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problems of African Americans. The Justice Department’s Black adviser Robert Vann was recruited to chair the meeting, which included Black intellectuals, leaders and activists from across the nation. They met in Washington in September 1933 and for two days discussed strategies to speed up relief to Black communities. The high point of the conference came when Roper, while addressing the gathering, announced his plan to restore the recently eliminated African American post. He then asked the group to put forward names for the position. While the delegates may have been encouraged to hear that Commerce would hire a Black adviser, they agreed that no one person could handle the overwhelming needs of Black America. At the end of the meeting, they informed Roper that they had organized themselves into an official advisory committee. Although they insisted on being based in the Commerce Department, they demanded review power over all decisions affecting African Americans throughout the New Deal. John P. Davis seized the opportunity and lobbied for the department to include Weaver on the advisory committee. He was told no. While some noted that the Commerce Department’s advisory committee on African American affairs threatened to compete with Foreman’s office, no doubt many realized that it also had the potential to emerge as the New Deal’s Black Cabinet. But that hope died quickly. In the end, Roper named the Urban League’s Eugene Kinckle Jones to the Commerce post. Tall, charming and athletic, the Urban League executive, at the age of 48, was strikingly fit and distinguished. Raised in Richmond, VA, the son of two respected and race-conscious college professors, Jones had been given many opportunities, and he embraced the responsibility of challenging American racism. After earning degrees at Virginia Union and Cornell, he took a job as a field inspector for the Urban League in 1911. The organization was only a year old, and he fully embraced the chance to shape the Urban League’s programs dedicated to addressing the conditions faced by African Americans in the cities. In 1917, he became the organization’s executive secretary. Jones’s addition to the New Deal team was received with applause, in part prompted by Commerce Department press releases. The New York Times celebrated Jones as “one of the foremost authorities on the problems of Negro life in the cities.” Jones’s achievement was certainly a milestone. When he arrived on the job in late October 1933, he became the first upper-level leader of a national civil rights organization to occupy an advisory post in the federal government. Yet for Jones, the transition from Urban League head to Commerce Department adviser was rough. Despite his efforts to rise above the quarrels over his appointment, he entered office under a cloud of suspicion. Additionally, to some Jones seemed a bad fit. A nationally recognized specialist in Black labor, he now headed a division dedicated to the recovery and expansion of Black businesses. Although Jones was hired at $5,600 a year (a respectable salary although lower than that of other New Deal officials) and given a spacious suite with two offices, he had no staff and no authority to pursue projects or investigations. It quickly appeared that his role in New Deal relief, outside of serving as the subject of a publicity campaign, was murky at best. Jones soon found himself under a mountain of complaints regarding New Deal inequalities, many from the Urban League itself. With no resources, he was blocked from offering any response. The fanfare around Jones’s appointment was certainly not enough to satisfy those demanding that Roosevelt respond to the crises in Black America. Stories of African Americans struggling against poverty filled the pages of the nation’s Black newspapers. Already cash-poor communities watched helplessly as food and fuel prices started to rise when National Recovery Administration wage and price regulations kicked in. As the cost of living increased, Black incomes continued to plummet. One African American journalist reported that “a conservative estimate would place 90 percent of Harlem’s population in the breadline.” Howard University Professor Kelly Miller urged African Americans to abandon cities and return to the countryside, where they might make a living off the land. “The city Negro has no definite function or assured status,” he told The New York Times. “The farm is the Negro’s best chance and the best help the government can render him in this emergency is to aid him to avail himself of this chance.” Foreman agreed and began to advocate for African Americans to be admitted to the programs run by the Division of Subsistence Homesteads, which placed families on collective farms to communally work the land. Those programs had only accepted white applicants and turned away Black Americans seeking aid. Far from making him more popular, Foreman’s proposal actually damaged his reputation further. He did not advocate for African Americans to be integrated into preexisting projects. Instead he called for separate Blacks-only collective farms. Such plans convinced some Black leaders that the white southerner was really in the business of promoting segregation. Furthermore, the justice system continued to fail Black citizens in the most horrific ways. Throughout the summer and fall of 1933, the national media was filled with stories of the “Scottsboro Boys,” nine African American youths, ranging in age from 13 to 20, who had been arrested for allegedly gang-raping two young white women. While there were both Black and white Americans who spoke out on behalf of the accused, establishing that the charges were groundless, in late fall two of the nine were found guilty and sentenced to die in the electric chair by an Alabama jury. (All nine were much later exonerated.) About the same time, George Armstrong of Princess Anne, MD, was jailed for an alleged assault of a white woman. While he awaited a hearing and an opportunity to defend himself, a white mob pushed past 25 state police officers assigned to protect him, dragged him through the town, hung him and then burned his body. Just over 130 miles away, in Washington, DC, President Roosevelt sat silent in the White House. Jill Watts is a professor of history at California State University San Marcos. In addition to The Black Cabinet, she is also the author of Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood. This article has been adapted from The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt, by Jill Watts (Grove Press, 2020). Used by permission of the publisher. www.MoAF.org | Summer 2020 | FINANCIAL HISTORY 25