An extensive program of legal reform and public expenditure that President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his administration implemented in the United States from 1933 to 1939, as part of a largely successful attempt to alleviate the economic and social devastation caused by the Great Depression. However, nearly all of the New Deal’s programs and agencies were strictly segregated by race, and African Americans received worse jobs, benefits, and protections than white people as a result of the New Deal legislation. For instance, while the New Deal spurred the construction of public housing and public provision of mortgages in the United States, all the public housing it built through the Works Process Administration was segregated, and it only provided mortgages to white people through the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and Federal Housing Administration. Work programs like those implemented by the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Civilian Conservation Corps were completely segregated, too. Rothstein explains that this expanded the income and wealth gap between black and white Americans, as well as set a precedent for federal legislation to explicitly ignore the needs of black people. He argues that the New Deal’s segregation was a product of Roosevelt and his officials’ explicit racism, as well as the fact that they needed to form a coalition with segregationist Southern Democrats in order to get the New Deal passed.
New Deal Quotes in The Color of Law
The The Color of Law quotes below are all either spoken by New Deal or refer to New Deal. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 2
Quotes
The biracial character of many neighborhoods presented opportunities for different futures than the segregated ones that now seem so unexceptional. Yet those opportunities were never seized.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4
Quotes
The HOLC created color-coded maps of every metropolitan area in the nation, with the safest neighborhoods colored green and the riskiest colored red. A neighborhood earned a red color if African Americans lived in it, even if it was a solid middle-class neighborhood of single-family homes.
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire The Color of Law LitChart as a printable PDF.
New Deal Term Timeline in The Color of Law
The timeline below shows where the term New Deal appears in The Color of Law. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1: If San Francisco, Then Everywhere?
...school year was shorter for black children, so they could work on farms, and the New Deal ’s Fair Labor Standards Act established minimum wage and anti-child labor protections for all sectors...
(full context)
Chapter 2: Public Housing, Black Ghettos
While “[the] New Deal created the nation’s first public housing for civilians,” it was explicitly segregated. For instance, the...
(full context)
In Part II of the chapter, Rothstein reveals that non- New Deal public housing under Roosevelt was “even more rigid[ly]” segregated. In fact, Harold Ickes, the rather...
(full context)
...reinforced segregation by constructing housing projects in these neighborhoods, for instance in Chicago. While “ New Deal public housing” is not solely responsible for segregation in American cities, it was a very...
(full context)
Chapter 4: “Own Your Own Home”
...but the wealthy to afford homes. Conditions only worsened during the Great Depression, but the New Deal created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), a government lender that offered struggling homeowners better,...
(full context)
Chapter 10: Suppressed Incomes
...that, because Franklin D. Roosevelt had to cooperate with racist southern Democrats to get the New Deal passed, much of it excluded African American people. “Agriculture and domestic service” were generally excepted...
(full context)
Chapter 12: Considering Fixes
...fail to mention the government's role in producing segregation or the discrimination written into the New Deal , and one falsely calls segregation “de facto” and blames it on “unwritten custom or...
(full context)
