(via azspot) (emphasis mine)

The Great Depression effectuated a sea change in American race relations and party alignment. The New Deal—spearheaded by the Democratic Party of President Franklin D. Roosevelt—was designed to alleviate the suffering of poor people in the midst of the Depression, and blacks, the poorest of the poor, benefited disproportionately. While New Deal programs were rife with discrimination in their administration, they at least included blacks within the pool of beneficiaries—a development, historian Michael Klarman has noted, that was “sufficient to raise black hopes and expectations after decades of malign neglect from Washington.” Poor and working-class whites in both the North and South, no less than African Americans, responded positively to the New Deal, anxious for meaningful economic relief. As a result, the Democratic New Deal coalition evolved into an alliance of urban ethnic groups and the white South that dominated electoral politics from 1932 to the early 1960s.

It is rather unfortunate that Howard Zinn just passed away. He would have a problem with this assessment (the bolded selection). In “A People’s History of the United States,” (Ch. 15, Self-Help in Hard Times) Zinn notes the difficulties faced by blacks in Harlem during the Great Depression. In particular, he notes how the New Deal passed them by. An excerpt:

Black Harlem, with all the New Deal reforms, remained as it was. There 350,000 people lived, 233 persons per acre compared with 133 for the rest of Manhattan. In twenty-five years, its population had multiplied six times. Ten thousand families lived in rat-infested cellars and basements. Tuberculosis was common. Perhaps half of the married women worked as domestics. They traveled to the Bronx and gathered on street corners—“slave markets,” they were called—to be hired. Prostitution crept in. Two young black women, Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke, wrote about this in The Crisis in 1935:

Not only is human labor bartered and sold for the slave wage, but human love is also a marketable commodity. Whether it is labor or love, the women arrive as early as eight a.m. and remain as late as one p.m. or until they are hired. In rain or shine, hot or cold, they wait to work for ten, fifteen, and twenty cents per hour.

In Harlem Hospital in 1932, proportionately twice as many people died as in Bellevue Hospital, which was in the white area downtown. Harlem was a place that bred crime—“the bitter blossom of poverty,” as Roi Ottley and William Weatherby say in their essay “The Negro in New York.”

…

To white Americans of the thirties, however, North and South, blacks were invisible.

I would (obviously) draw different conclusions from the data that Zinn found. Where Zinn saw government corruption and exploitation, he saw the opportunity for more enlightened leadership, whereas I see the need for less government power. But whether you are minarchist or socialist, you would benefit from reading Zinn’s books. His focus on the “out” groups throughout history was unparalleled and under-appreciated. He will be missed.