Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Key New Deal programs failed Black Americans. The WPA and CCC could have been part of a segregation-busting project, but instead segregation was bolstered, as Blacks were relegated to separate work camps across the country, bringing Jim Crow to the North. The best jobs went to whites and out of the 10,000 WPA supervisors hired in the south, only 11 were Black. This was one of the many concessions FDR made to the racist southern Democrats in his coalition, which bled over to the war mobilization where whites and Blacks served in segregated units. The backwardness of the South was forced upon the rest of the country in the New Deal era, promoting a Jim Crow that exacerbated existing racial tensions in Northern cities instead of mitigating them. When workers of various ethnicities migrated across the United States to find work in war industries— because they were still unemployed after the height of New Deal programs— it was the feds who mandated segregated housing for war industry workers, where Blacks regularly received lower-quality housing than whites.