The New Deal Era 

When the Great Depression hit, everyone in America was suffering. President Franklin D. Roosevelt saw this suffering and passed the New Deal Program. At first the New Deal seemed promising to the black community because of the promises President Franklin D. Roosevelt made, but as the black community soon found out some of the promises were soon broken.

However during this time FDR’s administration addressed racism as a national problem, and many people of the black community felt a slight change in the war of equality.

Still, FDR’s stand on civil rights was mediocre at best. The New Deal was supposed to promote civil rights, but instead FDR’s administration had to make some “sacrifices” in order to gain the support of the white community. FDR constantly turned his face away from racial injustice to not upset the southern white community. This ultimately effected the black community in a bad way.

Sadly, most of the New Deal programs discriminated against blacks. The NRA offered whites jobs first, also created separate and lower scales for blacks. The FHA didn’t guarantee mortgages to blacks who wanted to buy a house in the suburbs. The AAA made some “adjustments” in sharecropping by forcing over 100,000 blacks of the land.

With the white southern white community making up most of the Democratic Party FDR has to choose his fights wisely. However he was the first President to publicly classify lynching as murder. FDR also opened up positions in his cabinet for blacks. There was such a mass number of blacks working in his cabinet that the became known as the “Black Cabinet”. FDR and his administration tripled the jobs of blacks working in the government, lawyers, librarians, and manager positions. This was huge for the black community but was still significantly small when you compare it to the jobs whites were able to obtain.

The New Deal didn’t end racism or stop racial inequality in tracks, as a  matter of fact there was no significant change in the fight for equality at all. That being said FDR’s “did their best” to make a change m, which means something because even the slightest of changes can help end this war on racial inequality.