United States History - Great Depression - Essay Example

This essay focuses on the Great Depression that mostly unnerved African Americans in south. Faced with the double burden of racism and Depression - induced poverty, black people struggled to survive. Because blacks were disproportionately employed in the service sector, they were particularly vulnerable to the economic crisis that forced even well-to-do residents to scale back on luxuries like keeping servants, dining out, and traveling by rail. Blacks dared to hope for progress not perfection and the intermixture of symbolic and substantive assistance, of rhetoric and recognition, swelled further hope in the formerly disheartened.

Despite the fact that little had changed for the better in the concrete aspects of life for most black southerners, a belief that "we are on our way" took root. Blacks associated the New Deal with it, and idolized Franklin D. Roosevelt for it. Given the heritage of racism they credited the New Deal with establishing government precedents favorable to blacks, with making civil rights a part of the national liberal agenda, with generating reform and, as never before in our nation's history, propounding the federal government's responsibility in race relations.

These changes that were analyzed in the essay did little to ameliorate the continuity of racism staining the New Deal, but they would help transform the despair, the discouragement, the dreadful apathy of black southerners into a fighting conviction of a better world that could soon and surely be achieved.