GREAT DEPRESSION, MOST VULNERABLE VICTIMS OF

Formerly middle-class urban and farm families suffered drastic economic changes in their lives as the Depression wore on. But the most severe effects were felt by people who were already poor. For them, this period was more than just a painful disruption in their comfortable lives — for many African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, American Indians, and elderly people, it was a grim struggle for survival. Many of these and other vulnerable victims became uprooted from their homes.

African-Americans

Black Americans felt the brunt of the Depression with particular intensity. Unemployment among African-Americans was much higher than among whites, nationwide about one and a half times greater. In Baltimore, one year after the stock market crash, for example, 32 percent of adult blacks had lost their jobs; in Pittsburgh, the figure was 38 percent. The unemployment rates in southern cities were even more appalling: 70 percent in Charleston, South Carolina, for example, and 75 percent in Memphis, Tennessee.

In the South, where three-quarters of the African-American population lived, the effects of the Depression were especially severe. Many blacks in the rural South had already experienced extreme poverty before this decade, and the widespread economic devastation only worsened their lot. Four out of five agricultural workers did not own their land but worked as sharecroppers, tenant farmers, or hired wage hands. This meant they had virtually no security and often lost their means of livelihood as the hard times continued.

The rate for picking cotton, for example, got as low as twenty cents for a hundred pounds; this meant that the average cotton picker earned sixty cents for a fourteen-hour day. Sharecroppers received cash advances of as little as ten dollars a month to support their families, which often included as many as eight or ten people, sometimes more.

An increasing number of African-American families were forced to live in substandard housing — dirt-floored shacks with no windows or screens and virtually no furniture. Many of these hovels had no running water or means of sewage disposal. Their diet was monotonous and inadequate — daily rations of hominy grits, salt pork, corn bread, and molasses. Fresh meat, milk, and fruit were possible only on special occasions.

In both southern and northern cities, the situation was almost as bad. The urban unemployment rate for blacks was 30 to 60 percent higher than that of whites. And blacks in the North, where three million lived, were almost as distressed economically as blacks in the South. The Works Progress Administration, a federal agency, estimated that the average family of four needed an income of not less than $973 a year to survive. In Chicago, more than 70 percent of the city’s African-American families earned less than that and a third earned less than $500.

Throughout the country, industries that traditionally employed large numbers of African-American workers, such as bituminous coal mining and building construction, fell into a slump. Many of the nonfarming jobs that were traditionally held by African-Americans evaporated as the economy shrunk. These jobs included cooks, maids, bellhops, chauffeurs, garbage collectors, elevator operators, and hospital attendants. In addition, desperate whites sometimes resorted to violence to take away jobs from blacks. On the Illinois Central Railroad, for example, ten blacks were attacked and killed by white firemen who wanted their jobs. While the white murderers landed in jail, other African-Americans were intimidated into quitting.

Where southern blacks were living in dilapidated shacks, blacks in northern cities were crammed into tiny apartments. One widespread "solution" to the housing crisis was the "kitchenette." Here, a six-room apartment was divided into six kitchenettes, each with a single bed, refrigerator, and gas hot plate. Each kitchenette was rented out to a family, and all of the families had to share a single bathroom. The landlords of these properties profited from this poverty: The subdivided apartments, which used to bring in $50 a month, now brought in $142 a month. A building that once housed sixty families now bulged with three hundred.

One consequence of all this was the breakdown of working-class and poor African-American families. As was true in middle-class and white families, the high rates of unemployment, low wages, and lack of a steady job undermined black men’s ability to function as breadwinners and family authority figures. In one neighborhood in Chicago, for example, half of all African-American families were without a husband or father, either because of desertion or from their premature death.

Although public relief programs helped many white families survive the depths of the Depression, African-Americans were not as fortunate. Despite the fact that throughout the Depression black unemployment rates remained higher than those for whites, only one out of four African-Americans — a total of about three million — received any public aid during the Depression. Even then, blacks often got less that white families in comparable situations. In Texas, for example, rural black families on relief received a quarter less aid than white families. While in Jacksonville, Florida, some African-Americans got twenty cents an hour in a work relief program. Whites received thirty.

It was not surprising, then, that Roosevelt became very popular with African-American voters. This was largely because the New Deal programs attempted to correct some of these inequalities by guaranteeing fair treatment for all. Before 1933, local relief agencies had the power — and often used it — to turn away African-American applicants. The New Deal programs attempted to prohibit this. As a result, by 1935, nearly 30 percent of all African-American families were receiving some sort of aid; in some cities that percentage rose to nearly 50 percent.

In addition, the Public Works Administration instituted the first nondiscrimination and quota clauses for hiring. While there was some discrimination in New Deal programs because Washington officials generally put administration of the programs into local hands, in general the programs helped African-Americans receive their rightful share of federal assistance. Despite persistent discrimination, blacks supported Roosevelt, switching their party allegiance from the Republicans specifically because of the relief they received.