le undertakings during the New Deal. At that time, the decline of black agricultural employment was a quarter of a million. Roosevelt realized that it was necessary to provide the rural American the same basic privileges that Americans enjoyed in the cities, such as electricity and plumbing. He decided to create major employment opportunities with this program to construct dams in the Tennessee Valley, an area that stretched from Ohio through Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama alongside the Tennessee River. Recognized by some historians as the most significant program of the New Deal, the purpose of the TVA was to “provide for the agricultural and industrial development of the Tennessee Valley, and to foster an orderly and physical, economic and social development of such areas.”14 The TVA employed more than 2,000 people in the region and is credited with providing relief to many out-of-work rural citizens. Some of the TVA jobs included the construction of dams to provide fresh water to the rural workers and to provide residents with electricity for their homes. When construction began on the Norris Dam, an integral part of the project, officials rejected African-American applicants for work, telling them that they could not work on it because the entire project was for the advantage of the white man. Moreover, in a number of other TVA dam projects built in densely populated black areas, the workforce was always predominantly white. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored Person’s Walter White pointed out the pervasive racial discrimination by TVA administers when he wrote a letter on March 14, 1938 to Senator George Norris, considered the father of the TVA. “But what my dear Senator Norris, is the worth to a man of an electrically lighted home if he can be taken from that home as easily as from a cabin lighted by candles and burned to death by a howling mob?”15 Blacks were understandabl...
