events affecting minorities since colonial times, says this about the New Deal:
Throughout the 1930s, white Southern Democrats secured amendments excluding the majority of blacks from the benefits and protections of New Deal legislation that built the central pillars of the modern middle class. The Southern congressmen struck agricultural and domestic workers from the law establishing Social Security, barring over 60 percent of the black workforce overall, 85 percent of black women, and almost 75 percent of the Southern black workforce from receiving Social Security benefits. This included retirement benefits, welfare, and unemployment payments.
The Southern Democrats, capitalizing on their control of leadership positions in Congress and their effective veto power over almost any legislation, similarly barred farm workers and domestic workers from the protections of laws creating modern labor unions, and setting minimum wage and maximum hours. The Southern legislators secured provisions requiring local administration of the GI Bill, small business loans, home mortgage assistance, educational grants, and nearly all forms of federal financial aid that built our modern middle class and the assets that can be passed from generation to generation. Southern Democrats also prevented Congress from including any anti-discrimination language in social welfare programs, such as hospital construction grants, school lunches, and community health services. As explained by Representative James Mark Wilcox from Florida, “You cannot put the Negro and the White man on the same basis and get away with it.
As a result of this concerted effort by White Southern politicians, the unprecedented comprehensive government program represented by the New Deal disproportionately benefitted Whites and largely excluded Black people. The impact of this racially motivated, discriminatory legislating continues to profoundly impact the nation today. According to the Pew Research Center, White households possess roughly 20 times as much wealth as Black households, and more than a third of Black people have zero or negative wealth, compared to just 15 percent of Whites.
The Equal Justice Initiative report focuses on White southern Democrats, but it fails to reflect the complicity of Roosevelt and the national Democratic Party. For the American Negro community, the New Deal was not a policy of beneficence but might be better called a New Deal in hypocrisy.
While Roosevelt’s programs, with their alphabet soup acronyms, are highly praised by latter-day liberals and most modern-day Black leaders, the true history has been largely trumped by political propaganda that has infected academia, media, publishing, and entertainment.
In a 2003 Cato Institute article entitled “How FDR’s New Deal Harmed Millions of poor People,” author by Jim Powell wrote:
The price of Southern Democratic support for New Deal reforms was the exclusion of blacks from federal benefits and protections. Only in this way could Southern Democrats both support the reforms, which benefitted white industrial employees principally, without threatening the political economy of the racist South.”
While southern Blacks were denied the right to vote, access to jobs and the financial benefit of various New Deal programs, those in the North were being put on general welfare dependency as the alternative to constitutional civil rights, integration, and upward mobility.
Using government money for votes was evident in the advice of the Indiana Democrat V. G. Coplen, who advised FDR’s campaign manager, James Farley, to “use these projects to make votes for the Democratic Party.”
The online Digital History provided a summarized history of Roosevelt’s key New Deal programs:
Most New Deal programs discriminated against blacks. The NRA, for example, not only offered whites the first crack at jobs, but authorized separate and lower pay scales for blacks. The Federal Housing Authority (FHA) refused to guarantee mortgages for blacks who tried to buy in white neighborhoods, and the CCC maintained segregated camps. Furthermore, the Social Security Act excluded those job categories blacks traditionally filled.”
One of the primary crafters of the New Deal legislation was Alabama Senator Hugo Black. This was before Roosevelt put him on the Supreme Court and was recast as one of the Icons of liberal Democrats.
“Justice Hugo Black and the KKK
In 1937, in his first opportunity to appoint a justice to the Supreme Court, FDR nominated Alabama Democrat senator Hugo Black. While modern political pop culture has cast Black as an enlightened progressive jurist, he, like many progressives of that era, was far from a civil rights advocate. He was an outspoken White supremacist and racist.
At the time of his appointment, Black was a proud and active member of the Robert E. Lee chapter of the Ku Klux Klan—a fact well known to Roosevelt. Black’s nomination was opposed by numerous Negro groups, including the Black members of the National Medical Association. Their resolution stated that Black’s appointment was ‘noxious to the entire country as well as the Black race.’
As an attorney, Black built his public reputation as a defender of Klan members accused of murdering Negroes. He would pack juries with fellow Klansmen and use secret Klan hand signals to connect with jurors.
His all-White juries would routinely convict Black defendants. The same juries would acquit White defendants no matter the volume of evidence. In one case, they acquitted E. R. Stephenson, against whom the evidence clearly showed that he was guilty of murdering a Catholic priest, Father James E. Coyle, who aggressively promoted integration.
In his 1926 campaign for United States Senate, Black took his campaign to every Klavern in Alabama, preaching against both Negroes and Catholics. His finance chairman was the exalted cyclops of the Lee Klan.
Upon winning his nomination, Black referred to Klan support in his speech: ‘I realize that I was elected by men who believe in the principles that I have sought to advocate, and which are the principles of this organization [the KKK].’
While in the Senate, the future Supreme Court Justice joined his southern Democrat colleagues in consistently opposing Republican anti-lynching bills. In 1935, Black launched a filibuster that led to the defeat of the Costigan-Wagner anti-lynching bill.
Upon defeat of the anti-lynching bill, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported how Black had grinned and shook hands with his fellow Democrats in their joyful victory in protecting racial lynching from federal justice.
On the Supreme Court, Black was part of a racist majority that consistently limited the scope of the civil rights acts. He supported Roosevelt’s clearly unconstitutional incarceration of Japanese Americans in concentration camps. He wrote a dissenting opinion in a case that reversed the conviction of Black freedom riders. He complained that rulings supporting the right of Blacks to assemble and protest as nothing more than giving special benefit to Negroes. ‘Unfortunately, there are some who think that Negroes should have special privileges under the law,’ he said.
As a Supreme Court Justice, Black was among the majority of Democrat justices who decided the contested Georgia gubernatorial election in favor of Democrat racist Lester Maddox over Republican Howard Calloway in 1966.
Despite this extensive provable history of hard-core racism and devotion to the KKK, Black is ironically a heroic figure within the Democratic Party.”
Black History Month (Part 3) will provide more detail on the specific racism of the New Deal programs.
So, there ‘tis.