Editing Works Progress Administration (section)

==African Americans==
The share of [[Federal Emergency Relief Administration]] and WPA benefits for African Americans exceeded their proportion of the general population. The FERA's first relief census reported that more than two&nbsp;million African Americans were on relief during early 1933, a proportion of the African-American population (17.8%) that was nearly double the proportion of white Americans on relief (9.5%).<ref name = "salmond">John Salmond, "The New Deal and the Negro" in John Braeman et al., eds. ''The New Deal: The National Level'' (1975). pp 188–89</ref> This was during the period of [[Jim Crow]] and [[racial segregation]] in the South, when black Americans were largely [[Disenfranchisement after the Reconstruction Era|disenfranchised]].

By 1935, there were 3,500,000 African Americans (men, women and children) on relief, almost 35 percent of the African-American population; plus another 250,000 African-American adults were working on WPA projects. Altogether during 1938, about 45 percent of the nation's African-American families were either on relief or were employed by the WPA.<ref name = "salmond"/>

[[Civil rights]] leaders initially objected that African Americans were proportionally underrepresented. African American leaders made such a claim with respect to WPA hires in New Jersey, stating, "In spite of the fact that Blacks indubitably constitute more than 20 percent of the State's unemployed, they composed 15.9% of those assigned to W.P.A. jobs during 1937."<ref name="Howard"/>{{Rp|287}} Nationwide in 1940, 9.8% of the population were African American.

However, by 1941, the perception of discrimination against African Americans had changed to the point that the [[NAACP]] magazine ''Opportunity'' hailed the WPA:

<blockquote>It is to the eternal credit of the administrative officers of the WPA that discrimination on various projects because of race has been kept to a minimum and that in almost every community Negroes have been given a chance to participate in the work program. In the South, as might have been expected, this participation has been limited, and differential wages on the basis of race have been more or less effectively established; but in the northern communities, particularly in the urban centers, the Negro has been afforded his first real opportunity for employment in white-collar occupations.<ref name="Howard"/>{{Rp|295}}</blockquote>

The WPA mostly operated segregated units, as did its youth affiliate, the [[National Youth Administration]].<ref>{{cite book|author=Charles L. Lumpkins|title=American Pogrom: The East St. Louis Race Riot and Black Politics|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=q8_ZBcXXRAYC&pg=PA179|year=2008|publisher=Ohio University Press|page=179|isbn=9780821418031}}</ref> Blacks were hired by the WPA as supervisors in the North; however of 10,000 WPA supervisors in the South, only 11 were black.<ref>{{cite book|author=Cheryl Lynn Greenberg|title=To Ask for an Equal Chance: African Americans in the Great Depression|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Rcdl9nafM2oC&pg=PA60|year=2009|publisher=Rowman & Littlefield |page=60|isbn=9781442200517}}</ref> Historian Anthony Badger argues, "New Deal programs in the South routinely discriminated against blacks and perpetuated segregation."<ref>{{cite book|author=Anthony J. Badger|title=New Deal / New South: An Anthony J. Badger Reader|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=VmXIZEtMYyQC&pg=PA38|year=2011|publisher=U. of Arkansas Press|page=38|isbn=9781610752770}}</ref>