remains suspended in mid-air, bewildered, and innocuous… unemployment was greater at the end of the year 1934 than it was at the end of December 1933.5Later, student activists at Howard University, expressed their misgivings about the benefit of New Deal programs to African-Americans at the National Negro Congress:The Council has not begun to do its part in struggling for the rights of white and Negro workers when it hands out a few dollars to share-croppers facing machine guns, disposition, the burning of their homes, the closing of their schools, the beating and killing of their men, and slow-death form below-zero cold and hunger.6By early 1932, African-Americans began to organize themselves politically and took the initiative to form their own division of the National Democratic Committee. Presidential candidate Franklin Roosevelt promised immediate relief to the working man. Whether he intended to include African-Americans or not, it is not known for sure, but he gave the black American population hope and sufficient reason to support him. Author and historian Raymond Wolters explained why African-Americans supported Roosevelt when he wrote: “Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected on a platform that promised to help the forgotten man, and bring a New Deal to the American people.”7 Of the four major relief programs designed and enacted in first 100 days of FDR’s first term, the most comprehensive and well-known New Deal program was the National Recovery Administration. The NRA was a program of government / business cooperation. It intended to establish codes of fair competition between business and labor. These codes set guidelines for pricing and production and guaranteed labor the right of collective bargaining, minimum wages and maximum hours. Even though the NRA did loosen the burden of the poor white male, it did not appreciably relieve the plight of the African-American. Author Raymond Wolters bes...
