Jesse O. Thomas
"Will the New Deal Be A Square Deal For the Negro?"
Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life
October 1933
Excerpts from the Original Electronic Text at The American Experience: The Presidents.
{1}Through the various channels of the recovery program propelled by the New Deal as a mobilizing slogan, American industry, both agricultural and manufacturing, is being revolutionized. President Roosevelt, the author of the New Deal, is attempting to lift the nation out of this widespread and prolonged depression, which has been so devastating to our social and economic life for the past three years, by reducing unemployment and increasing the buying power of wage earners. . . .
{3}The perplexing question to the employing class in all parts of America is, "Can the National Recovery Act operate in such a manner as to prevent the Negro from sharing equally with other wage earners?" It is the most important element in the whole recovery set-up to the captains of industry in the South. It has caused a sharp division in the alignment of the white world in this area. Many white people in the South are dogmatically opposed to Negroes participating on equality with white people in any beneficial measures; and they insist that in the administration of relief and in the application of the minimum wage scale there must be an exception to the general rule when it comes to Negroes. Spokesmen for this school of thought insist that the NRA can only be made a success by making exceptions wherever it is applied to the status of Negroes.
{4}There is still another group who insists that this is the opportunity for the South to be lifted above the starvation level by paying the minimum wage as provided by the several codes to all employees regardless of race. They further prophesy that the NRA will be a failure to the extent that it attempts to establish a differential wage based on race. . . .
{17}Dr. W. W. Alexander, of the Interracial Commission, spoke thus for the interracially minded white South:
{18}Employers of labor who are urging a lower wage level for Negroes under the Code of the N. R. A. are offering a dangerous proposal. If put into effect, it would undermine the President's program of economic recovery in the South, and at the same time would cut the economic foundations from under the feet of white working men. Negroes, pressed to accept and even to ask for such a differential, are vigorously and, I think, quite properly objecting. They are unwilling to be put in the role of 'scabs,' under-cutting the white man's wage and standard of living. There can be no economic recovery for the South that does not include the Negro. The wiser economic leaders will not acquiesce in a plan so obviously unsound."
{19}[The managers of an Atlanta pencil factory took the opposite position.] As a threat of intimidation to its Negro employees, a pencil factory in Atlanta put a pink slip in the pay envelope in all of its more than one hundred Negro employees during the first week of September, which contained, among other things, the following:
{20}"If the 'false friends' of the colored people do not stop their propaganda about paying the same wages to colored and white employees this company will be forced to move the factory to a section where the minimum wage will produce the greatest production. Stop your 'friends' from talking you out of your job.' "
{21}The automobile dealers of Florida appeared before the Recovery Commission of that state contending that if they were compelled to pay their Negro filling station attendants more money and work them less hours than competing stations, it would make unfair competition. Their request for exemption from the code paying the minimum wage to Negro labor was granted. The exemption asked by T. R. Williams, of the Florida Service Station, was disapproved. He desired to work a Negro porter 84 hours a week for $7.
{22}In contrast to the above, a number of employers have complied with both the spirit and letter of the law. As a result, many Negroes are beneficiaries of the minimum wage schedule set by the NRA. It is true that many others have lost their jobs on account of the enforcement of the minimum wage scale. We have not gone far enough and there is not enough authentic information available for anyone to state with any degree of scientific authority just to what extent the Negro will benefit or how much he will suffer as a result of the enforcement of these codes.
{23}It must be recognized that the President and his administration have departed from the usual custom of appointing political demagogues as heads of these several important missions. The highest type of men and women the nation can afford, with Northern and Southern background, have been chosen. Mr. A. L. Johnstone, of Newberry, South Carolina, Regional Director of the Relief of the Southeastern Sea Board, is an example of the calibre of men chosen to interpret the policies of the administration as well as charged with the responsibility of their enforcement. Mr. Johnstone is a man of great courage, foresight, wisdom and understanding.
{24}The Federal Government, however, finds itself in a paradoxical situation. It has virtually conceded that it cannot stop lynching, that it is powerless to enforce the provisions of the 11th and 15th Amendments. Beyond a Supreme Court decision, it cannot nullify the almost universal practices of residential segregation, or render ineffective the discriminatory practices of the Democratic primary. Too many of the employers of labor whom the government,through its National Recovery Act and the several codes, is insisting upon paying the minimum wage, are members of school boards and otherwise identified with business corporations and industrial concerns in this area whose policy in dealing with Negroes runs counter to the equalization provision of the minimum wage schedule. In the public schools, Negro teachers receive from 50 to 75 per cent of the salary of the white teachers with the same qualifications and a teacher-load invariably much heavier.
{25}The double economic standard makes itself manifest in the relationship of the Negro wage earners to whites in every department of our economic and political life in this section. This has become such an established and accepted policy that the proposed shift required to meet the provisions of the NRA is little less than revolutionary.