page_title: African-American history
section_title: New Deal
hierarchical_section_title: African-American history / New Deal
caption_attribution_description: English: Robert McDaniels lynched. Apr. 1937
context_page_description: African-American history is the part of American history that looks at the history of African Americans or Black Americans.
  Of the 10.7 million Africans who were brought to the Americas by white Europeans until the 1880s, 450 thousand were shipped to what is now the United States.
context_section_description: The Great Depression hit black America hard. In 1930, it was reported that 4 out of 5 blacks lived in the South, the average life expectancy for blacks was 15 years less than whites, and the black infant mortality rate at 12% was double that of whites. In Chicago, blacks made up 4% of the population and 16% of the unemployed while in Pittsburgh blacks were 8% of the population and 40% of the unemployed. In January 1934, the journalist Lorena Hickok reported from rural Georgia that she had seen "half-starved Whites and Blacks struggle in competition for less to eat than my dog gets at home, for the privilege of living in huts that are infinitely less comfortable than his kennel". She also described most Southern blacks who made worked as sharecroppers as living under a system very close to slavery. A visiting British journalist wrote she "had traveled over most of Europe and part of Africa, but I have never seen such terrible sights as I saw yesterday among the sharecroppers of Arkansas".
  The New Deal did not have a specific program for blacks only, but it sought to incorporate them in all the relief programs that it began. The most important relief agencies were the CCC for young men (who worked in segregated units), the FERA relief programs in 1933–35 (run by local towns and cities), and especially the WPA, which employed 2,000,000 or more workers nationwide under federal control, 1935–42. All races had had the same wage rates and working conditions in the WPA.
  A rival federal agency was the Public Works Administration (PWA), headed by long-time civil rights activist Harold Ickes. It set quotas for private firms hiring skilled and unskilled blacks in construction projects financed through the PWA, overcoming the objections of labor unions. In this way, the New Deal ensured that blacks were 13% of the unskilled PWA jobs in Chicago, 60% in Philadelphia and 71% in Jacksonville, Florida; their share of the skilled jobs was 4%, 6%, and 17%, respectively. In the Department of Agriculture, there was a lengthy bureaucratic struggle in 1933-35 between one faction which favored rising prices for farmers vs. another faction which favored reforms to assist sharecroppers, especially black ones.  When one Agriculture Department official, Alger Hiss, in early 1935 wrote up a directive to ensure that Southern landlords were paying sharecroppers for their labor (which most of them did not), Senator Ellison D. Smith stormed into his office and shouted: "Young fella, you can't do this to my niggers, paying checks to them". The Agriculture Secretary, Henry A. Wallace, sided with Smith and agreed to cancel the directive. As it turned out, the most effective way for black sharecroppers to escape a life of poverty in the South was to move to the North or California.
  An immediate response was a shift in the black vote in Northern cities from the GOP to the Democrats (blacks seldom voted in the South.) In Southern states where few blacks voted, Black leaders seized the opportunity to work inside the new federal agencies as social workers and administrators, with an eye to preparing a new generation who would become leaders of grass-roots constituencies that could be mobilized at some future date for civil rights. President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed the first federal black judge, William H. Hastie, and created an unofficial "black cabinet" led by Mary McLeod Bethune to advise him. Roosevelt ordered that federal agencies such as the CCC, WPA and PWA were not to discriminate against black Americans. The president's wife, Eleanor Roosevelt (who was a close friend of Bethune's), was notably sympathetic towards Afro-Americans and constantly in private urged her husband to do more to try help black Americans. The fact that the Civil Works Administration paid the same wages to black workers as white workers sparked much resentment in the South and as early as 1933 conservative Southern politicians who claiming that federal relief payments was causing blacks to move to the cities to become a "permanent welfare class". Studies showed that blacks we
caption: Robert McDaniels lynched. Apr. 13, 1937
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