Additionally, Southerners were reluctant to experiment with new techniques or crops such as rice or sugar cane. When cotton prices fell in 1930 and stayed low for several years, the Southern economy worsened. Adding to this frustration was an exodus of the younger generation of Southerners who had once been a source of farm labor; they were departing the countryside in large numbers now for better educational and job opportunities in the cities.
At the same time, rural blacks started to benefit from practical, hands-on lessons taught by a project called the Movable School. County agents, also black, traveled into their communities and showed them by example how to increase their crop yield and make improvements on their living quarters. Classes taught by men and women gave simple, relevant advice on matters of animal husbandry, mattress-making, canning, and midwifery.
Lastly, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's economic programs, collectively called the New Deal, offered relief to both races during the Depression. The 1933 National Recovery Act (NRA), which is referred to in the novel, provided for codes of fair competition and demanded that minimum wages and maximum hours be set. Also mentioned is the 1935 Works Progress Administration (WPA), which was responsible for putting over 8 million unemployed Americans to work in less than a decade.
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