Southern congressional power deliberately excluded Black workers from New Deal social programs

Evidence

During the 1930s, Southern congressmen headed many of the key committees in Congress. They used this power to ensure that New Deal measures did not threaten the nation’s racial stratification. For example, as the Columbia University historian Ira Katznelson and others have documented, it was largely at the behest of Southern Democrats that farm and domestic workers—who made up more than half the nation’s workforce at the time, and an even higher percentage of the Black workforce—were excluded from New Deal policies, including the Social Security Act; the Wagner Act, which ensured the right of workers to collective bargaining; and the Fair Labor Standards Act, which set a minimum wage and established the eight-hour workday. The same voting bloc ensured that states controlled crucial programs like Aid to Dependent Children and the 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, better known as the GI Bill. In the South, especially, state leaders then excluded Black Americans from these programs through a variety of dubious mechanisms, including by creating onerous and subjective tests for determining need. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1170

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reading purpose’s core reframing case: the structural exclusion of Black Americans from foundational social-welfare programs is a specific contested empirical claim supporting ‘foundational, not peripheral.’ The Katznelson documentation is a named historian source useful for the case-study methodology. — connects to: Southern Democrats used labor law to block CIO-driven voter realignment — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 211; Targeted Southern Democrats carried anti-union lawmaking to Congress and HUAC — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 226
• SEED: The GI Bill and New Deal exclusions as a concrete proof-point for how origin stories shape policy design—who counts as a ‘worker’ in the American origin story.
• SHARE: The detail that farm/domestic workers made up more than half the workforce yet were excluded from Social Security, the Wagner Act, and the FLSA—worth sharing with anyone interested in labor or welfare history.