Integrated CCC camps in the Phoenix District

The following photos are from the Official Annual 1936, Civilian Conservation Corps, Phoenix District, 8th Corps Area (Direct Advertising Co., Baton Rouge, Louisiana), and are used here for educational and non-commercial purposes.

Above: Part of CCC Company 835, at Camp F-19-A, Prescott, Arizona. These young men worked on the improvement of Prescott National Forest.

Above: Enrollees in CCC Company 822, at Camp F-33-A, Mayer, Arizona. Company 822 had work projects involving trail construction, bridge building, and soil erosion control.

Above: The undefeated baseball team of CCC Company 2870, Camp F-18-A, Prescott Arizona. Enrollees in Company 2870 engaged in the elimination of tree disease and had opportunities to learn auto mechanics, welding, mineralogy, and other vocations and skills.

Above: A band in CCC Company 1837, Camp SP-8-A, Kingman, Arizona. Company 1837 did much work at Hualapai Mountain Park (see, e.g., here and here).

Above: Another photo from Company 1837 (see previous photo). Note the older folks. They are probably war veterans who, while normally formed into their own CCC units, have been integrated into a camp of mostly younger enrollees. One can imagine the benefits of such an arrangement, such as the sharing of wisdom and experience.

CCC Integration: A complex history

The photos above highlight that the demographics of CCC camps were more complex than what many modern critics of the New Deal would have us believe (that the CCC was a hard-core discriminatory and segregationist program from start to finish). This is not to say that everything was racially fair and harmonious in the CCC--it existed in Jim Crow America, after all--just that the history needs to be examined and evaluated more carefully, for example, taking into account different ethnic groups and races, regional differences, changes over time, and the variety of reasons why some camps had a degree of integration while others had none at all.

For more photos of CCC integration, this time in the Tucson District of Arizona, see my blog post, "Interesting examples of integration in the Civilian Conservation Corps, from Arizona."