History of the United States II / Unit 11 USH2 1552 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Excluded and Employed
The idea
Two statements about the New Deal and Black Americans are both true, and each misleads without the other. Social Security's pension programme excluded domestic workers and farmworkers, the job categories Black workers had traditionally filled, and the Yawp records that Roosevelt agreed to the exclusion under pressure from southern politicians. The same government's Works Progress Administration employed about three hundred fifty thousand African Americans a year, nearly fifteen percent of its workforce, the anchor records.
In practice
A Black family in the rural South with no pension, and Black workers on a WPA project in a northern city.
Where people slip
The Civilian Conservation Corps shows both at once: it set quotas and kept segregated camps, and yet it employed over three hundred thousand African Americans, its Black share rising from three percent to nearly eleven, the anchor records. Digital History calls the WPA colourblind. Either half alone misleads: the New Deal neither wholly excluded nor fairly included Black Americans.
Your place on the trail
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