Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration And Racial Segregation In The United States

When Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected, the United States of America was in a terrible condition. The stock market crash in 1929 had led to the Great Depression, one in every 4 Americans was out of a job, and civil rights for minority people were in a distraught state; the previous 3 presidents (Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover) had only worsened the state of racial equality. Harding’s administration did nothing to prosecute lynchings linked to the Ku Klux Klan, which led to the KKK reaching approximately 4 million members during his presidency. President Coolidge declared that the federal government should not interfere with local issues regarding race. President Hoover did not allow blacks to hold federal office or work on federal construction jobs. And when the depression hit, blacks were hit the hardest; when Roosevelt took office, over 50% of blacks were unemployed because the blacks, who typically worked low-skill, low-paying jobs, had their jobs stolen by desperate whites.

Prior to 1933, there was almost no federal aid for poor African Americans in the south, which meant that the establishment of nationwide federal aid was a huge boon towards African-Americans. However, Franklin Roosevelt did not have much concern for the racial divide at the time he took office. The real thing that made the Roosevelt Administration start pushing civil rights was the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt. While she was traveling the country with FDR, she visited several communities of poverty-stricken African Americans, but only realized the depth of institutional racism when attempting to pressure the Subsistence Homestead Administration to admit African Americans to new communities created by the New Deal. She eventually failed in this action, but this was an important step in the battle for racial