Primary Sources: The Great Depression and the 1930s: Race & Ethnicity

"Fox News and Fox Movietone News camera crews covered the people and events of the country and, indeed, the world. From 1919 to 1963 these journalists aimed their viewfinders at the mundane and the spectacular."

Songs from the 1930s recorded by Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress Archive of Folk Song.

" Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the primary purpose of this documentary project was to record and preserve the living memory of African American life during the age of legal segregation in the American South, from the 1890s to the 1950s."

"As part of the United States' Bicentennial celebration, the Washington State Archives undertook an oral history project which focused on the Black community in Seattle and King County. These 69 interviews were conducted by Esther Hall Mumford in 1975 and 1976, and include audio, transcripts, and negatives. Transcriptions were created shortly after the interviews took place. Negatives can include portraits of interviewees, as well as images taken of photographs, clippings, and other items belonging to or relating to interviewees."

"A news sheet for Indians and the Indian service"
Issued by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs

A News Sheet for Indians and the Indian Service

"Modern Farmer was one of the only serial publications published in the Depression-era United States that was aimed at African-American farmers. It was published between 1929-1949 by the National Federation of Colored Farmers (NFCF), an organization which formed local chapters of buying and selling distribution cooperatives for African-American farmers and their goods at a time when prevailing Jim Crow laws made such efforts dangerous. Editor James P. Davis was the president of the NFCF, Head Field Officer the Agricultural Adjustment Administration and was also a member of President Roosevelt’s “Black Cabinet.”"

"This multi-media web site brings the vital history of Seattle's civil rights movements to life with scores of video oral histories, hundreds of rare photographs, documents, movement histories, and personal biographies, more than 300 pages in all. Based at the University of Washington, the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project is a collaboration between community groups and UW faculty and students."

Images from Life magazine of Josephine Baker.

"On June 18, 1934, Congress passed the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA, sometimes known as the "Indian New Deal"). When the bill was being considered that spring, Congress held hearings to learn what tribes around the nation thought about it. This document from the National Archives contains the testimony given by tribes in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Ho Chunk leader Henry Roe Cloud played a prominent role at the meeting. The 1934 act reversed the federal government's 50-year-old policy of Indian assimilation that had tried to force Indians to give up their languages, cultures, and identity in favor of white culture. Instead, it encouraged Indian nations to form tribal governments and to conduct their own internal affairs. These new tribal governments drafted constitutions and provided tribes with political bodies that could assert their sovereign rights."

"John Collier’s appointment as Commissioner of Indian Affairs by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 marked a radical reversal—in intention if not always in effect—in U.S. government policies toward American Indians that dated back to the 1887 Dawes Act. An idealistic social worker, Collier first encountered Indian culture when he visited Taos, New Mexico, in 1920, and found among the Pueblos there what he called a “Red Atlantis”—a model of living that integrated the needs of the individual with the group and that maintained traditional values. Although Collier could not win congressional backing for his most radical proposals, the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 dramatically changed policy by allowing tribal self-government and consolidating individual land allotments back into tribal hands. Collier set out his vision for what became known as the “Indian New Deal” in this 1934 article from the Literary Digest. Although he was sympathetic to Indians, he depicted them in a stereotypical manner."

"The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which became known as the Indian New Deal, dramatically changed the federal government’s Indian policy. Although John Collier, the commissioner of Indian affairs who was responsible for the new policy, may have viewed Indians with great sympathy, not all Native Americans viewed the Indian New Deal in equally positive terms. In this 1970 interview with historian Herbert T. Hoover, Amos Owen, Mdewakanton Sioux tribal chairman, gave a mixed verdict on the Indian Reorganization Act."

"The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which became known as the Indian New Deal, dramatically changed the federal government’s Indian policy. Although John Collier, commissioner of Indian affairs who was responsible for the new policy, may have viewed Indians with great sympathy, not all Native Americans viewed the Indian New Deal in equally positive terms. In this 1968 interview with historian Joseph H. Cash, attorney Ramon Roubideaux, a Brule Sioux, denounced the Indian Reorganization Act as “a white man’s idea” of how Indians should live and argued that it “set the Indian people aside from the mainstream of American life and made them a problem.” " GMU History Matters

"Spirituals and work songs, rooted in both the slavery era and the West African societies from which most African-American slaves were originally taken, provided cultural sustenance to African Americans in the midst of intense racial oppression. They first came to be valued by northern white audiences in the late-19th century. Later, folklorists began collecting (and eventually recording) traditional southern music. John and Alan Lomax recorded southern musicians (African-American, white, and Mexican-American) for the Library of Congress. They recorded “Long John,” a work song, sung by a man identified as “Lightning” and a group of his fellow black convicts at Darrington State Prison Farm in Texas in 1934. Black prisoners working in gangs to break rocks and clear swamps relied on the repeated rhythms and chants of work songs (originating in the forced gang labor of slavery) to set the pace for their collective labor. “Long John” mixed religious and secular concerns, including the notion of successful escape from bondage, a deeply felt desire of both slaves and prisoners."

"Although Franklin D. Roosevelt never endorsed anti-lynching legislation and condoned discrimination against blacks in federally funded relief programs, he still won the hearts and the votes of many African. Yet this support and even veneration for Roosevelt did not blind black Americans to the continuing discrimination that they faced. Indeed, the two views were often combined when they wrote letters to the president asking him to do something about discrimination that they confronted in their daily lives. Three letters are included here from the thousands that poured in to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt from black Americans during the 1930s."

"Tensions among industrial workers of different ethnic backgrounds often proved a barrier to unionization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was, for example, a key factor in the defeat of the 1919 steel strike. In the 1930s, however, that began to change, particularly under the auspices of the CIO. In this 1974 interview done by historian Peter Gotlieb in 1974, Polish-American steelworker Joe Rudiak recalled how ethnic hostility declined in the “CIO days,” particularly among the “young folks.” This decrease in suspicion between people of different nationalities fostered unionization in the 1930s. "

"The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which became known as the Indian New Deal, dramatically changed the federal government’s Indian policy. Although John Collier, the commissioner of Indian affairs who was responsible for the new policy, may have viewed Indians with great sympathy, not all Native Americans viewed his programs in equally positive terms. Antonio Luhan, the husband of the wealthy writer Mabel Dodge Luhan and a Taos Pueblo Indian, was a friend and supporter of John Collier. In this letter to Collier, which he dictated to his wife, he reported on his efforts to persuade other Indians that Collier was their friend and that the reorganization act would bring positive change."

"John Collier’s appointment as Commissioner of Indian Affairs by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 marked a radical reversal—in intention if not always in effect—in U.S. government policies toward American Indians that dated back to the 1887 Dawes Act. An idealistic social worker, Collier first encountered Indian culture when he visited Taos, New Mexico, in 1920, and found among the Pueblos there what he called a “Red Atlantis”—a model of living that integrated the needs of the individual with the group and that maintained traditional values. As Commissioner, Collier proposed a sweeping set of reforms to reverse the previous half century of federal policy. Although he could not win congressional backing for his most radical proposals, the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 dramatically changed policy by allowing tribal self-government and consolidating individual land allotments back into tribal hands. His 1938 report as Commissioner of Indian Affairs combined a frank indictment of the broken promises of the past with an insistence that the Indian Service, since 1933, had made a “concerted effort” to rectify those past mistakes."