Great Depression Effects On African Americans

In general, the Great Depression brought mass suffering to everyone and was especially hard for the African Americans. The National debt income had drop to 50% and unemployment has risen up to 25% of the total labor force (U.S. History, n.d. para 1). Therefore, America’s had twenty million Americans receiving public assistance to survive. The blacks faced the harshest conditions because employers starting using racist hiring and firing procedures as the “Last Hired and the First Fired” from employment and their unemployment increased during the Great Depression (U.S. History, n.d. para 1). Some whites believed that a black person had no right to hold a job while the white people were unemployed. However, some blacks were able to keep their
The lifestyle they had become accustom to were harsh in which they barely had enough food eat and clothes to wear from the hot sun or the cold winter months. Many African Americans became sharecropper where they worked the land for the white landowners who in return provide them shelter and supplies to work the land and in return the white landowners will receive a majority of the profit they produce. The agreeable contract would keep African Americans at a disadvantage because at the end of the season they would owe the landowner more than what they were able to produce.
The African Americans lives would change again when America enter another their second World War. Some African Americans had to deal with the introduction of machinery as some white landowners started to reduce the number of field hands in which required plowing, hoeing, and weeding, but the mechanical devices displace even more blacks farm worker (U.S. History, n.d. para 1). Therefore, this increased the migration for blacks as the living conditions in urban areas rose from 44 percent to 50 percent on the onset of the World War II (U.S. History, n.d. para
However, the government of the United States got an political boost during the World War II when W.E.B. Du Bois stated in short, that the blacks should forget their grievances and close ranks with their fellow white citizens and allied with the nation fighting for democracy (Mullane, 1993, p. 573). The second World War proved to be known different because African Americans troops faced similar discrimination and assigned to construction jobs, manual labor, and the government even established separate blood banks for black and whites troops (Mullane, 1993, p. 574). In conclusion, the African Americans conditions were no better than the first World War they continued fighting in the war and during the World War II, the establishment of Tuskegee Airmen names given to U.S. Army Air Force units which comprised of African American flyers and maintenance crews, but trained by white officers (History Net, n.d. para 1). However, once again most African Americans participated in the war to escape poverty from the Great Depression in which they would earn an income from the war in which allow them to provide for their