The United States
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Prior to 1932, African Americans had traditionally voted Republican, the party of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1932 promise of a "New Deal for all Americans" caused only a slight shift toward the Democratic Party. Some African Americans voted instead for the Communist Party, whose vice-presidential candidate was an African American, James W. Ford. By 1936, the voting picture had changed dramatically.
In the Presidential election, Franklin Delano Roosevelt did not receive much of the African American vote. To a certain extent the African American still identified with the Republican Party. Also, Roosevelt's running mate, John Nance Garner was a Texan. In Chicago, for example, Roosevelt received only 23% of the African American vote. Another factor in the low African American vote for Roosevelt may have been that James W. Ford, an African American, was the Vice Presidential candidate of the Communist Party.
However, Roosevelt soon became extremely popular, due to the ties which he and Mrs. Roosevelt established with prominent African Americans. Roosevelt employed African American advisors in numbers much greater than previous Administrations. The "Black Cabinet" included: Robert Vann, assistant to the Attorney General; William Hastie, Assistant Solicitor, in the Department of Interior; Eugene Kinckle Jones, adviser on Negro Affairs in the Department of Commerce; Lawrence Oxley, in the Division of Negro Labor in the Department of Labor; Mary McLeod Bethune, director of the Division of Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration; Edgar Brown, adviser on Negro Affairs in the Civilian Conservation Corps; Frank Horne, in several capacities with Federal housing programs; and William Trent as a race relations adviser in the Department of the Interior and in the Public Works Agency.
Four years later, in 1936, grateful for President Roosevelt's relief programs and record number of African American appointments to high offices, as well as for First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt's advocacy of civil rights, African Americans voted overwhelmingly Democratic -- setting a pattern that continued into the future.
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Faced with agricultural distress and racial oppression in the South, a new wave of African American migration began into the major industrial centers of the North in search of economic and social opportunities.
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Academic Achievements
*Frederick Douglas Patterson, received a Ph.D. in Agricultural Science from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.
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Academic Achievements
*Frederick Douglas Patterson, received a Ph.D. in Agricultural Science from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.
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George Washington Carver
In 1932, the writer James Saxon Childers wrote that Carver and his peanut products were almost solely responsible for the rise in United States peanut production after the boll weevil devastated the American cotton crop beginning about 1892. His article, "A Boy Who Was Traded for a Horse" (1932), in The American Magazine, and its 1937 reprint in Reader's Digest, contributed to this legend about Carver's influence.
The Communist Party
*The Communist Party selected an African American, James W. Ford, as its vice-presidential candidate.
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Economic Endeavors
*Asa T. Spaulding (1902-1990) became the first African American actuary in the United States.
After earning a magna cum laude degree in accounting from New York University in 1930, and an M. A. from the University of Michigan in 1932, Asa Spaulding went to work for the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company of Durham, North Carolina. He became president of the company in 1959 and retired in 1968. He was also the first African American president of the company in 1959 and retired in 1968. He was also the first African American to serve on the board of directors of a major non-African American corporation, W. T. Grant (1964), and the first African American elected to the Durham County Board of Commissioners. He is a member of the state Business Hall of Fame.
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W. E. B. DuBois
In 1932, Du Bois was selected by several philanthropies – including the Phelps-Stokes Fund, the Carnegie Corporation, and the General Education Board – to be the managing editor for a proposed Encyclopedia of the Negro, a work Du Bois had been contemplating for 30 years. After several years of planning and organizing, the philanthropies cancelled the project in 1938, because some board members believed that Du Bois was too biased to produce an objective encyclopedia.
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In 1932, Du Bois was selected by several philanthropies – including the Phelps-Stokes Fund, the Carnegie Corporation, and the General Education Board – to be the managing editor for a proposed Encyclopedia of the Negro, a work Du Bois had been contemplating for 30 years. After several years of planning and organizing, the philanthropies cancelled the project in 1938, because some board members believed that Du Bois was too biased to produce an objective encyclopedia.
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Economic Endeavors
*Asa T. Spaulding (1902-1990) became the first African American actuary in the United States.
After earning a magna cum laude degree in accounting from New York University in 1930, and an M. A. from the University of Michigan in 1932, Asa Spaulding went to work for the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company of Durham, North Carolina. He became president of the company in 1959 and retired in 1968. He was also the first African American president of the company in 1959 and retired in 1968. He was also the first African American to serve on the board of directors of a major non-African American corporation, W. T. Grant (1964), and the first African American elected to the Durham County Board of Commissioners. He is a member of the state Business Hall of Fame.
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Educational Institutions
*Among the 117 African American institutions of higher education, 36 were public, 81 were private (74 of which were church-affiliated), and 5 offered graduate-level instruction. Before 1937, only five offered graduate level education.
*Between 1913 and 1932, the Rosenwald Fund had aided in the construction of more than 5,000 school buildings for the education of African Americans in 15 Southern states. African Americans contributed 17% of the money disbursed by the Fund.
*Howard University began publishing the Journal of Negro Education.
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Father Divine
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By May 1932, meetings were regularly held of Father Divine's followers at Rockland and throughout New York and New Jersey. Father Divine had supporters in Washington state, California and throughout the world thanks to New Thought devotees like Eugene Del Mar, an early convert and former Harlem journalist, and Henry Joerns, the publisher of a New Thought magazine in Seattle. Curiously, although the movement was predominantly black, followers outside the Northeast were mostly middle class whites.
In this period of expansions, several branch communes were opened in New York and New Jersey. Father Divine's followers finally named the movement: the International Peace Mission Peace Mission movement.
Father Divine's trial was finally held on May 24, 1932. His lawyer, Ellee J. Lovelace, a prominent Harlem African American and former United States Attorney had requested the trial be moved outside of Suffolk County, due to potential jury bias. The court acquiesced, and the trial took place at the Nassau County Supreme Court before Justice Lewis J. Smith. The jury found him guilty on June 5 but asked for leniency on behalf of Father Divine. Ignoring this request, Justice Smith lectured on how Father Divine was a fraud and "menace to society" before issuing the maximum sentence for disturbing the peace, one year in prison and a $500 fine.
Smith, 55, died of a heart attack days later on June 9, 1932. Father Divine was widely reported to have commented on the death, "I hated to do it." In fact, he wrote to his followers, "I did not desire Judge Smith to die.… I did desire that MY spirit would touch his heart and change his mind that he might repent and believe and be saved from the grave."
The impression that Justice Smith's death was divine retribution was perpetuated by the press, which failed to report Smith's prior heart problems and implied the death to be more sudden and unexpected than it was.
During his brief prison stay, Father Divine read prodigiously, notably on the Scottsboro Nine. After his attorneys secured release through an appeal on June 25, 1932, he declared that the foundational documents of the United States of America, such as the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, were inspired. Father Divine also taught that contemporary leaders strayed from these ideals, but he would become increasingly patriotic through his life.
Father Divine moved to Harlem, New York, where he had accumulated significant following in the black community. Members, rather than Father Divine himself, held most deeds for the movement, but they contributed toward Father Divine's comfortable lifestyle. Purchasing several hotels, which they called "Heavens", members could live and seek jobs inexpensively. The movement also opened several budget enterprises, including restaurants and clothing shops, that sold cheaply by cutting overheads. These proved very successful in the depression. Economical, cash-only businesses were actually part of Father Divine's doctrine.
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The Labor Movement
*Ten African Americans were killed when European American employees of the Illinois Central Railroad tried to prevent African Americans from working there.
Law
*The United States Supreme Court decided Nixon v. Condon (May 2).
Nixon v. Condon, 286 U. S. 73 (1932), was a voting rights case decided by the United States Supreme Court, which found the all-white Democratic Party primary in Texas unconstitutional. This was one of four cases brought to challenge the Texas all-white Democratic Party primary. All challenges were supported by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (the NAACP).
In Nixon v. Herndon (1927), the Court had struck down a Texas statute that prohibited blacks from participating in the Texas Democratic primary election. Very shortly after that decision, the Texas Legislature repealed the invalidated statute, declared that the effect of the Nixon decision was to create an emergency requiring immediate action, and replaced the old statute with a new one. The new law provided that every political party would henceforth "in its own way determine who shall be qualified to vote or otherwise participate in such political party."
Under the authority of this law, the executive committee of the Texas Democratic Party adopted a resolution stating that "all white democrats who are qualified under the constitution and laws of Texas" would be allowed to vote. In the 1928 Democratic primary, Dr. L.A. Nixon of El Paso again tried to vote. He was again denied, on the ground that the resolution allowed only whites to vote (Nixon was black). Nixon sued the judges of elections in federal court.
The defendants argued that there was no state action and therefore no equal protection violation, because the Democratic Party was "merely a voluntary association" that had the power to choose its own membership.
The Court, however, in a five to four ruling, reasoned that because the Texas statute gave the party's executive committee the authority to exclude would-be members of the party – an authority, the Court said, that the executive committee hitherto had not possessed – the executive committee was acting under a state grant of power. Because there was state action, the case was controlled by Nixon v. Herndon (1927), which prohibited state officials from "discharg[ing] their official functions in such a way as to discriminate invidiously between white citizens and black."
The Court's decision affected all-white primaries in other Southern states.
The Democratic Party in Texas responded by barring blacks from participation in the party nominating conventions, and thus effectively continuing the white primary.
Grovey v. Townsend (1935) and Smith v. Allwright (1944) were additional cases brought by African Americans to challenge Texas white primaries. With the latter, the Supreme Court decisively prohibited white primaries.
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*The United States Supreme Court decided Powell v. Alabama, overturning the convictions of the Scottsboro Boys (November 7).
In Powell v. Alabama, 287 U. S. 45 (1932), the United States Supreme Court reversed the convictions of nine young African American men for allegedly raping two European American women on a freight train near Scottsboro, Alabama. The majority of the Court reasoned that the right to retain and be represented by a lawyer was fundamental to a fair trial and that at least in some circumstances, the trial judge must inform a defendant of this right. In addition, if the defendant cannot afford a lawyer, the court must appoint one sufficiently far in advance of trial to permit the lawyer to prepare adequately for the trial.
Powell was the first time the Court had reversed a state criminal conviction for a violation of a criminal procedural provision of the United States Bill of Rights. In effect, the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment Due Process Clause included at least part of the right to counsel referred to in the Sixth Amendment, making that much of the Bill of Rights binding on the states as well as the federal government. Before Powell, the Court had reversed state criminal convictions only for racial discrimination in jury selection — a practice that violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Literature and Journalism
*Countee Cullen published his only novel, One Way to Harlem.
*Wallace Thurman's novel Infants of the Spring was published. It is considered to be one of the last novels of the Harlem Renaissance.
*Rudolph Fisher published The Conjure Man Dies, the first African American detective novel.
*Victor Daly's novel, Not Only War, an attack on racism within the United States Army during World War I, was published. The novel concerns the racial tensions over French women.
*The James Weldon Johnson Literary Guild conducted a nationwide poetry contest for African American children. One winner was Margaret Walker of New Orleans with her poem "When Night Comes."
*James Weldon Johnson, educator, lyricist, consul, author, editor, poet, and civil rights activist, was appointed to teach creative writing at Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee, where he held the Adam K. Spence Chair of Creative Literature and Writing, becoming the first poet to teach creative writing at a black college (January).
Medicine
*The Tuskegee syphilis experiment began.
The Tuskegee syphilis experiment was a clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972 in Tuskegee, Alabama, by the United States Public Health Service. In the experiment, 400 impoverished black males who had syphilis were offered "treatment" by the researchers, who did not tell the test subjects that they had syphilis and did not give them treatment for the disease, but rather just studied them to chart the progress of the disease. By 1947, penicillin became available as treatment, but those running the study prevented study participants from receiving treatment elsewhere, lying to them about their true condition, so that they could observe the effects of syphilis on the human body. By the end of the study in 1972, only 74 of the test subjects were alive. 28 of the original 399 men had died of syphilis, 100 were dead of related complications, 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children were born with congenital syphilis. The study was not shut down until 1972, when its existence was leaked to the press, forcing the researchers to stop in the face of a public outcry.
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Music
*Thomas Dorsey, the "Father of Gospel", established the first music publishing firm dedicated only to gospel music.
*Duke Ellington and his orchestra first recorded the classic jazz tune "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)" (February 2).
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*Duke Ellington and his orchestra first recorded the classic jazz tune "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)" (February 2).
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*The NAACP published "Mississippi River Slavery - 1932" after investigating the conditions of African-American workers on federal flood-control projects. It would lead to a United States Senate investigation and to the setting of federal standards for minimum conditions and wages.
The NAACP published 10,000 copies of a leaflet, Mississippi River Slavery - 1932. It was the result of an investigation made by Roy Wilkins and George Schuyler into conditions on Federal flood-control projects. Wilkins and Schuyler carried out their investigations by working on some projects. In 1933, Senate investigations began and resulted in the government setting minimum standards for conditions and for wages for all workers.
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The Nation of Islam
*Communist attempts at infiltration of the Black Muslim movement proved unsuccessful.
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