One of the chief New Deal programs, the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) was quite destructive to Black sharecroppers in the south. Howard Zinn in A People’s History of the United States estimates that of the 6,800,000 farmers in the south, 2,800,000 were tenant farmers who consisted of entirely poor Blacks and Whites (1980). As a result of the AAA, which encouraged farmers to artificially raise the price of their crops by burning a select amount of them, many of these tenant farmers were forced off the land and into northern or southern cities where they would find no work and hostile racial conditions.

Certain changes in banking regulations led by the Federal Housing Administration made it significantly more difficult for African-Americans to purchase homes as compared to White Americans. The FHA essentially created two segregated housing markets for Whites and Blacks by forcing Blacks to pay a much larger down payment in order to purchase a home whilst also forcing them to make higher monthly payments. The FHA also created a rating system primarily based on race, with lower housing being designated for Black areas and higher value housing for White areas. Because of this criteria only 2% of FHA insured mortgages were given to non-Whites thus forcing Blacks into rentership rather than ownership (Gordon, 2005).

The Wagner Act while highly productive and beneficial to the White working class, allowed labor unions to disinclude Black working men and deny them access to union protections and benefits including but not limited to retirement, job security, and health care benefits. This is an issue that permeated across decades and to this day many labor unions are still non-inclusive and predominantly White both in the northern and southern regions of the United States. It should be noted that Senator Wagner wanted to include a clause protecting the rights of African-American workers but the AFL forced him to remove this particular clause and he did so (Lipsitz, 1995).

Perhaps the landmark piece of legislation from the Roosevelt presidency, the Social Security Act, specifically prohibited agricultural workers and domestic servants who were disproportionately African-American from being qualified for collecting benefits or contributing to the Social Security system. Typically these were professions where workers had scarce income and were unable to save substantial amounts of their personal income and were thus unable to transfer that wealth onto their children. This also meant that older African-American workers were left in poverty as they aged. This program specifically excluded Black workers based on race primarily because congress was controlled by wealthy Southern Democrats who historically had opposed the creation of a welfare system and forced them into a low-wage-job-or-bust poverty cycle (Conley, 1999).