rto Rican youth suspected of stealing a knife from a store. Although in actuality the youth was released unharmed, violence erupted. Store windows were smashed and stores looted through the night. Three people were killed and one hundred injured. Considerable property damage resulted to about 250 shops. The incident alerted President Roosevelt to the increasing explosive nature of race relations in the North as well as the South.
The New Deal Reaches Out
By early 1935 President Roosevelt began to take more direct action in black issues. In May 1935 he issued Executive Order 7046 prohibiting discrimination in the newly created Works Progress Administration (WPA). Within a few short years after President Roosevelt’s order between 15 and 20 percent of WPA workers, or about 230,000, were black. Their inclusion enabled many blacks to economically survive the Depression. Reflecting the low economic status of black Americans, the minimum wage of WPA—set at $12 a week—was twice the amount many had previously earned. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) proved less responsive, largely due to its greater reliance on local implementation. Only about 250,000 black American men (7 percent) served in the CCC through the decade. Some areas would not select blacks for CCC work positions at all. In Georgia where 36 percent of the population was black, less than 2 percent of the CCC enrollment was black.
Sensitive to the criticism that his farm policies were harmful to the small farmer, Roosevelt created the Resettlement Administration (RA) in 1935. Roosevelt named Will Alexander, who had focused on black poverty issues throughout his career, to lead the agency. For the rural poor, the agency sought to end sharecropping, tenant farming, and migratory labor, and to promote land ownership. One of the RA’s initial goals was to resettle 500,000 farm families onto their own productive lands. The program attracted considerable opposition from existing white landowners who relied on such cheap labor. As a result the agency fell short with only 4,441 families eventually relocated. The RA also sought to relocate the poor from urban slums into planned towns in the suburbs. This program met the strong resistance of real estate developers. Though the initial goal was the creation of 25 towns, only three were actually constructed and settled.
The New Democratic Coalition
The humanitarian interests of Eleanor Roosevelt and others, in addition to Franklin Roosevelt’s increasing recognition of the growing importance of the black vote in national politics, led President Roosevelt to include blacks in the new Democratic coalition he was building. American attitudes toward race were changing, and blacks were becoming more politically organized. Even before Roosevelt began to take steps for inclusion, the black vote had begun swinging away from Republican candidates for the first time in the 75-odd years since the Civil War (1861-1865). In the 1934 midterm elections, Arthur Mitchell became the first black Democrat to win a seat in Congress, upsetting a black Republican incumbent in Chicago.
The 1936 presidential election marked a historic turnaround in party allegiance by black voters. Whereas Hoover won 66 percent of the black vote in 1932, Roosevelt won 76 percent of the black vote only four years later. Many blacks voted for the first time, encouraged by Roosevelt’s actions. Just as President Roosevelt had earlier anticipated, however, in reaction to his increasing support of civil rights issues, the southern Democrat support of New Deal programs waned. Many feared that not only was Roosevelt introducing socialism to America but racial equality as well. Some charged Roosevelt with instituting a second Reconstruction period. The first Reconstruction was when the Federal government had tried to force social and economic change on the South following the Civil War. Actually the “second Reconstruction” would not happen until the 1960s, three decades later. But President Roosevelt was beginning to lay the foundation for increased activism.
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