Blacks and the Great Depression the Great

Blacks and the Great Depression

The Great Depression, which had significant impacts across America, had a lesser impact on Black America. The greater is the loss, the greater the impact. Vice versa, the lesser is the loss, the lesser the impact. Historically, Black Americans had relatively less to lose in a Great Depression. Consequently, Blacks, already disenfranchised from American society, were less affected in the Great Depression than White Americans.

Understanding the Great Depression means, in part, that its effects on Americans cannot be painted with one brush stroke because the Great Depression had different effects on different groups of people. Certainly, the Great Depression had devastating effects on many Americans. As excerpts from two of the more than fifteen million letters written directly to President and Mrs. Roosevelt show, some Americans desperately needed coats[footnoteRef:1], rent, transportation, food and utilities[footnoteRef:2] but were unable to obtain financial relief from government programs.[footnoteRef:3] Nevertheless, the disadvantages of America's Great Depression affected Blacks differently than it affected Whites. [1: Robert S. McElvaine, "Letters to the Roosevelts During the Depression." In America: A Narrative History, 8th Edition, by George Brown Tindall and David E. Shi, 221-222. New York, NY W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2009, 221.] [2: Ibid., 222.] [3: Ibid., 221.]

Prior to the Great Depression, Blacks were already disadvantaged in terms of employment and income. As a retired Black worker named Clifford Burke put it, "The Negro was born in depression"[footnoteRef:4] because most Blacks already lived in poverty before the Great Depression. Living in a constant financial depression, Blacks knew how to survive on cheaper housing and cheaper food than the housing and food of Whites.[footnoteRef:5] Also, even if Blacks were able to get jobs before the Great Depression, they were very limited in the jobs they could hold and the amount of pay they would receive[footnoteRef:6], while Whites had a greater variety of jobs with at least the potential for higher pay. For example, in pre-Depression New York City, "primarily race determined employment level"[footnoteRef:7] and due to discrimination by employers and unions, blacks had low earnings and few opportunities for advancement.[footnoteRef:8] In addition, southern public schools were so poor that many blacks lacked basic skills needed for jobs and, due to continuing discrimination, even educated Blacks had little or no employment advantages over uneducated Blacks.[footnoteRef:9] Consequently, between working Whites and working Blacks, the Blacks had a shorter distance to fall into poverty.[footnoteRef:10] Finally, Blacks were already used to improvising in order to make ends meet before the Great Depression: as Clifford Burke stated, he had a "little hustle" in which he would play pool for money and bring home extra money because of it.[footnoteRef:11] As a result, when the Great Depression came, most Blacks were already in a financial depression and already knew how to supplement their incomes, so the financial blow of the Depression was not as great for the Blacks as it was for the Whites. Being used to financial depression even in the best of circumstances, Blacks like Clifford Burke did not apply to the Public Works Administration or the Works Progress Administration for work during the Great Depression.[footnoteRef:12] [4: Studs Turkel, "Two Views of the Great Depression (1932)." In America: A Narrative History, 8th Edition, by George Brown Tindall and David E. Shi, 214-216. New York, NY W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2009, 214.] [5: Ibid., 215.] [6: Ibid., 214.] [7: Cheryl Lynn Greenberg. "Or Does it Explode?": Black Harlem in the Great Depression. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, Inc., 1991, 18.] [8: Ibid., 19.] [9: Ibid.] [10: Turkel, 215.] [11: Ibid.] [12: Ibid.]

The Public Works Administration and Works Progress Administration were considered valuable aspects of America's recovery from the Great Depression, at least for White America. Trying to do what private industry could not do, the Roosevelt Administration and Congress established the New Deal, which included the Works Progress Administration and The Public Works Administration.[footnoteRef:13] The Works Progress Administration spent billions of dollars hiring private individuals to work on smaller projects while the Public Works Administration also spent billions of dollars employing private individuals to build swimming pools, schools and town halls in nearly every county across America.[footnoteRef:14] Combined, the Works Progress Administration and the Public Works Administration created literally millions of jobs.[footnoteRef:15] However, at least according to Clifford Burke, Blacks tended to stay away from those projects and continue to eke out a living in other ways.[footnoteRef:16] [13: Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2008, 391-2.] [14: Ibid.] [15: Shlaes, 392.] [16: Turkel, 215.]

The Black experience of poverty during the Great Depression also differed from the experience of lower-class-to-poor Whites. Though poor Blacks and poor Whites learned to make do with meager housing, clothing and food, poor Whites were likelier to use government-funded work programs. According to Jane Yoder, one of seven children of an immigrant blacksmith who was thrown out of work in 1929 and had to travel to work[footnoteRef:17], the Works Progress Administration was a "godsend" that allowed her family to survive.[footnoteRef:18] Yoder, who eventually became a nurse, also spoke of the disdain that some financially secure Whites had about people who seized the opportunities offered by the Works Progress Administration. Yoder would listen to these "upper class" people insult WPA workers by calling them "lazy people" and "shovel leaners"[footnoteRef:19] and think, "[Y]ou don't know what it's like."[footnoteRef:20] Yoder would then try to make these "upper class" people understand by using the abstraction of people in the hospital who do not choose to be sick[footnoteRef:21]; just as patients did not choose to be sick, poor people who needed and used the WPA did not choose to be poor. Though poor Whites were also "disenfranchised" in some ways because of their poverty, they were not also disenfranchised because of the color of their skin: they were still White and Whites such as Mr. Yoder still took advantage of government-funded work projects such as the Works Progress Administration. [17: Ibid.] [18: Ibid.] [19: Ibid., 216.] [20: Ibid..] [21: Ibid.]