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My family needs some cloths for they are about naked I have four boys going to school and this makes the second week they have stay home for they do not have any cloths or show to wear.

-letter to Sen. Nelly from J.T.C, 1935, in Down and Out In the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man

During the 1900s, most clothes were homemade. During the Great Depression, most women wore flour sacks as dresses. People that couldn't afford cloth to make clothes would wear sacks. This correlates to how the Forgotten Man needed cloth for his family, as most families needed cloth during the Great Depression and resorted to sacks.

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When they need us they call us migrants. When we’ve picked their crops were bums and we've got to get out.

- migratory worker, in This Fabulous Century

This demonstrates how hard migrant workers worked to pick crops for people during the Great Depression. People only needed them to pick crops and did not treat them well. Despite working hard for others, people continued to act discriminatory against migrant workers. Even children during this time were working in the fields.

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I am a widow with a son fourteen years of age and am trying to support him and myself and keep him in school on a very small sum which I make. I feel worthy of asking you about this: I am greatly in need of a Coat. If you have one which you have laid aside from last season would appreciate it so much if you would send it to me

-letter to Elanor Roosevelt, 1934, in Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man

Both the video and the letter explore the struggles of women during the Great Depression. Women could not support their families, as they did not make much money. It was hard for them to find opportunities to make money, as most jobs were for men. Not only that, but some New Deal Programs only catered to men. Women mostly gained benefits from their spouses, which widows could not gain.

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Women and the Great Depression-- Episode #18

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We ain’t no paupers. We hold ourselves to be decent folks. We don’t want no relief. But what we do want is a chanst to make an honest living like what we was raised.

-One of the down and out, in Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man

Lester Hunter, “I’d Rather Not Be on Relief” (1938)

We go around all dressed in rags

While the rest of the world goes neat,

And we have to be satisfied

With half enough to eat.

We have to live in lean-tos,

Or else we live in a tent,

For when we buy our bread and beans

There’s nothing left for rent.

I’d rather not be on the rolls of relief,

Or work on the W. P. A.,

We’d rather work for the farmer

If the farmer could raise the pay;

Then the farmer could plant more cotton

And he’d get more money for spuds,

Instead of wearing patches,

We’d dress up in new duds.

From the east and west and north and south

Like a swarm of bees we come;

The migratory workers

Are worse off than a bum.

We go to Mr. Farmer

And ask him what he’ll pay;

He says, “You gypsy workers

Can live on a buck a day.”

I’d rather not be on the rolls of relief,

Or work on the W. P. A.,

We’d rather work for the farmer

If the farmer could raise the pay;

Then the farmer could plant more cotton

And he’d get more money for spuds,

Instead of wearing patches,

We’d dress up in new duds.

We don’t ask for luxuries

Or even a feather bed.

But we’re bound to raise the dickens

While our families are underfed.

Now the winter is on us

And the cotton picking is done,

What are we going to live on

While we’re waiting for spuds to come?

Now if you will excuse me

I’ll bring my song to an end.

I’ve got to go and chuck a crack

Where the howling wind comes in.

The times are going to better

And I guess you’d like to know

I’ll tell you all about it,

I’ve joined the C. I. O.

Both the poem and the passage from letter explore the idea that people during the Great Depression didn't want relief. All people wanted was honest work with enough pay. If farmers could raise the pay, then migrant workers could pay more. All migrant workers wanted was the basic necessities to live. However, it is demonstrated how migrant workers had it extremely tough during the 1920s.

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“The Negro must build on his own basis apart from the white man’s foundation if he ever hopes to be a master builder.”

-Marcus Mosiah

Mosiah is saying how African Americans should create their own social, political, and economic basis without relying on the foundations already laid out by the U.S. However, that was difficult for African Americans during the Great Depression. African Americans during this time faced the highest rates of unemployment. Not only that, but they were the first people that institutions fired.

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Lasting from 1929 to 1939, the Great Depression was the worst economic downturn in the industrialized world. While no group escaped the economic devastation of the Great Depression, few suffered more than African Americans. Said to be "last hired, first fired," African Americans were the first to see hours and jobs cut, and they experienced the highest unemployment rate during the 1930s. Since they were already relegated to lower-paying professions, African Americans had less of a financial cushion to fall back on when the economy collapsed.

The Great Depression impacted African Americans for decades to come. It spurred the rise of African-American activism, which laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s. The popularity of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal program also saw African Americans switch their political allegiances to become a core part of the Democratic Party's voting bloc.

African-American unemployment rates doubled or tripled those of whites.

Prior to the Great Depression, African Americans worked primarily in unskilled jobs. After the stock market crash of 1929, those entry-level, low-paying jobs either disappeared or were filled by whites in need of employment. According to the Library of Congress, the African-American unemployment rate in 1932 climbed to approximately 50 percent.

As historian Cheryl Lynn Greenberg writes in To Ask for an Equal Chance: African Americans in the Great Depression, black unemployment rates in the South were double or even triple that of the white population. In Atlanta, nearly 70 percent of black workers were jobless in 1934. In cities across the North, approximately 25 percent of white workers were unemployed in 1932, while the jobless rates among African Americans topped 50 percent in Chicago and Pittsburgh and 60 percent in Philadelphia and Detroit.

During the Great Depression, hundreds of thousands of African-American sharecroppers who fell into debt joined the Great Migration from the rural South to the urban North. According to Greenberg, by 1940 1.75 million African Americans had moved from the South to cities in the North and West.

African Americans formed grassroots organizations, uniting for economic and political progress.

From the Great Depression's earliest days, African Americans mobilized to protest for greater economic, social and political rights. In 1929, Chicago Whip editor Joseph Bibb organized boycotts of city department stores that refused to hire African Americans. The grassroots protests against racially discriminatory hiring practices worked, resulting in the employment of 2,000 African Americans. The "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work" boycotts and pickets soon spread to other cities across the North.

The decade of the 1930s saw the growth of African American activism that presaged the Civil Rights Movement. In 1935, Mary McLeod Bethune organized the National Council of Negro Women, and the following year saw the first meeting of the National Negro Congress, an umbrella movement of diverse African-American organizations that fought for anti-lynching legislation, the elimination of the poll tax and the eligibility of agricultural and domestic workers for Social Security. Young African Americans in 1937 formed the Southern Negro Youth Congress registered voters and organized boycotts.

The African-American vote helped elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, for the first time switching to the Democratic Party.

For decades prior to the Great Depression, African Americans had traditionally voted for the Republican Party, which was still seen as the party of emancipation from the days of Abraham Lincoln. The presidential election of 1932, however, saw a sea-change as African Americans began to switch their political allegiance to the Democratic Party. "My friends, go turn Lincoln's picture to the wall," Pittsburgh Courier editor Robert Vann implored African Americans in 1932. "The debt has been paid in full."

In an oral interview, historian John Hope Franklin said African Americans were drawn to Franklin D. Roosevelt after years of inactivity under Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. "He had a purpose, had a message, had a program. And it seemed that was better than the inertia that preceded things," he said.

Franklin also said African Americans could identify with Roosevelt's personal struggles. "Roosevelt inspired large numbers of blacks, I think in part because he was handicapped himself. And although was not publicized as much as it might have been, blacks knew that he was a victim of polio, that he couldn't walk, and that he had overcome these handicaps."

Since Roosevelt needed the support of Southern Democrats to pass his New Deal agenda, he did not advocate for the passage of federal anti-lynching law or embrace efforts to ban the poll tax that prevented many African Americans from voting. Yet, the economic support received by African Americans under the New Deal solidified their newfound loyalty to the Democratic Party. By 1936, more than 70 percent of African Americans voted for Roosevelt, according to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

What was the 'Black Cabinet' during Roosevelt's presidency?

Roosevelt appointed far more African Americans to positions within his administration than his predecessors, and he was the first president to appoint an African American as a federal judge. According to the Roosevelt Institute, FDR tripled the number of African Americans working in the federal government.

New Deal officials appointed African Americans as special advisors. Although none actually filled Cabinet-level positions, these public policy advisors were referred to as the "Black Cabinet" and the "Black Brain Trust." Perhaps the best-known member of the Black Cabinet was its only woman, Bethune, a close friend of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and founder of Bethune-Cookman University.

New Deal programs, however, still discriminated against African Americans.

Although New Deal programs provided African Americans with badly needed economic assistance, they were administered at a state level where racial segregation was still widespread, and systemically, enforced. The New Deal did little to challenge existing racial discrimination and Jim Crow laws prevalent during the 1930s.

The Civilian Conservation Corps established racially segregated camps, while the Federal Housing Administration refused to insure mortgages in African-American neighborhoods. The Agricultural Adjustment Association gave white landowners money for keeping their fields fallow, but they were not required to pass any money to African-American sharecroppers and tenant farmers who farmed the land and were not eligible for Social Security benefits.

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Last Hired, First Fired: How the Great Depression Affected African Americans

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Lasting from 1929 to 1939, the Great Depression was the worst economic downturn in the industrialized world. While no group escaped the economic devastation of the Great Depression, few suffered more than African Americans. Said to be "last hired, first fired," African Americans were the first to see hours and jobs cut, and they experienced the highest unemployment rate during the 1930s.

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It will be necessary for the County of Los Angeles to furnish transportation for these people in order to move them out. I therefore respectfully request that the sum of  $6,000.00 be authorized to be expended in this manner, thus ridding ourselves of a large number of Mexicans who have been or are in danger of becoming dependent upon the County.

- Los Angeles, County Clerk to the Board of Supervisors 2-10-31

The passage and website represents the efforts of the U.S. to move Mexican-Americans out. Due to the issue of unemployment, The U.S. had to forcibly relocate Mexican-Americans despite being born there. Although they were in a period of depression, the U.S. did not spare money to provide transportation for them. It shows how people did not care for the well-being of Mexican-Americans. They already had struggles during the Great Depression and deportation greatly heightened these struggles.

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​Mexican Repatriation (1929-1936) - Immigration History

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During the economic and political crises of the 1920s and 1930s, the Border Patrol launched several campaigns to detain Mexicans, including some U.S.-born citizens, and expel them across the border.

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The rag town lay close to water; and the house were tents, and weed-thatched enclosures, paper house, a great junk pile. Te man drove his family in and became a citizen of Hooverville-always they were called Hooverville…. And when the rains came the house melted and washed away. He settled in Hooverville and he scoured the countryside for work, and the little money he had went for gasoline to look for work.

-from The Grapes of Wrath

The GIF shows somebody struggling through a dust storm. During the Dust Bowl era, many families and farmers struggled. Not only did they face economic hardships, but the land around them wasn't in good shape. Due to this, farmers had to leave their land and homes. As a result, they moved to Hoovervilles. This shows how much people during the Great Depression lost and what they had to resort to.

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“Once you wake up thought in a man, you can never put it to sleep again.”

-Zora Neale Hurston

Hurston's quote asserts that once you gain realization, it is irreversible. This is important regarding African American history. More specifically, their actions during the Great Depression. It is highlighted how once African Americans realized they deserved better, they never let that realization go. They kept fighting for what they believed in and persisted. The awakening of this realization led to many efforts to gain equality.

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It was an enormously hard life… But there was also a sense of great satisfaction in being a child with valuable work to do and, being able to do it well, to function in this world.

-Margot Hentoff in Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letter from the Forgotten Man

Hentoff reveals the reality of being a kid during the Great Depression. Children had to work in factories in order to help support their families. Although these were tough jobs, they gave them the satisfaction of contributing to their families. Despite the harsh conditions children had to face in factories, they still worked hard to earn money for their families. During this time, families relied on every member to help out, showing the desperation of this period of time. The Great Depression truly changed the lives of children, as they could not properly live out their childhood.

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The houses were left vacant on the land and the land was vacant because of this. Only the tractor sheds of corrugated iron, silver and gleaming, were alive…. The doors of the empty house swung open, and drifted back and forth in the wind. Bands of little boys came out from the towns to break windows and to pick over the debris, looking for treasures…. The weeds sprag up in front of the doorstep, where they had not been allowed, and grass grew up through the porch boards. The houses were vacant, and a vacant house falls quickly apart. Splits started up the sheathing from the rusted nails. A dust settled on the floors.

-from The Grapes of Wrath

During the Dust Bowl, farmers heavily struggled as dust storms emerged. The Dust Bowl made it extremely hard to grow crops. In fact, their fields turned into dust. Not only that, but their houses started to fall apart. Due to this, farmers had to leave their land. They had to leave with nothing, as their farms were all they had.

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