t illustrates this point:Black objections to the NRA policies, however, were fundamental. In respect to the industrial codes, they pointed out that in the case of Blacks, the codes were frequently evaded through devices such as occupational and geographic job classifications, wage loop holes or simply lack of NRA enforcement. Yet when the minimal wage and hour standards were adequately enforced, they often had equally harmful effects on Black laborers. This was a result of the inability to compete in compliance with NRA wage levels.8 White state officials violated labor codes by ensuring that unemployed whites received the best jobs. The pattern of whites receiving the better jobs was pervasive for a number of reasons. First, particularly in the South, officials who were charged with enforcing NRA regulations were typically white and racist. It was apparent that white males in the South still held racist ideology from the Civil War, seventy years prior to the New Deal. Indeed, the bigotry of whites was quite apparent to African-Americans in the 1930’s. Award-winning author T.H. Watkins accurately remarked about the bias against blacks when he wrote:Given the equal opportunity nature of bigotry, there was some logic in the fact that the anti-Semitism of the era often was linked to racism that had permeated in American society for three centuries and was still alive in the thirties. A popular doggerel of the day ran, ‘You kiss the Niggers, I’ll kiss the Jews, we’ll stay in he White House as long as we choose.’9Many blacks had concluded by then that their only friends were members of their own race, and the Federal Government. Most blacks viewed themselves as, “the real sick man of America” and thus in “need of every liberal program,” designed for the “benefit of the masses.” After all, they concluded, “Government of, for, and by the people,” and the &#...
