Hoover Dam Story

It has been said that if the Great depression years were bad for whites in this country, then it was worse than that for blacks and other minorities.  African Americans suffered more than whites, since their jobs were often taken away from them and given to whites. In 1930, 50 percent of blacks were unemployed. However, Eleanor Roosevelt championed black rights, and New Deal programs prohibited discrimination. Discrimination continued in the South, however, as a result a large number of black voters switched from the Republican to the Democrat party during the Depression.

 In 1929, the Great Depression devastated the United States. Hard times came to people throughout the country, especially rural blacks. Cotton prices plunged from eighteen to six cents a pound. Two thirds of some two million black farmers earned nothing or went into debt. Hundreds of thousands of sharecroppers left the land for the cities, leaving behind abandoned fields and homes. Even "Negro jobs" -- jobs traditionally held by blacks, such as busboys, elevator operators, garbage men, porters, maids, and cooks -- were sought by desperate unemployed whites. In Atlanta, Georgia, a Klan-like group called the Black Shirts paraded carrying signs that read, "No jobs for niggers until every white man has a job." In other cities, people shouted "Niggers back to the cotton fields. City jobs are for white men." And in Mississippi, where blacks traditionally held certain jobs on trains, several unemployed white men, seeking train jobs, ambushed and killed the black workers.

As one would imagine, this same institutional racism prevailed with the Six Companies hiring practices at the Hoover Dam construction site.  Whites even served in the lowliest of jobs at the dam, such as latrine cleaner.  "Alabam," a white worker from Alabama was too old to do the physical labor of the regular jobs, so he was assigned to clean the onsite latrines.  This clearly would have been a job for blacks, but times were hard and whites were eager to accept these jobs...any job, to the exclusion of blacks.

Click here for more on blacks and the making of Hoover Dam. 

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