Melissa Hwang
Rough Draft of the Mini-Investigation Paper
A. Plan of the Investigation
· Topic of the investigation: Economic inequality during the Great Depression
· How did economic inequality during the Great Depression challenge African Americans’ views on civil rights?
· I chose to write about this topic because I was curious about how the African Americans held onto hope during the Great Depression when President Roosevelt did little to help them and the white Americans chose to discriminate against them.
· I defined the important terms and phrases in my question before I began working on my wish list. With my wish list complete, I did not begin searching for the information immediately but thought of the possible locations of where I would find the facts. I considered Questia, Google books, and other online databases which were reliable, but I ended up using Questia for most of the time. I searched mostly in books because authors would usually have more time to investigate and study a particular topic than those who write short articles.
B. Summary of Evidence
· 75% of the people applying for relief were unknown to relief agencies
· By 1932, black urban unemployment rate was over 50%, more than twice the rates of whites.
· “For black people, the New Deal was psychologically encouraging…but most blacks were ignored by the New Deal programs…
· “On March 19, 1935, even as the New Deal reforms were being passed, Harlem exploded…In the mid-thirties, a young black poet named Langston Hughes wrote a poem, “Let America Be America Again”.
· In northern cities, unemployment forced many black women to participate in the “slave market.” These women offered their services to white women, who drove up in their cars seeking domestic help.
· During the early years of the New Deal, African Americans constantly complained of their inability to secure relief.
C. Evaluation of Sources
To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans is one important source I used to investigate my topic and question. It was written by multiple authors, many of whom are history professors, and was published in 2000. The purpose of this book is to explore the history of African Americans and how their struggles to change their conditions affected our world.
With reference to the origin of this book, it is a valuable source because it provides more history and information than a primary document does of how the African Americans were treated during the Great Depression. The authors had more time to conduct a deeper research about the topic. Although time may offer objectivity, this book has a limitation, and that is, the authors are all African Americans. Since they were writing about their own race, it is possible that their work is not balanced. However, it could also mean that they might be able to feel some of the emotions and attitudes African Americans felt in the past.
With reference to the purpose of this source, it is valuable because in order to explain how African Americans changed our world, the authors have to provide readers with quotes or other forms of primary documents that represent the conditions of the African Americans back then. However, this source also has a limitation with reference to its purpose. Since only the history of African Americans was studied, the perspectives of other peoples were left out, and it is possible that inconvenient truths, or facts which the authors considered as not supporting the topic, may be left out.
D. Analysis
During the first few years of the Great Depression, with the economy plummeting, the first group of people to be laid off was the African Americans. They were always “the last hired, the first fired”. African American laborers experience difficulty in finding jobs, as white supremacy still dominated the society. To help support their family, African American women made sacrifices. They voluntarily participated in the “slave market”, offering their services to white women seeking domestic help. Some were paid as little as five dollars per week for full-time housekeeping. The work was difficult and tiring, and many detested it, as Millie Jones, a young black woman, expressed in a detailed description of her work for one family. But these women were willing to give up their freedom as long as they could earn the few dollars per week to scrape by. Economic inequality had driven some African Americans to such hopelessness that civil rights mattered no more.
In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt became the president and initiated the New Deal, a domestic program aimed to bring about economic relief during the Great Depression. The New Deal brought hope, but it benefitted only a portion of the peoples in the nation. Times were hard for the African Americans, and to them, the New Deal was merely psychologically encouraging. All federal relief was supposed to be “colorblind”, but African Americans repeatedly complained of their inability to acquire relief. Even in
The facts in part B are not enough to provide a complete and final answer to my question because I need more of the actual views of the African Americans on civil rights during the Great Depression. I do not need the numerical information, but I need to know what the African Americans felt and thought.
Bibliography
Ferguson, Karen. Black Politics in New Deal
Bair, Barbara, et al. To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans. New York: Oxford
Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States.
Goff, Brent, et al. History Alive! Pursuing American Ideals.
Meltzer, Milton. A History in Their Own Words: The Black Americans.
