problems of African Americans. The Justice
Department’s Black adviser Robert
Vann was recruited to chair the meeting,
which included Black intellectuals, leaders
and activists from across the nation. They
met in Washington in September 1933 and
for two days discussed strategies to speed
up relief to Black communities.
The high point of the conference came
when Roper, while addressing the gathering,
announced his plan to restore the
recently eliminated African American
post. He then asked the group to put forward
names for the position. While the
delegates may have been encouraged to
hear that Commerce would hire a Black
adviser, they agreed that no one person
could handle the overwhelming needs of
Black America. At the end of the meeting,
they informed Roper that they had
organized themselves into an official advisory
committee. Although they insisted
on being based in the Commerce Department,
they demanded review power over
all decisions affecting African Americans
throughout the New Deal. John P. Davis
seized the opportunity and lobbied for
the department to include Weaver on the
advisory committee. He was told no.
While some noted that the Commerce
Department’s advisory committee on
African American affairs threatened to
compete with Foreman’s office, no doubt
many realized that it also had the potential
to emerge as the New Deal’s Black Cabinet.
But that hope died quickly. In the end,
Roper named the Urban League’s Eugene
Kinckle Jones to the Commerce post.
Tall, charming and athletic, the Urban
League executive, at the age of 48, was
strikingly fit and distinguished. Raised in
Richmond, VA, the son of two respected
and race-conscious college professors,
Jones had been given many opportunities,
and he embraced the responsibility of
challenging American racism. After earning
degrees at Virginia Union and Cornell,
he took a job as a field inspector for the
Urban League in 1911. The organization
was only a year old, and he fully embraced
the chance to shape the Urban League’s
programs dedicated to addressing the
conditions faced by African Americans in
the cities. In 1917, he became the organization’s
executive secretary.
Jones’s addition to the New Deal
team was received with applause, in
part prompted by Commerce Department
press releases. The New York Times
celebrated Jones as “one of the foremost
authorities on the problems of Negro life
in the cities.” Jones’s achievement was
certainly a milestone. When he arrived on
the job in late October 1933, he became the
first upper-level leader of a national civil
rights organization to occupy an advisory
post in the federal government.
Yet for Jones, the transition from Urban
League head to Commerce Department
adviser was rough. Despite his efforts to
rise above the quarrels over his appointment,
he entered office under a cloud of
suspicion. Additionally, to some Jones
seemed a bad fit. A nationally recognized
specialist in Black labor, he now headed
a division dedicated to the recovery and
expansion of Black businesses.
Although Jones was hired at $5,600 a
year (a respectable salary although lower
than that of other New Deal officials) and
given a spacious suite with two offices,
he had no staff and no authority to pursue
projects or investigations. It quickly
appeared that his role in New Deal relief,
outside of serving as the subject of a publicity
campaign, was murky at best. Jones
soon found himself under a mountain of
complaints regarding New Deal inequalities,
many from the Urban League itself.
With no resources, he was blocked from
offering any response.
The fanfare around Jones’s appointment
was certainly not enough to satisfy
those demanding that Roosevelt respond
to the crises in Black America. Stories of
African Americans struggling against poverty
filled the pages of the nation’s Black
newspapers. Already cash-poor communities
watched helplessly as food and
fuel prices started to rise when National
Recovery Administration wage and price
regulations kicked in. As the cost of living
increased, Black incomes continued to
plummet. One African American journalist
reported that “a conservative estimate
would place 90 percent of Harlem’s population
in the breadline.”
Howard University Professor Kelly
Miller urged African Americans to abandon
cities and return to the countryside,
where they might make a living off the
land. “The city Negro has no definite function
or assured status,” he told The New
York Times. “The farm is the Negro’s best
chance and the best help the government
can render him in this emergency is to
aid him to avail himself of this chance.”
Foreman agreed and began to advocate
for African Americans to be admitted
to the programs run by the Division of
Subsistence Homesteads, which placed
families on collective farms to communally
work the land. Those programs had
only accepted white applicants and turned
away Black Americans seeking aid.
Far from making him more popular,
Foreman’s proposal actually damaged his
reputation further. He did not advocate
for African Americans to be integrated
into preexisting projects. Instead he called
for separate Blacks-only collective farms.
Such plans convinced some Black leaders
that the white southerner was really in the
business of promoting segregation.
Furthermore, the justice system continued
to fail Black citizens in the most
horrific ways. Throughout the summer
and fall of 1933, the national media was
filled with stories of the “Scottsboro Boys,”
nine African American youths, ranging in
age from 13 to 20, who had been arrested
for allegedly gang-raping two young white
women. While there were both Black
and white Americans who spoke out on
behalf of the accused, establishing that
the charges were groundless, in late fall
two of the nine were found guilty and
sentenced to die in the electric chair by an
Alabama jury. (All nine were much later
exonerated.)
About the same time, George Armstrong
of Princess Anne, MD, was jailed
for an alleged assault of a white woman.
While he awaited a hearing and an
opportunity to defend himself, a white
mob pushed past 25 state police officers
assigned to protect him, dragged him
through the town, hung him and then
burned his body.
Just over 130 miles away, in Washington,
DC, President Roosevelt sat silent in
the White House.
Jill Watts is a professor of history at California
State University San Marcos. In
addition to The Black Cabinet, she is also
the author of Hattie McDaniel: Black
Ambition, White Hollywood.
This article has been adapted from The
Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of
African Americans and Politics During
the Age of Roosevelt, by Jill Watts
(Grove Press, 2020). Used by permission
of the publisher.
www.MoAF.org | Summer 2020 | FINANCIAL HISTORY 25