Aid programs organized by the various alphabet agencies of the New Deal did little to change the configuration, Katznelson writes, because the former slave states of the South fielded members on Capitol Hill who saw to it that relief went to white constituents. Every other index was weighed against blacks: their health was poorer, their rate of homeownership lower, their acreage smaller and less productive.
Katznelson (Political Science/Columbia Univ.) ponders how it could be that in the declining years of Jim Crow, the disenfranchisement of African-Americans could grow rather than weaken most people in most regions had been affected in one way or another by the Depression, but in the South, where the average per capita income was half that of the rest of the country, black male workers earned a third of what even poor whites did, $565 a year against $1,535. DuBois, writing in 1935 at the height of the New Deal. “Three-fourths of us are disenfranchised yet no writer on democratic reform says a word about Negroes.” Thus W.E.B. A searching study of institutional inequality, much of it wrought, then as now, by the South.
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