 that the lower standard of living of blacks meant they could live on less.
Similarly, Congress passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act in May of 1933 to provide economic relief to the nation’s farmers. The act created the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) to pay farmers to not grow crops on parts of their farms. The goal was to decrease the production of crops so that market prices and the farmers’ incomes would eventually go up. But this program essentially reduced the incomes of black farmers. For those blacks that owned land, routinely they held less land than white landowners. With less acreage available to qualify for payments, they received smaller government payments. Removing land from production was too great a hardship for many. Since they left no land unplanted, they received no government payments. The agricultural program meant that many black farmers could no longer afford to keep their own land.
Most black Americans did not own the land they farmed. This made them even more vulnerable to the AAA’s crop production control measures. So they could qualify for the AAA benefit checks, often the white landowner would pull the acreage they had leased to tenants. They would frequently keep the benefits for themselves and not share it with the tenant farmers as required by the act. The number of sharecroppers declined from over 390,000 in 1930 to less than 300,000 in just a few years.
Black farmers had little means to correct the problems. To gain farmer support for the early New Deal programs, the programs relied on local administration. This effort to encourage grassroots support meant those traditionally in power—the white landowners and business leaders—would control how federal benefits were distributed. County committees set up to run the AAA programs banned black participation. As a result the AAA continued the poor condition of rural black Americans in the nation. In 1934 the average income of black cotton farmers was less than $200 a year.
The popular Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) program, also created in 1933, initially offered hope to blacks in parts of the Southeast. But the program essentially barred blacks from skilled and management jobs. Blacks were even barred from the new federal model town of Norris, Tennessee. Norris, named after Senator George W. Norris of Nebraska who sponsored the TVA act, was built by TVA to house construction workers who were building the Norris Dam, the first major dam built by TVA. Given the local oversight of hiring workers and managing the projects, black Americans were excluded both from higher paying construction jobs and residence in the company town. As a result, blacks in the area continued to live in shacks with no electrical wiring. Consequently, the black tenant farmers in the region received little benefit from the cheap electricity generated by the new TVA hydroelectric dams.
Why Not Promote Civil Rights?
Despite the activism of the New Deal President Roosevelt consistently rejected appeals by the black community to correct some of the social injustices imbedded in American society. White supremacy still ruled American politics, and President Roosevelt rightly figured that anyone who promoted civil rights issues would quickly lose political support to accomplish much of anything.
By 1937 and 1938, however, Roosevelt’s support on the New Deal was waning. Despite his choice not to actively seek to improve the situation for blacks, he lost support from the conservative element of the Democratic Party, partly over racial equality issues.
One person was particularly responsible for changing the attitude of the federal government toward helping black Americans. That person was First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Eleanor had long held strong sympathies for the less fortunate in society. But she was especially struck by the uproar caused in 1933 by her simply having lunch with a black woman in Florida. Intent on making a difference in public attitudes toward racism, she took up the black cause for social justice and economic betterment. Her outspokenness on ci