some employment assistance to blacks in large cities they ignored the majority, the chronically impoverished rural citizens. During the New Deal period, 56.5% of the black population was rural. Blacks usually worked as sharecroppers and tenants, receiving low wages in a constantly fluctuating market. Clark Foreman, Harold Ickes’ chief racial assistant at the Department of Interior, wrote in 1934, that it was necessary to enact a program sensitive to the plight of rural blacks. He commented the following:In 1930, the census showed 6,697,230 or 56.5 per cent of the Negro population to be rural. Of that 4,690,523 or 39.3 per cent of the entire Negro population were classified as rural-farm population. Of this number 1,987,839 or 46 percent of the total number of Negroes over 10 years of age were gainfully employed in agriculture; 181,016 Negroes owned and operated farms and 700,911 were tenants, 923 were managers and 1,112,510 were farm laborers of one sort or another. Any program that is intended to reach the masses of the Negro population will undoubtedly have to do something about the Negro farmer.12In light of an increasing cry for legislation to aid the rural blacks, Roosevelt created the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (May 10, 1933). Ironically, in many respects, the AAA actually “enforced” poverty and reinforced racism on the black farm population. It facilitated violations of the rights of the tenants under crop reduction and rendered enforcement of these rights impossible. Faced with the Dred Scott decision against farm tenants, the AAA remained discreetly silent. In the Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court rendered blacks powerless from suing anyone because they were not considered to be U.S. citizens. Therefore, African-Americans could not dispute their eviction from employment based on discrimination by white officials. For tenants and sharecroppers who were retained on the plantations, t...
