1933: The New Deal

1900-1999: A New Divide
Written By Stephanie Brizee

Big Idea

While President Roosevelt launched his “New Deal” to aid Americans suffering as a result of the Depression, this deal did not extend to African Americans in equal measure. Black leaders continued to work in and out of government to further equal rights and equal support for Black communities.

The New Deal

In response to the Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, his administration, and the U.S. Congress developed “The New Deal” to reinvigorate the U.S. economy, put people to work, and provide assistance to those who could not work. The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Social Security Administration were two of the many organizations launched by the U.S. federal government as part of the New Deal.

Despite using a rhetoric of lifting all, the racialized system within the United States meant that White people gained from these programs more than Black people did. Feagin (2014) found that: 

Black workers continued to suffer much discrimination from the whites who administered the New Deal agencies…in most federal relief programs black workers got lower wages than whites, were employed only as unskilled laborers, and were employed only after whites were. (p. 58)

Housing Segregation

Housing remained one of the key mechanisms for enforcing the racial divide in America and the very programs created to help poor Americans move up, became the means of keeping Black Americans segregated and restricted.

Finding housing continued to be a problem for African Americans, and in fact, grew worse during the Depression. Feagin (2014) wrote that “New Deal housing programs increased residential segregation areas by restricting the new federally guaranteed home loans to homes in segregated areas and by locating public housing so that it would be segregated” (p. 58). 

To help address the housing shortage, the federal government created two organizations as part of the New Deal. The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) was created in 1933 in an effort to reduce bank foreclosures by helping owners refinance their loans. Similarly, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), created as part of the National Housing Act of 1934, was also designed to decrease home foreclosures caused by the Depression. Working within the existing racist mindset, however, the FHA supported segregationist policies already dividing many cities. They refused to provide funding to developers unless they committed to exclude African Americans from specific communities. Not only did they manipulate developers, but the FHA 

[R]efused to insure mortgages for black families in neighborhoods—a policy that came to be known as ‘redlining,’ because neighborhoods were colored red on government maps to indicate that these neighborhoods should be considered poor credit risks as a consequence of African Americans living in (or near) them. (Rothstein, 2015, p. 207)

African Americans suffered disproportionately under the Great Depression. The programs created to ameliorate some of the effects of the economic crash benefited poor White people and hurt poor Black people. Housing remained one of the key mechanisms for enforcing the racial divide in America and the very programs created to help poor Americans move up, became the means of keeping Black Americans segregated and restricted.

The Black Cabinet

President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Black Cabinet" taken in March 1938. [Black-and-white photo print.]

President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Black Cabinet" taken in March 1938. Front row, left to right: Dr. Ambrose Caliver, Dr. Roscoe C. Brown, Dr. Robert C. Weaver, Joseph H. Evans, Dr. Frank Horne, Mary McLeod Bethune, Lt. Lawrence A. Oxley, Dr. William J. Thompkins, Charles E. Hall, William I. Houston, Ralph E. Mizelle. Back row, left to right: Dewey R. Jones, Edgar Brown, J. Parker Prescott, Edward H. Lawson, Jr., Arthur Weiseger, Alfred Edgar Smith, Henry A. Hunt, John W. Whitten, Joseph R. Houchins. (Sources: information provided by Cynthia Hunt-Easley and Wanda Hunt-McLean; Langston Hughes, Milton Meltzer and C. Eric Lincoln, A Pictorial History of Black Americans, New York, Crown Publishers, Inc., 1973.)

Image Source: Smithsonian Online Virtual Archives

Mary McLeod Bethune photo

Mary McCloud Bethune

Image Source: Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID van.5a51728.

Mary McCloud Bethune served on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election campaign and when he won shifted to become Director of Negro Affairs in the National Youth Administration. While serving in the Roosevelt administration, she became the de facto organizer of a group of African American leaders in government who became known as the “Black Cabinet.” They sought to work together to influence Roosevelt’s policies to benefit African Americans across the United States.

At the time, African Americans represented roughly 10 percent of the population and so as Roosevelt’s administration laid out plans for The New Deal programs, members of the Black Cabinet advocated to ensure that African Americans would receive 10 percent of the disbursed aid. Their success in achieving their aims was mixed as Roosevelt worked to appease his Southern supporters.

Your Turn

How did restrictions to housing access especially hurt African Americans during the Great Depression? In what ways did African Americans gain more political power during the Great Depression?

    • Read Jill Watts, The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt (Grove Atlantic, 2021).

    • Read Eddie Stimpson, Jr.’s My Remembers: A Black Sharecropper's Recollections of the Depression. UNT Press, 1996.

    • Read Clarence Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936-75 (University of Michigan Press, 2009).

    • Read Livia Gershon, “How St. Louis Domestic Workers Fought Exploitation,” in JSTOR Daily.

    • Kelley, R. D. G. (2015). Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression. The University of North Carolina Press.

    • Lang, C. (2009). Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936-75. University of Michigan Press.

    • ——- and Kersten, A. (2015). Reframing Randolph: Labor, Black Freedom, and the Legacies of A. Philip Randolph. NYU Press.

    • Dunbar, E. and Hardison, A. (2022). African American Literature in Transition, 1930–1940. Cambridge University Press.

    • Woodward. C. G. (1933). The Mis-Education of the Negro.

Stephanie Brizee
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1929: The Great Depression
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1935: Redlining