Last Hired, First Fired - African Americans and The Great Depression

The Great Depression was the worst economic downturns in the industrialized world, While no group escaped the economic devastation of the Great Depression, few suffered more than African Americans. African Americans across the country already occupied a fragile position in the economy. By the late 1920s, the many African Americans toiled away as domestic servants, farmers, or service workers in jobs marked by low wages, weak job security, and questionable labor conditions. Approximately eleven million African Americans lived in the American South, where they principally used as sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and wage workers. only 10 percent of black southerners actually owned land, most cultivated crops on white-owned land and received a small share of the harvest. Black southerners were locked into this endless cycle of poverty, exploitation, malnutrition, disfranchisement and violence.

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Sources:
African Americans : a concise history
By Hine, Darlene Clark
www.history.com/news/last-hired-first-fired-how-the-great-depression-affected-african-americans
https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_events_depression.html
https://www.britannica.com/topic/African-American/African-American-life-during-the-Great-Depression-and-the-New-Deal
https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/united-states-history-primary-source-timeline/great-depression-and-world-war-ii-1929-1945/race-relations-in-1930s-and-1940s/
https://oxfordre.com/americanhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001/acrefore-9780199329175-e-632