¶ … Chicago writing Format a) Discuss Black Americans survived To a large degree, African-Americans were able to survive the Great Depression the way most Americans were able to do so -- by utilizing what forms of federal relief that they could and by sharing what they had and helping one another as much as possible. African-Americans were able to take advantage of some of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal programs that were able to create situations of temporary, tenuous forms of revenue such as the Federal Writer's Project. The Federal Writer's Project was able to create job opportunities for novice and experienced writers, many of whom interviewed people during the Great Depression about several facets of their lives. African-American writers involved in this particular program who were able to go on to literary prominence on a nationwide scale afterwards include Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Margaret Walker, and several others. Another federal program that was able to aid African-Americans was known as the Federal Art Project, which was targeted towards employing those involved in the visual arts. African-Americans who were able to take advantage of the pecuniary opportunities afforded by this initiative include Charles White and William Henry Johnson.

In rural areas, sharecropping continued and was exacerbated, of course, when Caucasian landowners would lose their farms. Still, African-Americans were able to augment their incomes via subsistence farming, while in urban areas, African-Americans were able to find unpopular...

African-American entertainers, such as Duke Ellington, were as popular as ever and continued to tour, while a number of African-Americans gained academic degrees and influenced areas of science and scholarship.
Religion tended to have a polarizing effect upon African-Americans in both the northern and the southern regions of the country. The Nation of Islam, for instance, was able to galvanize many African-Americans, particularly in the northern communities that were more centered near the East Coast, with its popular rhetoric of vilifying Caucasians and unabashedly supporting the divine nature of African-Americans (and that of African-American males, in particular). However, it was this same ideology that also alienated many African-Americans, particularly those who perceived Nation of Islam supporters as causing disturbances with contemporary laws as well as with the ubiquitous imagery and significance of Christianity, which has always been widely believed by African-Americans, particularly those in the southern regions of the country. Father Divine had a similar influence on the African-American population -- there were some who supported him because of his religious views and his avocation of civil rights, while others reviled him for his (at one time) frequent arrests, blatant sensationalism, and radical proclamations of the being God incarnate.

In the northern section of the country, there was a point in time during…