The Black Cabinet The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt

Jill Watts

eBook - 2020

An in-depth history exploring the evolution, impact, and ultimate demise of what was known in the 1930s and '40s as FDR's Black Cabinet.In 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the presidency with the help of key African American defectors from the Republican Party. At the time, most African Americans lived in poverty, denied citizenship rights and terrorized by white violence. As the New Deal began, a "black Brain Trust" joined the administration and began documenting and addressing the economic hardship and systemic inequalities African Americans faced. They became known as the Black Cabinet, but the environment they faced was reluctant, often hostile, to change."Will the New Dea...l be a square deal for the Negro?" The black press wondered. The Black Cabinet set out to devise solutions to the widespread exclusion of black people from its programs, whether by inventing tools to measure discrimination or by calling attention to the... more