The New Deal is arguably the single most transformative moment in American history. The Great Depression came hard and it impacted everyone in the United States to almost an unthinkable level. The depression was widespread and it affected the lives of everyone but it particularly hurt workers and even more so farmers. African Americans were in large part before the Depression living in the South mostly as very small farmers or even worse as debt riddled sharecroppers. These people who were already struggling to make a living and existed in the worst possible conditions under Jim Crow and the ever present specter of racism needed some sort of change to help them and the Federal government in the guise of the New Deal is what finally moved them away from abject poverty (Foner)
In large sections of American society the New Deal was seen not as a positive that helped the country dig out of the worst economic crisis it had ever faced but instead as a negative because of the undue expansion of federal power. This view was particularly prevalent in the South where their sectional interests and history influenced by the Civil War and Reconstruction bred a natural distrust of an interventionist and powerful government. Although the South was the most underdeveloped and hardest stricken region by the Depression, southerners wanted nothing to do with. This context is important in explaining why the New Deal gave African Americans such a negative stigma. (Foner)
Furthermore, the history of African Americans in the south especially during Reconstruction is one littered with a legacy of federal expansion and assistance. The establishment of the Freedmen’s Bureau in the waning days of the Civil War was one of the first ever cases of federal assistance for particular group due mostly to their status as a minority. Former slaves might have been freed from their owners but many white Southerners felt that the federal government was now the group most responsible for the maintenance of African American rights in the deep South.
The New Deal created a welfare state in the United States a true innovation but as most American institutions these measures were indelibly hurt by racism and sectionalism. Although it was a great expansion of federal power it could not stand up to the local issues prevalent in the South especially segregation in housing as well as discrimination in the workforce. The memory of Reconstruction was just one factor for why there was a stigma against African Americans and their involvement in the welfare state. (Foner)
The issue at hand is the fact that many African Americans directly benefitted in one or another for federal assistance during the New Deal but since many of them were so poor they contributed nothing to the system. This created a view among many whites especially in the South that African Americans were lazy and “dependent” on welfare to survive. This speaks to yet another creation by Southern racists that worked to further marginalize poor African Americans and especially black women. (Foner)
The New Deal was a birth of a new fairer America where people’s economic rights could be assured but it was no match to the institutionalized racism in the South which created the myth of the welfare dependent black family
Works Cited
Foner, Eric. Give Me Liberty! An American History: Seagull Fourth Edition. WW Norton & Company, 2013.
