Armed Forces: Fighting on Two Fronts, 1939-1953_
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1969).]

These politicians realized that the United States was beginning to
outgrow its old racial relationships over which Jim Crow had reigned,
either by law or custom, for more than fifty years. In large areas of
the country where lynchings and beatings were commonplace, white
supremacy had existed as a literal fact of life and death.[1-15] More
insidious than the Jim Crow laws were the economic deprivation and
dearth of educational opportunity associated with racial
discrimination. Traditionally the last hired, first fired, Negroes
suffered all the handicaps that came from unemployment and poor jobs,
a condition further aggravated by the Great Depression. The "separate
but equal" educational system dictated by law and the realities of
black life in both urban and rural areas, north and south, had proved
anything but equal and thus closed to Negroes a traditional avenue to
advancement in American society.

[Footnote 1-15: The Jim Crow era is especially well
described in Rayford W. Logan's _The Negro in
American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877-1901_
(New York: Dial, 1954) and C. Vann Woodward's _The
Strange Career of Jim Crow_, 3d ed. rev. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1974)]

In these circumstances, the economic and humanitarian programs of the
New Deal had a special appeal for black America. Encouraged by these
programs and heartened by Eleanor Roosevelt's public support of civil
rights, black voters defected from their traditional allegiance to the
Republican Party in overwhelming numbers. But the civil rights leaders
were already aware, if the average black citizen was not, that despite
having made some considerable improvements Franklin Roosevelt never,
in one biographer's words, "sufficiently challenged Southern (p. 009)
traditions of white supremacy to create problems for himself."[1-16]
Negroes, in short, might benefit materially from the New Deal, but
they would have to look elsewhere for advancement of their civil
rights.

[Footnote 1-16: Frank Freidel, _F.D.R. and the South_
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1965), pp. 71-102. See also Bayard Rustin,
_Strategies for Freedom: T