Racism
was rampant among the African American workers in the railroad industry. Although they
were well-trained and well-educated, they were only given blue-collar jobs such
as porters. During the Great Depression, unionized white workers and the
railroad brotherhoods in southern railroads used violence to intimidate, and
even murdered the blacks just to take their jobs from them. Despite the
continuous suffering and discrimination, Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal program’ was
only of little help to African American people. This urged the blacks to participate
more in social movements and exert more efforts to progress their contribution
in the New Deal coalition facilitated by the Congress of Industrial
Organization (CIO) in 1935.
