Flashback: FDR's War on Blacks. National Recovery Act Really Meant 'Negroes Ruined Again'.

AIM reports on FDR : the man who enjoyed putting blacks out of work.

“To the extent that black workers were able to get public
works jobs at all, they were mostly in lower level job categories than
they had previously held before the New Deal,” Bartlett, an economist,
writes.

Nor did they fare much better in the economy as a whole. “In
April 1930, the unemployment rate was 6.3 percent for black males and
6.9 percent for white males,” Bartlett shows. “Seven years later, in
1937, after implementation of most New Deal programs, the unemployment
rate for black males was well above that for white males: 19.1 percent
for the former versus 13.9 percent for the latter.”

“Negroes have lost jobs as a result of the NRA,” Dr. Robert C.
Weaver, the Roosevelt Administration’s senior black economist said of
the New Deal’s National Recovery Act. Some wags said that NRA stood for
“Negroes Ruined Again.”

“The minimum wage policy, he [Weaver] said, ‘resulted in
wholesale discharges in certain areas,'” Bartlett relates. “A 1937
study by the NRA itself concluded that the minimum wage provisions of
the NIRA [National Industrial Recovery Act] put 50,000 blacks out of
work in 1934 alone.”

To top it all off, Roosevelt was the first president to put a
Klansman on the U. S. Supreme Court-a move that Woodrow Wilson is never
known to have contemplated. Although FDR proclaimed ignorance of this
colorful aspect of Hugo Black’s past when asked about it in the 1930s,
the justice himself offered a far different recollection in a 1968
memo.

“President Roosevelt, when I went up to lunch with him, told
me there was not reason for my worrying about my having been a member
of the Ku Klux Klan,” Justice Black remembered. “He said that some of
his best friends and supporters he had in the state of Georgia were
strong members of that organization.”

Just a reminder , this Labor Day and the next time Strongman Barack Obama talks about the benefits of unions.