nion started in Arkansas and spread to other states. Store boycotts in northern cities sprung up as part of the “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” program. In Cleveland the Future Outlook League was formed, seeking to establish a fully economically self-sufficient black community within the larger city. In Harlem the Citizen’s League for Fair Play promoted greater employment opportunity for blacks. All of these movements led to opening up some employment opportunities and encouraged a number of new black businesses.
On a national level, black Americans, who composed only 10 percent of the population and had traditionally been economically downtrodden and politically voiceless, had a major mountain to climb for relief.
You kiss the niggers,
I’ll kiss the Jews,
We’ll stay in the White House
As long as we choose.
This poem (from McElvaine’s The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941, 1993) was a popular fictional characterization of President Roosevelt speaking to Eleanor. It was a criticism of Eleanor’s promotion of black equality. This prose represents well the racism that pervaded American society in the early 1930s. Not only did Eleanor become the target of such hate for promoting black issues nationally, but President Roosevelt did as well for reaching out to various ethnic and religious groups in building his new democratic coalition. Despite Roosevelt’s stance, however, racism was also a part of the Democratic Party. Senator Ellison D. “Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina walked out of the 1936 Democratic National Convention when he learned that a black minister was to give the invocation to the convention.
Despite such public views, the Roosevelts were successful in bringing diverse groups together politically for the first time in American history. President Roosevelt won by a landslide in the 1936 presidential election. Seventy-five percent of black voters voted for Franklin Roosevelt.
Though successful in the November 1936 elections, Roosevelt’s inclusion of black Americans into his new democratic coalition was more than many party traditionalists could stand. Though popular with the public, he lost the support of the southern Democrats in Congress for his programs. Just as he had feared in 1933 when he dodged civil rights issues for fear of losing key support for his economic recovery programs, his initiatives steadily lost the support of the more conservative congressmen through 1937 and 1938 with his inclusion of black Americans. As a result the New Deal era drew to a close.
Racism was not unique to the United States in the 1930s. Preaching racial and religious hatred, Adolf Hitler gained political power in Germany in the late 1920s and became the leader of Germany in 1933. Hitler claimed the Germans formed a “master race” that would rule the world. He considered blacks an inferior race. As a result, the Nazi Party in Germany most vigorously promoted the rise of racism in Europe through the 1930s. Black Americans were among the first Americans to condemn Hitler and Nazism. The Summer Olympics were held in the German capital of Berlin in 1936. When black American track star Jesse Owens won four gold medals, Hitler walked out of the stadium.
Black Americans were outraged when Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, one of the few independent black nations in the world at the time. Black Americans raised funds for medical supplies for Ethiopia and some even traveled to Ethiopia to help defend it.
U.S. Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi once noted that race consciousness was growing in various countries around the world. He called racial values “the only hope for future civilization” and commended the Germans for the importance they placed on it. Bilbo so strongly supported racial values that, in 1938, he sought a $1 billion congressional appropriation to deport all black Americans to Africa. Such were the hurdles black Americans faced in their quest for economic relief and racial equality.
The historic civil rights movement of the 1950s resulted in major legal gains in the 1960s. It clearly owed part of its success to the 