How FDR abandoned Black voters for economic progressivism

Eleanor Roosevelt joined the NAACP in 1934 and went to work with its executive secretary, Walter White, on getting a federal anti-lynching bill through Congress. She arranged a meeting at the White House between White and FDR on the legislation.

White recorded FDR’s response to the bill in his memoir A Man Called White, and the National Archives’ guide to Roosevelt’s race relations files reproduces it: “The Southerners by reason of the seniority rule in Congress are chairmen or occupy strategic places on most of the Senate and House committees. If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can’t take that risk.“ Southern senators filibustered anti-lynching legislation off the calendar in the spring of 1935.

This would be just one example of a long string of concessions FDR would make to white supremacist terrorists in Congress in order to get economic populist legislation through to stave off the Great Depression.