Question

What did fdr use to cause african americans to change their party alliance?

Answer 1

Franklin Delano Roosevelt became the 32nd President of the United States, from 1933 until 1945. A part of the biggest challenges that Roosevelt had to face, was the Great Depression of 1929, when the markets collapsed to such a level that famine and poverty affected every corner of the United States and the world. He was also the president who had to face the effects from the First World War and the entire conflict of the Second World War.

But the Great Depression was undoubtedly the biggest concern for FDR, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt was better known. And to face this humongous dragon, that had devastated the United States economy and left almost all of the population jobless and without economic relief, FDR established a policy that was named the New Deal and which aimed to restart the almost deseased economy. Among the most important points of the New Deal, were the programs that FDR established to help the groups of society that had been most hardly hit by the Depression, offering them economic relief, welfare programs and even job programs. He also managed to make these programs available to all Americans, including African Americans, who up until then had been greatly segregated, especially in the South, and who had suffered the most for the lack of job opportunities and the economic devastation. With this New Deal, even if most of the programs had very little impact on African Americans because of the still active segregation, they made this population group believe that this Democrat, and thus the Democratic Party as a whole, wished to help African Americans, and after Hoover´s presidency, a Republican, failed to answer the needs of this depressed group, Blacks began to swing their alligance towards the Democratic Party.

Answer 2

For his first election, African Americans voted massively in favor of Republicans for the last time due to Lincoln’s legacy and Southern Bourbon Democrats.

After he became president, Roosevelt made sure that all New Deal relief programs were available to African Americans across the nation. He publicly expressed his condemnation of lynching of African Americans in the South as “murder”. He even appointed a “Black Cabinet” in which prominent African American advisers provided him with assistance and propositions in favor off African American communities. He used an executive order to outlaw discrimination of racial and religious minorities working for defense contractors.

He created the Fair Employment Practices Committee to enforce such order. Finally his wife, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt publicly supported African American demands for fair wages and equal rights.