African American’s 1920’s and 30’s

In the 1920’s the “New Negro” emerged. It consisted of “African Americans who challenged the caste system that confined dark-skinned Americans to the lowest levels of society” (pp633). The “African American Intellectual W.E.B.Du Bois and the National Associations for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)” (pp633), were looking to pass a law that would fight against the violence the blacks were being subjected too. In 1917 Marcus Garvey launched the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). This would help African Americans have economic and political independence. By 1919, the UNIA had its own shipping company called the Black Star Line. In the 1920’s the black population showed a 115 percent increase in New York and surrounding areas. African Americans were setting out to create their own culture, free of whites. They were becoming “artists, sculptors, novelists, musicians, and poets” (pp633). They would introduce themselves to the rest of the world as the “New Negro”, “who rose from the ashes of slavery and segregation to proclaim African Americans’ creative genius” (pp 633). The New Deal was created to transform America’s economy after it was shattered by the Great Depression. It would help improve as many areas as possible, whether it was social, economic, or financial. Unfortunately the New Deal had its flaws and neglected some American’s from enjoying the benefits from it. “Bitter critics charged that the New Deal’s NRA stood for “Negro Run Around” or “Negros Ruined Again”” (pp672). Mary McLeod Bethune was the cofounder of the National Council of Negro Women. She would “use her position to guide a small number of black professionals and civil rights activists to posts within New Deal agencies” (pp672). Her efforts paid off some because African Americans had access to the New Deal programs. A few years later despite Bethune’s efforts, African Americans were still suffering. They had “low paying menial jobs, unprotected by the New Deal safety net” (pp672). They had a bad school system and therefore only 1 percent of students would go on to