To help Americans the state had a relief roll in which you would receive relief funds every month for survival of the family. As people enlisted the cost grew higher and by 1932 the cost for relief rolls for everyone was close to $75 million due to shortage of money. Some cities simply removed people from relief rolls, most of them African Americans. As a result of shortage of money factories and production lines, like the Ford motor Co. were forced to close due to low sales in 1931. But many African Americans, who had joined the Great migration, had found opportunity for a job in the northeast and Midwest.
Boarding trains by the thousands, African Americans headed for Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and New York. However the Great Migration caused sufficient factories in the north to close because of too many workers and little money. This led to riots and mobs demanding food for their families especially African Americans who were farmers in the south. African American farmers on the Great Plains often had used soil destroying cultivation methods. Such methods combined with droughts produced heavy dust storms called Dust Bowls. These high winds would carry dust and dump it on farms and cities adjacent to Chicago. The dust ruined many farms for African Americans and Anglos everywhere.
The Relief Programs from the New Deal that lasted two years weren’t perfect and especially for colored people. Full control of relief programs by the government wasn’t possible because there was still discrimination and bigotry in some programs. Although African Americans weren’t excluded they were still being ignored and discriminated by Corporations.
As mentioned earlier African Americans did not just sit there, they fought back with protests and Riots and marches. The Trade Union Unity League (TUUL) that started rallying up the people from the textile mills in 1930 did most of the riots. The next year they led a protest with extreme violence in Harlan County, Kentucky earning the county the name of “Bloody Harlan”. The TUUL was a communist organization that helped African Americans and Anglos rally and march and riot. On March 7 the Detroit officials were in action at a march where hundreds of people were being charged with being communists or suspected communism and some with “criminal syndicalism”.
After this last march the TUUL slowly faded. Veterans from thee past war had remembered about the bonus promised for fighting for the country. Soon word was out about the bonus and every veteran got together to see if a bill could be passed. Hoover vetoing the bill did not realize that it would become a problem later on. When African Americans and other veterans, about eight thousand, heard about the veto they set up a parade and marched to the capitol building on June 8, 1932. While the senate debated the bill the veterans slept on the lawn of the capitol building. Things had gotten worse for every body.
During the course of time, after Roosevelt became president, things began to get better. FDR was establishing and making many new jobs, many more programs, acts and corporations. Like the banking act giving the Federal Reserve greater control over the banking system and creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Creating these corporations made many more jobs for the American people. This was decreasing the unemployment rate and at the same time helping people back on their feet and out of those horrible living conditions. To repair overproduction he ordered the slaughter of millions of pigs most of which went to waste, to the outrage of millions of citizens like Claude Thompson of Indiana who telegraphed the president saying “We protest this action as being un-American in principle in view of the fact that we have thousands upon thousands of undernourished men, women and children in this country today who are unable to procure a bit of meat.” In response to the telegraph the federal Surplus Relief Corporation (FSRC) was founded to purchase surplus hogs, chickens, and livestock. Then it would be shipped to each state and given to relief funds to distribute among the needy. Before its end, the FSR would distribute 9.4 million pounds of fresh apples, 290 million pounds of beef, and 297 million pounds of pork to 60 million people, half of them African Americans. These systems or corporations that had been created worked with as much speed as most of them usually did which was not much. Nor did these programs ever manage to aid the bulk of the needy; as many as five million unemployed people still remained at the mercy of state relief programs, which in some of the poor states gave out less than ten dollars a month to a family.
With that said there’s something positive to say which is with all their failings the FERA, FDIC, CCC and all the rest changed the shape of life for all Americans in this country permanently. In conclusion American people had suffered the most during the Great Depression and especially those already discriminated against.
I will say this white, black, male or female, child or adult, no group of Anglo workers was more thoroughly oppressed than African Americans.
Works Cited
T.H Watkins, The Great Depression: America in the 1930’s, Little brown and Company 1993:book
Don Nardo, The Great Depression, San Diego: Greenhaven Press 1998
Christopher Collier, Progressivism, The Great Depression, and The New Deal, New York: Benchmark press 2001
William Dudley, The Great depression: Opposing Viewpoints, David l. Bender, Greenhaven press 1994
T.H Watkins, The Great Depression: America in the 1930’s, (1993) 59
T.H Watkins, The Great Depression: America in the 1930’s, (1993) 56
T.H Watkins, The Great Depression: America in the 1930’s, (1993) 70
Christopher Collier, Progressivism, The Great Depression, and The New Deal, (New York: Benchmark Books, 2001) 55,56
T.H Watkins, The Great Depression: America in the 1930’s, (1993) 83
T.H Watkins, The Great Depression: America in the 1930’s, (1993)
T.H Watkins, The Great Depression: America in the 1930’s, (1993) 125
