interest during his 1932 presidential bid to not express any anti-discrimination feelings. Being a northern Democrat, Roosevelt was careful not to say anything that would upset southern party leaders and lose their support. Roosevelt’s campaign staff had no blacks. He even issued a public statement earlier in 1929 denying he had eaten lunch with blacks. Earlier yet he had quietly stood by as President Woodrow Wilson (served 1913-1921) instituted a racial segregation system in the Navy during World War I (1914-1918).
No Relief from the First New Deal
Despite the black vote overwhelmingly going to Hoover, Roosevelt readily won the presidency. Once in office President Roosevelt continued an effort to not disturb southern Democrats. Early New Deal programs did not address the plight of black America directly. Any efforts by him to improve race relations, Roosevelt believed, would significantly undercut support for his main economic recovery measures. Southern support in Congress would be lost. If the critical economic legislation did not pass, both white and black Americans would be hurt. Therefore, President Roosevelt resolutely refused to make civil rights and racial equality a priority for the New Deal.
With no New Deal legislation addressing racial discrimination, discriminatory practices were widespread in the new programs. For example, many of the National Recovery Administration’s (NRA) programs establishing standard wage rates did less to help blacks than whites. Many black jobs were still in the South where regional wage rates were established lower than other regions of the country. In fact the program did not even cover many black occupations such as farm labor and domestic helpers. Consequently, the NRA programs in effect perpetuated racial pay discrimination. Even in situations where blacks might receive equal pay as whites, it often meant unemployed whites would replace the blacks. Or, businesses simply ignored the NRA guidelines and paid the white workers more than blacks for the same jobs. They argued 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) pro