Black History Month (Part 3) FDR’s New Deal racism program by program

Many people view President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs in a positive light.  The believe that his policies brought us out of the Great Depression and that he was an advocate of civil rights.  The first claim is highly debatable and the second is provably untrue.

The New Deal programs were crafted by racist Democrats – including those with ties to the Ku Klux Klan.  They were intentionally designed to shift jobs away from Black workers to desperate White works.  Even FDR’s highly vaunted Social Security program was created with a bias against Black Americans.

In Part 3, I focus specifically on FDR’s New Deal programs and how they impacted on Black Americans.  The follow excerpts are 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”.  (This section has been abridged due to space constraints.)

“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.

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.”

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.

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Perhaps the best way to understand the racism embedded in Roosevelt’s New Deal programs is to look at specific programs in greater detail.

National Recovery Act

The NRA was vehemently opposed by the NAACP, and William Pickens was the first to call it the Negro Removal Act. He said:

One of the first effects of the NRA programs to raise wages is to oust many Negroes from employment altogether. Minimum wage rates imposed by the NRA were generally higher than Negro workers were receiving, and employers preferred replacing previously cheap black labor with whites.

And in 2002 Ken Kersch, political science professor at Boston College, wrote:

The National Recovery Administration, or ‘NRA,’ a lynchpin of Franklin Roosevelt’s First Hundred Days, did not fare well in the African American press. Negro Removal Act, Negroes Ruined Again, and Negroes Robbed Again, were only a few of the epithets launched at what many blacks took to be a poisoned spoonful of alphabet soup.

Public Works of 1933

The Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works (later renamed the Public Works Administration (PWA) was created in 1933 to undertake large-scale public construction projects, including highways, bridges, airports, dams, hospitals, schools, and even warships. It also played a role in creating public housing that was a major feature in maintaining segregated communities—essentially keeping Negroes in their PLACE. The program constructed approximately thirty thousand units in five years.

Congressional Republicans sought anti-discrimination policies in hiring workers under the Public Works Program, but unions and congressional Democrats successfully thwarted those efforts.

Though Blacks were hired for the PWA projects despite undermining practices at the local levels, the number was relatively nominal compared to the need. The program continued to favor White employment, and the promised quotas were never reached.

This disparity in jobs for Blacks would be seen in one of the most important public works projects, the Hoover Dam. This technological marvel constructed in 1931–35 employed some twenty-two thousand workers— fewer than thirty of them were Black.

Works Progress Administration of 1935

The Works Progress Administration (WPA) differed from the Public Works Administration in that it dealt with smaller projects more suitable for semi-skilled or unskilled workers—potentially disproportionately beneficial to Black workers

The focus on the unskilled worker gave the WPA a greater potential in addressing the extraordinarily high levels of Black unemployment. As in other New Deal job programs, however, the WPA was subjected to fierce debate between those who wanted to broaden the scope of coverage and those interested in narrowing the coverage—essentially making the WPA a White worker program. The percentage of Black employment in WPA projects ranged around five percent.

Civilian Conservation Corps of 1933

The purpose of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was to provide public works project employment for unmarried men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three.

Though CCC provided some Blacks with employment, their numbers were comparatively low, and those who did participate were discriminated against from the onset. The entire program was largely segregated, with Black workers assigned to their own projects and housed in 143 segregated camps where they were overseen by White supervisors.

In 1935, Roosevelt’s CCC director, Robert Fechner, confirmed that there was a ‘complete segregation of colored and White enrollees.’ Picking up the popular theme of Democrat racists, he said that “segregation is not discrimination.”

Segregation policy did prevent Blacks from working on the more desirable CCC projects. Even where they performed similar jobs, Blacks often received lower pay even though that was illegal.

Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933

The online website Digital History provides a summarized history of Roosevelt’s key New Deal programs. In addressing the Agricultural Adjustment Act, it reports:

The story in agriculture was particularly grim. Since 40 percent of all black workers made their living as sharecroppers and tenant farmers, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) acreage reduction hit blacks hard. White landlords could make more money by leaving land untilled than by putting land back into production. As a result, the AAA’s policies forced more than 100,000 blacks off the land in 1933 and 1934.”

Even though Black farmers were technically eligible for financial assistance through AAA, virtually all the money flowed to White plantation owners.

According to Section 7 of the act, sharecroppers and tenant farmers were to be directly paid compensation for the land they set aside. Congressional Democrats objected, demanding that payment be administered through the racist state governments. Without any change in the law, Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture and future vice president Henry Wallace simply reinterpreted the meaning of Section 7 to comply with Democrat demands—essentially cutting off virtually all funds for Black sharecroppers and tenant farmers.

Black farmers were driven off the land and into the food lines. In many cases, White plantation owners would acquire the land of Black farmers for a nominal price, and they would receive the compensation for the very same land for which compensation was denied to the Negro farmer.

According to the New Jersey State Library’s African American history curriculum, unit 11 on the Great Depression:

The Agricultural Assistance Agency’s crop subsidy program … actually led to the displacement of about 192,000 black sharecroppers because, contrary to the program’s rules, they failed to receive any portion of the federal funds given white planters for reducing cotton production.

Tennessee Valley Authority Act of 1933

The Tennessee Valley Authority was created in 1933 as a public sector corporation created by federal charter. It was to serve a number of purposes including flood control, provide electrical energy for the region, and serve as a stimulus for economic development. The project represented the racial prejudices of the Roosevelt administration in two ways: loss of land and access to jobs.

The project flooded almost 750,000 acres and forced some fifteen thousand people off their land, including a great number of farmers. White farmers were compensated for their losses. Tenant farmers, who were mostly Black, received no compensation for the loss of their livelihood.

The TVA created thousands of jobs, but very few for Blacks and then only the lowest paid most menial tasks. According to an August 7, 2017, History Channel documentary ‘The workers were categorized by the usual racial and gender lines of the day. TVA hired a few African Americans for janitorial or other low-level positions.’

TVA was unionized from its inception. What many saw as a breakthrough for American workers was another barrier to Black employment. There was no willingness by the unions to voluntarily open up membership to Negroes and no desire by Roosevelt and the Democrats to force them to do so.

Federal Housing Administration Act of 1934

The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was created to regulate interest rates on mortgages and the general terms. The initial underwriting standards developed in 1930 discriminated against minority home shoppers. Up to 1959, Blacks received barely two percent of the federally insured home loans—essentially eliminating qualified Black home buyers from access to mortgages.

As the program grew for White Americans, the result was a significant decline in the value of properties in segregated Black communities. Democrat policies in the major cities and in Washington were essentially creating worsening slum conditions in the Black ghettoes. The barrier to home ownership for Blacks was exacerbated by racist redlining policies imposed by local urban Democrat political machines.

National Labor Relations Act of 1935

In 1935, key provisions of the unconstitutional National Industrial Recovery Act were incorporated in the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), also known as the Wagner Act. The NAACP and the National Urban League were joined by virtually all major civil rights organizations in lobbying against it, but to no avail. The president and his southern Democrat friends in Congress prevailed.

The Wagner (NLRA) Act put the federal thumb on the scale in favor of the predominantly Democrat-controlled all-White labor unions.

The minimum wage provision of the Wagner Act was intentionally designed by congressional Democrats to remove Blacks from jobs which would then be available to unemployed White workers.

According to Jim Powell, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute:

The minimum wage regulations (of the Wagner Act) made it illegal for employers to hire people who weren’t worth the minimum because they lacked skills. As a result, some 500,000 blacks, particularly in the South, were estimated to have lost their jobs.

The fact that mandatory union membership would all but eliminate Black access to government jobs did not go unnoticed. Such civil rights leaders as Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, and W. E. B. DuBois strongly protested, but their voices fell on deaf ears in the White House and on Capitol Hill.

In his Capital Research Center article ‘The Untold Racist Origins of Progressive Labor Laws,’ Horace Cooper said that in removing the predominantly Black farm workers, the congressional Democrats had acted ‘to preserve the racially subordinate role of the black worker.’ Cooper concluded:

It is a strange kind of social reform indeed that flatly and purposefully excludes those for whom the reform would purportedly be the most helpful.

Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938

Ku Klux Klan member and Democrat senator Hugo Black is credited with being the father of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). He proposed the law first in 1932 and was an associate justice of the Supreme Court when it was passed in 1938. In concert with the major Democrat trade unions, Black crafted noble sounding legislation that was actually intended to, and did, depress Black employment. This bias against Negros in the FLSA and other New Deal programs was in no small measure due to the racial prejudices of Hugo Black. As a close friend and staunch ally of Roosevelt, his influence over New Deal programs was considerable and extensive.

While the provisions were significant in their requirements, the act covered less than 750,000 workers—and barely covered Black workers at all.

The New Deal Fails Black America

Despite the political mythology and false racial narratives advanced by the Democratic Party, Roosevelt’s New Deal was not beneficial to Negro Americans in any way. As with Woodrow Wilson, the New Deal represented another example of progressive racism and hypocrisy—only this time the Democrats added welfare dependency as an alternative “civil right.”

In his biography of civil rights leader William Pickens, historian Sheldon

Avery said that Pickens had concluded that:

…most of the New Deal’s legislative innovations for relief and recovery, including the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), the National Recovery Act (NRA), the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), and the Public Works Administration (PWA), either provided little or no assistance for Negroes or worked to their disadvantage.

Roosevelt and the Democrats had woven the threads of racism into virtually all the major New Deal programs. These threads created institutional racial prejudices that have influenced public policy into the twenty-first century—especially in the major cities ruled over by Democrat political machines.

 Roosevelt’s Impact on Black Employment

Many in the Black community view Roosevelt with idolatry. They believe that he brought them out of the Great Depression—an erroneous impression that has been handed down from generation to generation.

Before the Great Depression, the Black unemployment rate was actually lower than the White rate at less than four percent—although Blacks disproportionately held jobs at the lower end of the wage scale. By 1932, as the Great Depression took hold, the White unemployment rate jumped to 25 percent, while the Black rate soared to approximately 50 percent. This disproportionate rise in the rate of Black unemployment was more the result of Roosevelt’s New Deal laws discriminating against Negro employment than the Depression, itself.”

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I have focused on Roosevelt and his policies in the first three Black History Month commentaries because they not only worked against Black employment in the 1930s but they laid the foundation for the Black segregation and oppression that has continued into the 21^st Century.  Black History Month (Part 4) will show how generational welfare dependence was substituted for civil rights by design.

So, there ‘tis.