Social Welfare History Project Eras in Social Welfare History Page 15

Congress of Racial Equality

The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) pioneered direct nonviolent action in the 1940s before playing a major part in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Founded by an interracial group of pacifists at the University of Chicago in 1942, CORE used nonviolent tactics to challenge segregation in Northern cities during the 1940s. Members staged sit-ins at Chicago area restaurants and challenged restrictive housing covenants. Early expansion beyond the University of Chicago brought students from across the Midwest into the organization, and whites made up a majority of the membership into the early 1960s.

What Religion Means to Me (1932)

Article by Eleanor Roosevelt, Forum, 1932. “…in all cases the thing which counts is the striving of the human soul to achieve spiritually the best that it is capable of and to care unselfishly not only for personal good but for the good of all those who toil with them upon the earth.”

New Governmental Interest in the Arts (1934)

Eleanor Roosevelt’s speech before the Twenty-Fifth Annual Convention of the American Federation of Artists in 1934. “Go ahead and make this thing as beautiful as you can make it…make of this thing something that really was the expression of a “love”–a piece of work that was done because he loved to do it.”

Keepers of Democracy (1939)

By Eleanor Roosevelt, 1939. “If you are in the South someone tells you solemnly that all the members of the Committee of Industrial Organization are Communists, or that the Negroes are all Communists. This last statement derives from the fact that, being for the most part unskilled labor, Negroes are more apt to be organized by the Committee for Industrial Organization. In another part of the country someone tells you solemnly that the schools of the country are menaced because they are all under the influence of Jewish teachers and that the Jews, forsooth, are all Communists. And so it goes, until finally you realize that people have reached a point where anything which will save them from Communism is a godsend; and if Fascism or Nazism promises more security than our own democracy, we may even turn to them.”

Woman’s Place After the War (1944)

“Will women want to keep their jobs after the war is over?” When I asked Miss Mary Anderson of the Bureau of Women in Industry, she told me it all boils down to economic necessity. Married women usually keep their jobs only when they have real need for money at home. This, of course, does not mean that women who take up some kind of work as a career will not stay in that work if they like it, whether they are married or single.

Lasting Values of the WPA

Written by Ellen Woodward, WPA Assistant Administrator in charge of the Division of Women’s and Professional Projects. “No one can better appreciate the lasting values of the work relief program than we women, for its results affect primarily that which is closest to our hearts–the home.”

Hot Lunches for a Million School Children

One million undernourished children have benefited by the Works Progress Administration’s school lunch program. In the past year and a half 80,000,000 hot well-balanced meals have been served at the rate of 500,000 daily in 10,000 schools throughout the country.

Washington Sweatshop (1937)

by Robert S. Allen, The Nation July 17, 1937. Wage-hour legislation was a campaign issue in the 1936 Presidential race.

Outlining the New Deal Program (1933)

A Radio Address by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Sunday, May 7, 1933.

We Do Our Part–But… (1933)

Article by Ira DeA. Reid in Opportunity, Journal of Negro Life (September, 1933). “Three million Negro workers, more than half of the total number of Negroes who must labor for their livelihood, will not be covered by the industrial codes now being formulated by the NRA!”