ABSTRACT
Some New Deal agencies, like the National Youth Administration and the US Housing Authority, appointed blacks to look after black interests. Southern Congressmen made the first 100 days of the New Deal possible, and later, after the urgency had passed, many Southerners continued to help the New Deal: Robinson of Arkansas, the Bankheads of Alabama, Barkley of Kentucky, Patman and Rayburn and Johnson of Texas. The Southern Democrats controlled the party in Congress; not having changed themselves, they opposed change–social and much business legislation and all civil rights efforts. Once economic circumstance nudged the black off the Southern farm and into Northern industry, the migration snowballed, propelled by secondary forces. Southern whites resented having to compete with blacks for disappearing jobs and feared that Northern egalitarianism would spread southward. For in the 1930s Washington was a Southern city, predominantly segregated, though like the nation it was changing.
