While the Great Depression dealt blacks a severe blow, with the New Deal the federal government addressed the issue of black poverty for the first time. In doing so, the New Deal marked a turning point in American race relations. Blacks needed government intervention, since they suffered severe economic dislocation in the Depression: by the mid 1930s the proportion of blacks on relief doubled that of whites, and in some southern cities 80 percent of the black population needed public assistance.
The Depression severely disrupted lower-class black family life. Rural black poverty was extreme in the late 1920s, but the Depression made it still worse. Payment for picking cotton dropped to a low of sixty cents for a fourteen-hour day. Sharecropping families were given as little as ten dollars a month for a family of six or eight to live on......
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