Submitted for coursework, spring 2019
Sklaroff locates significant roots of the Long Civil Rights Movement within Black cultural development that thrived as a result of the Federal Works Progress Administration programs. Winding her way through the political bureaucracy of New Deal and Cold War politics, Sklaroff presents a more nuanced framework within the age-old, Manichean struggle between agency and structure, widening the lens on Black and white leaders during the period. Using an impressive array of theatrical and other manuscripts within the Federal Works Progress Administration, Presidential papers, and a formidable index of periodicals, journals, and newspapers, Black Culture and the New Deal aims to demonstrate ways in which Black and white administrators, playwrights, and performers set the stage for successive movements as they negotiated for Black autonomy and equality.
According to some authors, Black Culture and the New Deal fits squarely within cultural histories that exemplify “quotidian forms of politics” (Glickman, 233). In six chapters, Sklaroff invites her readers on a journey that begins as FDR’s administration courted Black votes while eschewing Black equality. She develops the Federal Theater Project and the Federal Writers’ Project, demonstrating how not only did they help African Americans survive, but how many writers and playwrights (among them Richard Wright) saw the role of culture as emancipatory. The subsequent chapters analyze the phenomenon of Joe Louis, variety shows for servicemen, and how Black people interacted with the screen. In each case, Sklaroff describes African Americans stuck in dual roles meant to pacify Blacks while they also symbolized powerful forms of inspiration and autonomy. Joe Louis, for example, fought exhibition fights, yet he also was a Black man who beat up white men; in doing so he was able to transcend the role he had been given as many Black people internalized the pride he gave permission to take.
That the Roosevelt administration eagerly sought Black votes while hoping to assuage powerful Southern Democrats is no surprise. However, Sklaroff’s selective framing only depicts African Americans taking assertive steps within the context of ambivalent white benevolence. Readers are left to wonder how African Americans simultaneously equipped to exert creative and powerful influence within institutions like the WPA operated outside of these circumscribed contexts.
One of Sklaroff’s most fascinating use of sources is Sterling Brown’s unpublished history entitled “Portrait of the Negro in America.” Brown was significant not only as an African American historian but also as a national editor in the Federal Writer’s Project. Sklaroff’s use of this unpublished document shows how what does not reach the public can also contribute to significant change. Nevertheless, Sklaroff’s interpretations of the sources do not always consult the well-known scholarship of her time. Certainly, nobody would fault the author for collecting only what was germane to her study in the NAACP papers, yet works other works with more extensive attention could have, such as Carol Anderson’s Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955 (2003). Anderson could add a third and necessary dimension to her flattened read of Eleanor Roosevelt and Walter White. Sklaroff depicts Roosevelt as an initially reluctant but later uncompromising soldier for Civil Rights. In fact, Sklaroff opens her book with Eleanor’s lamentation about her husband’s political impotence from her 1949 memoir, This I Remember, a book she penned just as she and Walter White undermined the struggle for Black equality due to the very same political vulnerability she had complained her husband had been compromised by.
Black Culture and the New Deal would be suitable for undergraduate courses to illustrate the Long Civil Rights Movement within a cultural and political context. It also contains fascinating descriptions of plays that may have fallen out of view that would be excellent primary source material. As many of these plays were rejected or edited, these sources, and so does Sklaroff, paint a much more nuanced picture of the many different ways African Americans creatively reacted to their surroundings.