In the mid-thirties, a young black poet named Langston Hughes wrote a poem, "Let America Be America Again":

For black people, the New Deal was psychologically encouraging (Mrs. Roosevelt was sympathetic; some blacks got posts in the administration), hut most blacks were ignored by the New Deal programs.

When the New Deal was over, capitalism remained intact. The rich still controlled the nation's wealth, as well as its laws, courts, police, newspapers, churches, colleges

The minimum wage of 1938, which established the forty-hour week and outlawed child labor, left many people out of its provisions and set very low minimum wages (twenty-five cents an hour the first year)

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose- The steel of freedom does not stain.

When the black and white workers and members of their families are convinced that their basic economic interests arc the same, diey may be expected to make common cause for the advancement of these interests.. . .

So I have seen people change. This is the faith you've got to have in people.

Many Americans began to change their thinking in those days of crisis and rebellion.

there were more strikes in 1944 than in any previous year in American history,

The coming of World War II weakened the old labor militancy of the thirties because the war economy created millions of new jobs at higher wages

Unions were not wanted by employers, but they were more controllable-more stabilizing for the system than the wildcat strikes, the factory occupations of the rank and file.

There were injunctions, but a procession of five thousand armed workers encircled the plant and there was no attempt to enforce the injunction. Police attacked with tear gas and the workers fought back with firehose

In 1936 there were forty-eight sitdown strikes

his Committee, headed by John Lewis, then broke away and became the CIO-the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

In 1932 and '33 we began to organize these unemployed block committees in the various communities of Birmingham.... If someone get out of food. . .. We wouldn't go around and just say, "That's too bad". We make it our business to go see this person. .. . And if the person was willing ., . we'd work with them. ...

ways and actions a heap of times speaks louder than words.

The deputy came back with more men, and one of them shot and wounded Shaw, who then got his gun and fired back. He was arrested in late 1932, and served twelve years in an Alabama prison.

By September I8, 421,000 textile workers were on strike throughout the country. There were mass arrests, organizers were beaten, and the death toll rose to thirteen. Roosevelt now stepped in and set up a board of mediation, and the union called off the strike.

In the fall of that same year, 1934, came the largest strike of all- 325,000 textile workers in the South.

A million and a half workers in different industries went on strike in 1934.

Were the New Dealers-Roosevelt and his advisers, the businessmen who supported him-also class-conscious? Did they understand that measures must be quickly taken, in 1933 and 1934, to give jobs, food baskets, relief, to wipe out the idea "that the problems of the workers can be solved only by themselves"?

I find it is no secret that Communists organize Unemployed Councils in most cities and usually lead them, but the councils are organized democratically and the majority rules.

ook, such and such a place, there's a family sittin' out there. Everybody passed through the neighborhood, was a member of the Workers Alliance, had one person they would call. When that one person came, he'd have about fifty people with him... . Take that stuff right on back up there.

But the New Deal's organization of the economy was aimed mainly at stabilizing the economy, and secondly at giving enough help to the lower classes to keep them from turning a rebellion into a real revolution.

When the Supreme Court in 1935 declared the NRA unconstitutional, it claimed it gave too much power to the President, but, according to Bellush, ". . . FDR surrendered an inordinate share of the power of government, through the NRA, to industrial spokesmen throughout the country."

War veterans, holding government bonus certificates which were due years in the future, demanded that Congress pay off on them now, when the money was desperately needed.

It was not just a song of despair

Harburg had to write a song for the show Americana. He wrote "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?"

Fifteen hundred jobless men stormed the plant of the Fruit Growers Express Company here, demanding that diey be given jobs to keep from starving. The company's answer was to call the city police, who routed the jobless with menacing clubs.

The long drought that ruined hundreds of Arkansas farms last summer had a dramatic sequel late today when some 500 farmers, most of them white men and many of them armed, marched on the business section of this town. .. . Shouting that they must have food for themselves and their families, the invaders announced their intention to take it from the stores unless it were provided from some other source without cost.

until the Cichon homestead near Elkhom, Wisconsin, was besieged on December 6 by a host of deputy sheriffs armed with machine-guns, rifles, shotguns, and tear-gas bombs, there had been no actual violence

And a homeless hungry man, driving the road with his wife beside him and his thin children in the back seat, could look at the fallow fields which might produce food but not profit, and that man could know how a fallow field is a sin and the unused land a crime against the thin children

There were millions of tons of food around, but it was not profitable to transport it, to sell it.

those responsible for organizing the economy did not know what had happened, were baffled by it, refused to recognize it, and found reasons other than the failure of the system

Over five thousand hanks closed and huge numbers of businesses, unable to get money, closed too

the economy was fundamentally unsound."

One by one the various strikes were settled, with some gains, but not at Gastonia.

The first of the textile strikes was in Tennessee, where five hundred women in one mill walked out in protest against wages of $9 to $10 a week

TWW locals

A textile strike in Rhode Island in 1922 among Italian and Portuguese workers failed, but class feelings were awakened and some of the strikers joined radical movements

What we want is the help of your department on the meat profiteers who are keeping the hard-working people of this city from obtaining proper nourishment.

"women have shown the same tendency to divide along orthodox party lines as male voters."

another tumbled "accidentally" from a skyscraper in Philadelphia, another purposely from a skyscraper in New York.

25,000 workers were killed on the job and 100,000 permanently disabled.

The Ku Klux Klan was revived in the 1920s, and it spread into the North.

by passing laws setting immigration quotas: the quotas favored Anglo-Saxons, kept out black and yellow people, limited severely the coming of Latins, Slavs, Jews

More than thirty thousand black workers were brought into the area as strikebreakers-they had been excluded from AFL unions and so felt no loyalty to unionism.

100,000 steelworkers were signed up in twenty different AFL craft unions

The common man .. . losing faith in the old leadership, has experienced a new access of self-confidence, or at least a new recklessness, a readiness to take chances on his own account . ..

AFL locals

The so-called sympathetic Seattle strike was an attempted revolution.

No one was ever arrested for Everett's murder, but eleven Wobblies were put on trial for killing an American Legion leader during the parade

his genitals were cut off,

The strike had been peaceful. But when it was over, there were raids and arrests

Handling the crowds WITHOUT GUNS,

What scares them most is That NOTHING HAPPENS

Laundry workers handled only hospital laundry.

the IWW leadership was in jail

Yes, racism was a factor but "accumulations of capital, and the men who controlled them, were as unaffected by attitudinal prejudices as it is possible to be.

Are the conditions of slavery as important as the existence of slavery?

an average of 0.7 whippings per hand per year. About half the hands were not whipped at all during the period." One could also say: "Half of all slaves were whipped." That has a different ring.

They say slaves are happy, because they laugh, and are merry. I myself and three or four others, have received two hundred lashes in the day, and had our feet in fetters; yet, at night, we would sing and dance

But can statistics record what it meant for families to be torn apart, when a master, for profit, sold a husband or a wife, a son or a daughter?

John Brown was hanged, with federal complicity, for attempting to do by small-scale violence what Lincoln would do by large-scale violence

race prejudice of the nation's political leaders.

For there began to rise in America in 1876 a new capitalism and a new enslavement of labor.

Was Du Bois right-that in that growth of American capitalism, before and after the Civil War, whites as well as blacks were in some sense becoming slaves?

If we are not striving for equality, in heaven's name for what are we living? I regard it as cowardly and dishonest for any of our colored men to tell white people or colored people that we are not struggling for equality

"By means of appropriations, subsidies, grants, and bonds such as Congress had so lavishly showered upon capitalist enterprise in the North, the South might yet mend its fortunes-or at any rate the fortunes of a privileged elite."

Even in the worst periods, southern Negroes continued to meet, to organize in self-defense.

The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly."

When the Civil War ended, nineteen of the twenty-four northern states did not allow blacks to vote.

The object of the amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.

As white violence rose in the 1870s, the national government, even under President Grant, became less enthusiastic about defending blacks, •and certainly not prepared to arm them.

I saw them kill my husband; it was on Tuesday night, between ten and eleven o'clock; be was shot in the head while he was in bed sick

The Constitutional amendments were passed, the laws for racial equality were passed, and the black man began to vote and to hold office.

There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women

TEACHER: Yes, but what enabled them to obtain it? How did they get money? STUDF.NTS: Got it off us, stole it off we all!

we arc told mat if black men want to speak, they must speak through white trumpets; if black men want their sentiments expressed, they must be adulterated and sent through white messengers, who will quibble, and equivocate, and evade, as rapidly as me pendulum of a clock

A black skin means membership in a race of men which has never of itself succeeded in subjecting passion to reason; has never, therefore, created civilization of any kind.

The Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

southern blacks were determined to make the most of their freedom, in spite of their lack of land and resources.

The Fourteenth Amendment repudiated the prewar Dred Scott decision by declaring that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States" were citizens. It also seemed to make a powerful statement for racial equality, severely limiting "states' rights"

The Fifteenth Amendment said: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

Lincoln got the praise for freeing us, but did he do it? He gave us freedom without giving us any chance to live to ourselves and we still had to depend on the southern white man for work, food, and clothing, and he held us out of necessity and want in a state of servitude but little better than slavery.

You's free! You's free!"

We wasn't there in Texas long when the soldiers marched in to tell us that we were free. ... I remembers one woman

And all that night the niggers danced and sang right out in the cold.

The Confederacy was desperate in the latter part of the war, and some of its leaders suggested the slaves, more and more an obstacle to their cause, be enlisted, used, and freed.

Most slaves neither submitted nor rebelled. They continued to work, waiting to see what happened. When opportunity came, they left, often joining the Union army.

"In Lafayette County, Mississippi, slaves responded to the Emancipation Proclamation by driving off their overseers and dividing the land and implements among themselves."

I believed that these people were content, happy, and attached to their masters.

The people are all idle on the plantations, most of them seeking their own pleasure. Many servants have proven faithful, others false and rebellious against all authority and restraint.

Black women played an important part in the war, especially toward the end. Sojourner Truth, the legendary ex-slave who had been active in the women's rights movement, became recruiter of black troops for the Union army

whereby hundreds of thousands of slaves deserted the plantations, destroying the Smith's ability to supply its army.

The Civil War was one of the bloodiest in human history up to that time: 600,000 dead on both sides, in a population of 30 million-the equivalent, in the United States of 1978, with a population of 250 million, of 5 million dead.

the Union army was open to blacks. And the more blacks entered the war, the more it appeared a war for their liberation

Thus, when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued January 1, 1863, it declared slaves free in those areas still fighting against the Union (which it listed very carefully), and said nothing about slaves behind Union lines.

So Lincoln distinguished between his "personal wish" and his "official duty."

"Abraham Lincoln may not wish it; he cannot prevent it; the nation may not will it, but the nation cannot prevent it.

Racism in the North was as entrenched as slavery in the South, and it would take the war to shake both.

So, when Lincoln was elected, seven southern states seceded from the Union. Lincoln initiated hostilities by trying to repossess the federal base at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, and four more states seceded. The Confederacy was formed; the Civil War was on.

am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races (applause); that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.

Sir, slavery will not be overthrown without excitement,

Lincoln refused to denounce the Fugitive Slave Law publicly.

t was the Supreme Court of the United States that declared in 1857 that the slave Dred Scott could not sue for his freedom because he was not a person, but property.

Of the twenty-two men in John Brown's striking force, five were black. Two of these were killed on the spot, one escaped, and two were hanged by the authorities.

You may dispose of me very easily-I am nearly disposed of now, but this question is still to be settled,-this Negro question, I mean; the end of that is not yet."

he admired the ailing man of sixty, tall, gaunt, white-haired. Douglass was right; the plan would not work.

Certain black women faced the triple hurdle-of being abolitionists in a slave society, of being black among white reformers, and of being women in a reform movement dominated by men.

White abolitionists did courageous and pioneering work, on the lecture platform, in newspapers, in the Underground Railroad. Black abolitionists, less publicized, were the backbone of the antislavery movement

The States in which we dwell have twice availed themselves of our voluntary services, and have repaid us with chains and slavery.

Ten years after Nat Turner's rebellion, there was no sign of black insurrection in the South.

Loguen made his home in Syracuse a major station on the Underground Railroad. It was said that he helped 1,500 slaves on their way to Canada.

The Act made it easy for slaveowners to recapture ex-slaves or simply to pick up blacks they claimed had run away.

The Fugitive Slave Act passed in 1850 was a concession to the southern states in return for the admission of the Mexican war territories (California, especially) into the Union as nonslave states

It was not color, but crime, not God, but man, that afforded the true explanation of the existence of slavery; nor was I long in finding out another important truth, viz: what man can make, man can unmake.

Never make an attempt to gain our freedom or natural right from under our cruel oppressors and murderers, until you see your way clear-when that hour arrives and you move, be not afraid or dismayed.

There was no slavery in history, even that of the Israelites in Egypt, worse than the slavery of the black man in America

While southern slaves held on, free blacks in the North (there were about 130,000 in 1830, about 200,000 in 1850) agitated for the abolition of slavery.

Slaves hung on determinedly to their selves, to their love of family, their wholeness.

And a man wrote to his wife, sold away from him with their children: "Send me some of the children's hair in a separate paper with their names on the paper. ... I had rather anything to had happened to me most than ever to have been parted from you and the children. . . . Laura I do love you the same

The slave community acted like a generalized extended kinship system in which all adults looked after all children

It was once thought that slavery had destroyed the black family. And so the black condition was blamed on family frailty, rather than on poverty and prejudice.

"The slave communities, embedded as they were among numerically preponderant and militarily powerful whites, counseled a strategy of patience,

Religion was used for control

One of the conspiring slaves said that it was "the common run of poor white people" who were involved. In return, blacks helped whites in need.

The instances where poor whites helped slaves were not frequent, but sufficient to show the need for setting one group against the other.

hey displeased me with their work and I give some of them a few lashes, 'Ibm with the rest. On Wednesday morning, they were missing."

ome negroes are determined never to let a white man whip them and will resist you, when you attempt it; of course you must kill them in that case

There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive...."

he negro population was so docile, so little cohesive, and in the main so friendly toward the whites and so contented that a disastrous insurrection by them would be impossible.

During a period when neither the State nor the nation faced any sort of exterior threat, we find that Virginia felt the need to maintain a security force

But if your course was wholly different-If you distilled nectar from your lips and discoursed sweetest music.... do you imagine you could prevail on us to give up a thousand millions of dollars in the value of our slaves, and a thousand millions of dollars more in the depreciation of our lands ... ?

The plan was to burn Charleston, South Carolina, then the sixth-largest city in the nation,

The whippings, the punishments, were work disciplines

a thousand tons of cotton were being produced every year in the South. By 1860, it was a million tons. In the same period, 500,000 slaves grew to 4 million.