Sign Up Now
Get instant access to over 1 million+ study documents
OR
Already registered? click here to login
By creating your account, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and student honor code.
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...
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…
Bibliography
Greenberg, Cheryl Lynn. "Or Does it Explode?": Black Harlem in the Great Depression. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, Inc., 1991.
McElvaine, Robert S. "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.
Shlaes, Amity. The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2008.
Turkel, Studs. "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.
There was little support for an Equal Rights Amendment, largely due to the belief that there were other problems to solve first, but the mindset of women was well set for what would be their need in the workforce during World War II. However, while large numbers of women worked during the Depression, scholars often see their status slightly decreasing because the American Federation of Labor, for one, did
Great War The United States after the Great War World War I, also known as the Great War, officially came to an end in 1918 and reshaped the country in a variety of ways. One of the most immediate changes was the way the world perceived the United States. Before the war, most of the country and its leaders preferred an isolationist stance to any international conflict. In 1914 the U.S. had
Black Experience in American Culture This is a paper that analyzes the black experience in American culture as presented by Hughes, Baldwin, Wright and Ellison. It has 20 sources in MLA format. African-American authors have influenced American culture as they have come forward to present issues that the society would rather have forgotten. Authors such as Richard Wright Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes and James Baldwin have come under fire as they have
Weak governmental intervention and stubborn responses by overzealous investors led to the stock market crash in October of 1929. Non-existent money artificially inflated the prices of stocks traded on the market and caused firms to produce more than they could sell. When reality hit, it was too late to prevent the market from crashing. President Hoover reacted by stimulating construction and public works projects. Urging firms to keep wages steady
Depression The Great Depression Pre-Depression Economy Summary • Write a journal entry describing a weakness in your chosen character's sector of the economy that would later contribute to the Great Depression. • Write a summary of the weaknesses in the American economy that contributed to the Great Depression. The Great Depression was one events of the twentieth century that defined the entire century. It was the longest lasting and most widespread financial crisis in the
The very crux of the argument comes to the central point of censorship -- who must be protected and why must they be protected? Ideas, political, social, or otherwise, may be the most dangerous form of literature ever. For instance, in 19th century autocratic regimes, the ideas of Karl Marx, even Voltaire, Locke, and Jefferson were seen to be subversive because they challenged the order of things, the idea