by black people during the first two years of the Roosevelt administration were listed. It was apparent even then, that the Roosevelt New Deal was not a fair deal for the black community: “Perhaps the best indication of the effect that the New Deal had on the Negro was the increase of blacks on relief from two million in 1933 to three and one half million by January, 1935.”20 From 1929 to 1935, the nation had been engulfed in an extraordinary economic crisis. Blacks had been exploited and excluded in every possible way by white New Dealers and the federal government. One can conclude that many blacks felt that racism and exploitation had been heightened by New Deal programs. The NRA and the AAA, essentially the heart of the New Deal, failed to deal with the “special problems” confronting blacks during the depression, and their “ultimate impact was detrimental to black economic and social progress.”21 Blacks found themselves cemented in a futile position of segregated inferiority in all aspects of American society. Between Roosevelt’s reluctance to strive for racial inequality, and the disproportionate funding of wealth to the tenant farmers, the New Deal was a broken promise to the whole of the African-American population. Historian John Byron Kirby summarized the New Deal and the dilemma faced by African-Americans when he wrote: Racial ambivalence, based on the white man’s own racial conflicts, lay at the heart of the New Deal’s relationship to Black America and that ambivalence was clearly expressed in the mixed impact of its reform policies and the frustrations experienced by Blacks who tried to unravel its true meaning.22BibliographyPrimary SourcesAlfred, Helen. “The New Deal and Housing,” Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life, Volume 12, p.23-25, January 1934.This article, from a popular African-American Journal, outlines the troubles that many rural blacks had aff...
