The only issue I have is your timeline. The Plessy decision by the Supreme Court in 1896 made the “separate but equal” policy apply to the whole government. We look to the South, but it wasn’t applied to just the South. It was a whole of government approach since it was on a federal Supreme Court level, much like Roe v. Wade doesn’t apply to one abortion or one woman or one state.
When Woodrow Wilson got elected and made the federal workforce segregated, it was seen as allowable legally across the whole country because of the Plessy decision. By 1934, the nation had officially be living under the “separate but equal” policy for 38 years as a country. This meant it basically wasn’t even an issue when FDR made the act. He was after all a Democrat, which at the time meant the “Solid South” Democrats voted for him. The “blue” state South was not socialist. They were the KKK, the red shirts, the racists. All the blacks, I believe some 20 or 24 people, who were voted into office on the federal level were all southerners, and all a Republicans.
Blacks had a problem voting for Wilson, FDR, as they were in the party of racists who had strategized to repress the black vote. The Republican Party voted for civil rights and had blacks and whites in it. In effect, the Republican Party today would be the Democrats.
So when FDR voted all these bills, he did under the federal expectation and policy, constitutionally protected, that the monetary disbursements and treatment would be “separate but equal.” Nothing was equal in terms of treatment on the federal level. Passing the law meant allocating the money, benefits, and rights of all those laws you mention to his white racist Southern “base” who he needed for election and re-election.
We’ve been deeply fooled into believing FDR was a “socialist” helping blacks. Anything but. He made some words to the effect of how he helped “them”, but it was by dividing them into different work groups with lesser jobs under his “rebuild America” program. Wilson, a southern democrat by birth, also believed in the “America First” slogan, which today would be known as “MAGA”, though the term America First has also been used.
In effect, people point to FDR as a socialist helping blacks because they don’t know their history. Federal law is the law of the land and it is what makes the system the system. In other words, a country living under the Separate But Equal decision approved by the Supreme Court meant that the only logical outcome of all the laws FDR passed, and all the jobs programs and welfare programs and GI programs, would be under the rubric or framework of the segregationist policy in place. This meant blacks would get disparate treatment. And they did. There was nothing contradictory here in the law or how it was applied back them. FDR did nothing for blacks and civil rights because he did Not belong to that party.
The Republican that followed him later on, Eisenhower, passed the 1957 civil rights act, just as Lincoln was freed the slaves and believed in civil rights. Lincoln did not believe or fight perfectly, but was flawed in his approach morally, but the Democrats didn’t believe in civil rights for blacks at all, opposing them violently, and were against them, forming the Klan and the red shirts to stop civil rights.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, rather that the systemic racism in place by the federal government was far deeper than imagined, far more systemic.
It wasn’t until Brown versus Board of Education the ended school segregation, and not until 1964 that separate but equal would end not just at schools but in the voting booth.
In 1964 the Racist Klan Democrats, who worked so hard to suppress the black votes, quit the Democratic Party en masse after LBJ betrayed them completely by signing those laws MLK pressed him to sign. (You can check out my article The Great Democratic Massacres to see how it all started, the creation of the Solid South of racist Democrats executing a black politician in 1876 and killing many more during the voting period in order to win but also in order to permanently repress the blacks.)
Thanks. I do agree, but I’ve only just learned it was more systemic than you let on and certainly more than anyone else believes.