Nancy Weiss does not make a quick judgment. She stresses the prevailing racial conservatism of the period, “the inflammatory potential of race as a political issue,” and the need for evaluating the cautious and tentative responses of the politicians, black as well as white, “in the context of their times.” Blacks of the 1930s found the symbolic racial gestures of the New Deal—timid and restrained as they seem in retrospect—“impressive because there had been nothing like them in anyone’s memory.” Gestures of this sort included Mrs. Roosevelt’s pouring a glass of water for Mary McLeod Bethune when her voice cracked during a public speech, or the government’s sponsorship (with no risk of violating States’ rights) of the Lincoln Memorial concert of Marian Anderson after the Daughters of the American Revolution excluded her from Constitution Hall.
The evasiveness of New Dealers on issues of racial justice and the repeated frustration of protests against lynching, Jim Crow, white primaries, and discrimination “related more to the ritual of black leadership than it did to actual expectations about realizable progress,” according to Weiss. No leader could have maintained his standing among his colleagues or constituency without publicly demanding such reforms. Even among the leaders, however, there was probably “a gap between their public assertions and their private expectations,” and “the racial expectations of most blacks fell considerably short of the protest voiced by black spokesmen.” In the words of the historian Rayford W. Logan, “Negroes had been so depressed, so frustrated, almost having given up hope, that nearly anything would have created substantial support.”
The critical thing determining the choice of individual voters, in Weiss’s opinion, “depended less on their racial identity than on their economic fortunes.” For all the notorious and pervasive racial discrimination of the New Deal programs, they did help the suffering poor, and the “poor man” was the typical black American. The single most important New Deal event for blacks was the Works Progress Administration, which was literally the salvation of millions of unemployed, and of them blacks were the most desperate of all. The WPA put manual and skilled laborers to work on sewage systems, water-works, irrigation ditches, hospitals, power lines, airports, and roads. It employed substantial numbers of black professionals: architects, engineers, writers, musicians, and actors. And it brought schools, public housing, and community centers as well as recreational and vocational services to black neighborhoods.