The New Deal: Millions of new opportunities and benefits for African Americans

"If [the WPA theatre program] had been less alive it might have lived longer. But I do not believe anyone who worked on it regrets that it stood from first to last against reaction, against prejudice, against racial, religious, and political intolerance."

--Hallie Flanagan, director of the WPA's Federal Theatre Project, responding to the closing of her project, in 1939, by conservative congressmen who hated, among other things, its racial inclusiveness (Hallie Flanagan, Arena, 1940, p. 367).

Above: A new chemistry building for Howard University in Washington, D.C., built with funds from the New Deal's Public Works Administration (PWA). At the dedication for this building, October 26, 1936, President Franklin Roosevelt said, "Despite the constant raising of the scholastic standards of the University, as the years went by, the demand for higher training and higher education among our Negro citizens has increased to an extent which has created a strain upon its facilities. And so the Federal Government has provided three new structures for it at this time, and there are more to come... As far as it was humanly possible, the Government has followed the policy that among American citizens there should be no forgotten men and no forgotten races." Photo courtesy of the National Archives.

Above: African American actors rehearse their scenes on a WPA theatre project in Birmingham, Alabama, 1936. The New Deal offered millions of new opportunities and benefits for African Americans: Jobs, job training, adult education, recreation projects, art projects, health clinics, new libraries, new schools, and much more. The February 1939 edition of the African American journal, Opportunity, noted: "It is to the eternal credit of the administrative officers of the WPA that discrimination on various projects because of race has been kept to a minimum and that in almost every community Negroes have been given a chance to participate in the work program." Photo courtesy of the National Archives.

The New Deal was not perfect in its racial inclusion; FDR was constrained by existing prejudices & customs in America, and also the need for southern political support. How far he could have pushed for more racial inclusion will be a topic debated for eternity. However, it is indisputable that the New Deal opened up millions of new opportunities and benefits for the African American community. Roosevelt surrounded himself, in one way or another, with people committed to social justice and racial inclusion - Harry Hopkins, Harold Ickes, Ellen Woodward, Aubrey Williams, Hallie Flanagan, and Helen Tamiris, to name just a few. 

The Roosevelt Administration also opened up new opportunities for African Americans in the federal government. For example, when education advocate Mary McLeod Bethune told Roosevelt how important the National Youth Administration (NYA, a subdivision of the WPA) was to young African American men & women, "The president was openly moved by her speech, and, grasping her hand in both of his, assured her that he would do his best" (Nancy Ann Zrinyi Long, The Life and Legacy of Mary McLeod Bethune, Cocoa, FL: Florida Historical Society Press, 2004, pp. 36-37). Shortly thereafter, Bethune was in charge of a new Office of Minority Affairs within the NYA.

And of course, FDR was married to a woman who was constantly prodding him to do the right thing. After Eleanor Roosevelt died, Martin Luther King, Jr. said: "The impact of her personality and its unwavering devotion to high principle and purpose cannot be contained in a single day or era."