ons, and
also as an indirect by-product of the success of the New Deal programs.
In a government bureaucracy, power and authority are distributed
throughout the administrative hierarchy. Officials at varying levels were
still influenced by their personal prejudices, and they continued to use
their positions in a discriminatory manner. Regardless of the intentions
at the top, prejudice continued to exist in varying degrees throughout
the lower levels of the structure.

In 1935 the Wagner Act protected the rights of labor unions, but because
most unions practiced racial discrimination, it served indirectly to
undercut the status of the Negro worker for a short time. Actually, with
the heightened competition for jobs, unions tended to intensify their
discrimination. The American Federation of Labor largely consisted of
trade or skilled workers. Its member unions regularly practiced racial
exclusion and kept blacks out of the trades. To the contrary, the United
Mine Workers Union which had been organized on an industry-wide basis
rather than a craft basis had encouraged the participation of Negroes
within the union since at least 1890. In 1935, several union leaders, led
by John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers, decided that the union
movement must break away from its craft orientation and begin to organize
the new mass production industries on an industry-wide basis.

While the A. F. of L. dragged its feet, the dissidents withdrew and
formed the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Immediately they began
to organize the steel workers, the meat packers and the automobile
workers. These were all industries which employed significant numbers of
Afro-Americans, and the CIO followed an aggressive, nondiscriminatory
policy. In the beginning, black workers were suspicious, but they soon
joined the new unions in large numbers. In the long run, both black and
white labor benefited from the Wagner Act.

Finally, the New Deal failed to extend its program to include either
agricultural or domestic workers. These were areas in which
Afro-Americans were employed in unusually high proportions, and this
meant that a large portion of the Afro-American community was not covered
by this legislation. For example, both the Social Security and the
Minimum Wage laws excluded both agricultural and domestic workers.
Nevertheless, it was estimated that in 1939 some one million Negroes owed
their livelihood to the Works Progress Administr