For southern farmers, both black and white, who did not enjoy the prosperity of northern industrial centers, the Great Depression had begun in the 1920s, well before the stock market crash of 1929. Factors such as soil erosion, the attack of the boll weevil on cotton crops, and the increasing competition from foreign markets led to widespread poverty among southern farmers. The majority of African Americans were still farming in the South, and they were much harder hit than the white population, even after the advent of President Roosevelt's New Deal. The percentage of blacks on relief was three to four times higher than the number of whites, but relief organizations discriminated by race; some would not help blacks altogether, while others gave lower amounts of aid to blacks than they did to whites.

Such practices led one NAACP leader to call the program "the same raw...