became more restrictive. Workers could not remain on projects longer than eighteen months. This was especially difficult for black workers because the private labor market did not absorb them as quickly as it had absorbed whites. There were many instances of inequalities in the WPA. Historian Anthony Badger commented on some of these inequalities:But the elimination of discrimination by directive from Washington was not easy. Payments to blacks in the South never revealed the gross inequities that occurred under the WPA. Blacks in eight of thirteen southern states constituted a greater share of the WPA rolls than their proportion of the population. But blacks were discriminated against in job allocations: by May 1940 only 11 of the 10,344 WPA supervisors in the South were black.17 The rejection of blacks from joining labor unions was also found to be discriminatory and was summarized in the Journal of Negro Education in 1936:Labor Unions refusal to admit Negroes in St. Louis building trades unions have kept Negroes out of practicality all skilled processes on jobs being erected from public funds in that city. An amazing situation arose where Negro workers obliged to picket a hospital building being erected for colored patients in the middle of the Negro district because the contractors refused to employ Negro skilled workers.18 Not permitting blacks to work on an all-black hospital construction project in a black district demonstrated the blatant racism that was prominent in so many New Deal programs.Although the Public Works Administration was one of the most important and helpful organizations of the New Deal, it was not without discrimination. The PWA was created under the watchful eye of Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes, the administration’s leading advocate of equal wages for whites and blacks. The purpose of the program was to provide jobs for the unemployed and to donate money to important organizatio...
