Effects Of The Great Depression On African Americans

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The Great Depression
Throughout most of the 1920s, or, “Roaring Twenties,” Americans lived in a period of great success. For the first time in history, more Americans were residing in cities than on farms. Under two of the least innovative presidents in history, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, the U.S. was “prestigious, strong and prosperous” (Commonlit.org “The Roaring Twenties” by Mike Kubic). The country’s national net worth had more than doubled between 1920 and 1929. Many people had more leisure time, and as a result, entertainment, such as movies, radio stations, watching sports games, and theaters flourished. The 19th amendment was ratified, giving women the right to vote, and Americans were spending more money, as there was a wide …show more content…
With employment quickly becoming a serious competition, African Americans continued to have a serious disadvantage in comparison to white people. Throughout both the 1920s and the entirety of the Great Depression, African Americans were the “Last Hired and the First Fired,” and many African Americans had already been in a state of economic depression before the stock market crash, and stayed in it for longer than most other Americans. For many, it was hard enough to get a job without the Great Depression, so the Great Depression made it almost impossible to get one. As prices dropped, African Americans began to lose their footholds in many industries - the agriculture industry included. As cotton prices dropped by more than 60% in 1933, around 12,000 African American sharecroppers in the south tried moving to cities in other regions in search of jobs. As a battle over the few jobs that were available swept through the country, tensions between African Americans and whites reached dangerous new levels. On and around southern railroads, fights between whites and African Americans, some of which cost the lives of African Americans, broke out over the jobs held by them. Although the Great Depression had greatly weakened its membership ranks, the Ku Klux Klan continued its practices, resulting in the killing of many African Americans based on race …show more content…
Throughout Roosevelt’s presidency, he proposed a multitude of government programs to Congress, each with the intention to ease America out of the Great Depression. This mass of government programs was called the New Deal. The most prominent of the programs produced from the New Deal was Social Security, which guaranteed pensions to millions of Americans and created an unemployment insurance system. Many other programs, such as the Work Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps, gave work to hundreds of thousands of Americans, young and old. As Roosevelt continued to add programs to the New Deal, the economy continued to improve, bit by
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