Stock Market Crashes, Ushering in the Great Depression: 1929
Flood refugees in line for food, at the time of the Louisville flood in 1937.
The Great Depression devastated the United States, leaving no population untouched. No group, however, was as negatively impacted by this economic catastrophe as African Americans were.
In some Northern cities, white people called for Black workers to be fired from any job as long as there were white people out of work. Racial violence increased, especially in the South, where there was a significant rise in lynchings. [#36]
Roosevelt signs the Social Security Act into law on August 14th, 1935.
Much heralded measures to address the economic hardships experienced during the Great Depression, notably the New Deal, would exclude Black people either overtly or in practice.
Social Security, for example, didn’t apply to agricultural and domestic workers—positions likely to be held by Black people. Consequently, while 27% of white people were ineligible for Social Security in 1935, 65% of Black people were excluded, as were 70-80% of Black people in the South. [#37]
Black women complete a training program to work as maids and household servants. New Orleans, 1939.
This was especially harmful to Black women, who, “compared with other women the United States, have always had the highest levels of labor market participation regardless of age, marital status, or presence of children at home…. Black women have been the most likely of all women to be employed in the low-wage women’s jobs that involve cooking, cleaning, and caregiving.” [#38]
To what extent was our economy designed to be fair?
To what extent was our economy designed to be fair?
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Dispossession of Land
from Indigenous Peoples:
1607 – Present Day
Wall Street Established
as an Official Trading
Post of Enslaved Peoples:
1711
Invention of the Cotton
Gin Accelerates the
Expansion of Slavery:
1794
Choctaw Nation Forced
to Abandon Ancestral
Lands for “Indian
Territory”: 1831
Lehman Brothers’
Cotton Exchange: 1858
Sharecropping and Debt
Peonage: 1870s-1940s
Prison Labor:
1870s - Present Day
Railroads and Chinese
Laborers: 1880s-1890s
Tulsa Black Wall Street Massacre: 1921
Stock Market Crashes, Ushering in the Great Depression: 1929
LA Police "Repatriate" Mexican Americans and Immigrants at La Placita Park: 1931
The Home Owners Loan Corporation Develops Redlining: 1933
Report on “Pinklining” Reveals How Wall Street Targets Women for Toxic Loans: 2016
