Among these urban phenomena, all of which claimed black New Jerseyans as members, were the Nation of Islam and the United House of Prayer of All People of Daddy Grace. Also, perhaps as a reaction to the despair and pervasive gloom that beset many African Americans, several black religious sects, radically different from traditional black Baptist and Methodist churches, gained significant followings. These services included providing food, clothing, and housing for the needy. For example, black churches were spurred to widen their services to the community considerably. Some of these efforts were directed toward ameliorating the misery derived from the economic crisis. While the Great Depression generally caused black people to uproot themselves less than in the 1920s, organizational activity among them increased, prompted no doubt by conditions associated with the Great Depression. New Jersey was part of this cycle workers came to the state to work primarily on produce farms in South and Central Jersey. Many were part of a major migratory cycle in which workers started in Florida in the spring, worked their way northward and completed the fall harvest in the North, then returned to Florida to begin the cycle anew. The Great Depression did, however, increase the number of African American migrant workers. Because the Great Depression appreciably reduced employment opportunities in the North for blacks, the pace of southern black emigration slowed considerably during the thirties (an estimated three hundred thousand blacks left the South during this period). The Agricultural Assistance Agency’s crop subsidy program, for example, actually led to the displacement of about 192,000 black sharecroppers because, contrary to the program’s rules, they failed to receive any portion of the federal funds given white planters for reducing cotton production. Finally, some New Deal policies had disastrous consequences for blacks. Further, racial wage differentials (wages for blacks averaged 30 percent less than for whites) caused African Americans to experience the Great Depression in harsher terms than whites. Black unemployment was also aided by the racist attitude that whites should not be without work while blacks were employed this resulted in whites moving blacks out of jobs they had traditionally occupied (such as porters, elevator operators, trash collectors). For example, because African Americans were concentrated in those jobs and industries most sensitive to economic cycles and were the “last hired and first fired,” they became jobless in disproportionate numbers. The reasons for greater black suffering during the Great Depression are linked to racial discrimination. In 1935, 25 percent of the black population was receiving welfare as opposed to 15 percent of whites. Also, the percentage of African Americans receiving welfare was higher than that of whites. And in spring 1933 while the general unemployment rate was 25 percent, for blacks it was 50 percent. ![]() For example, among male workers in thirteen large cities in 1931 the rate was 31.7 percent for whites and 52 percent for blacks. ![]() Throughout this economic crisis unemployment rates were considerably higher for blacks than for whites. The nation’s most devastating economic downturn, the Great Depression, affected blacks more adversely than any other group of Americans.
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