General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: 9 Ways FDR's 'New Deal' Purposely Excluded Blacks [View all]BumRushDaShow
(128,905 posts)My mother, born in 1930, grew up under Roosevelt. In the heart of the depression, a large segment of the U.S. was heartened to have FDR in to try to dig the country out of despair. However in order to do so, a whole segment of the population's additional woes (racism) were put on the back-burner, where legal, de jure segregation (including in the U.S. military, where my father served in WWII in a segregated army, prompting A. Philip Randolf to organize a march on Washington unless something was done), Jim Crow, lynchings, redlining, and all sorts of other atrocities, were permitted to continue - all to pander to the racist southern dixicrats.
People tend to forget that FDR was elected to 4 terms (but only survived until the very beginning of the 4th), so it's not like he didn't have enough time to attempt to address civil rights issues beyond sending his wife out to soothe the community.
LBJ faced similar, but being from the south, he eventually chose to take them on in the aftermath of the 1963 "March on Washington" (prompted by assassination of Medgar Evers and all the previous atrocities committed against POC). And his doing so, after taking the helm of the nation upon the 1963 assassination of JFK (another who did little to rock the dixicrat voters outside of calling up the National Guard against them on several occasions when the news of egregious wrongs became embarrassing), to shepherd a nascent Civil Rights Act through to completion. This eventually lead to the scum dixicrats fleeing to the GOP, but in return, it gave us a series of more potent Civil Rights-related laws that began to confer what should be considered "human rights" onto a population that had such stripped away.