Throughout the semester an ongoing topic that continued to catch my attention was African Americans during the Great Depression. In class we discussed their unequal rights, listened to slave narratives as well as explored the Green book which mapped out safe travels for them. A lot of these resources have come from a caucasian perspective or produced by one. I was curious to explore more of the African Americans perspective of life back in the 1930’s.
From a previous reading from the American YAWP it was said that 1 and some of those difficulties included unemployment, unequal rights, programs excluding African Americans etc. Roosevelt at the time “… not only rejected such proposals as abolishing the poll tax and declaring lynching a federal crime, he refused to specifically target African American needs in any of his larger relief and reform packages”. African Americans attempted to take matters into their own hands by directly speaking to the president through recordings in hope it would get him to listen. There is a bundle of recordings from a variety of different ages, genders and situations but they all told their story and asked for the same thing. They wanted the president to try and help themachieve equal opprotunity. Hearing the recordings of people asking the president for help and knowing now that he did little to help them in the time affects us different. You can hear in their voices the hope they have for him to help and it is saddening that his helping hand was not extended to them.
Earlier this semester we looked into how people were mapping racism over the years. The article Mapping Racism and Assessing the Effect of Digital Humanities explained that 2. African Americans were trying to do all that they could in order to reach the people and the president. Sound recordings, interviews and maps were brought to life to explain their struggles. Digital humanities have helped embody the emotions and hardships African Americans faced during this time period.
Bond, Sarah Emily. “Mapping Racism And Assessing the Success of the Digital Humanities”, History from Below. Retrieved from https://sarahemilybond.com/2017/10/20/mapping-racism-and-assessing-the-success-of-the-digital-humanities/
“The Great Depression”, The American Yawp. Retrieved from http://www.americanyawp.com/text/23-the-great-depression/
“Dear Mr. President”,Dear Mr. President collection (AFC 1942/003), Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/afc1942003_sr39/
- “…Franklin Roosevelt did little to directly address the difficulties black communities faced”
- “Many prominent African-American activists at the time turned to maps and other data visualizations in order to help the public–and even the president–to understand the detrimental effects of slavery on the country”
