Ta-Nehisi Coates Quote

But these progressives rarely note that Roosevelt's New Deal, much like the democracy that produced it, rested on the foundation of Jim Crow. The Jim Crow South, writes Ira Katznelson, a history and political science professor at Columbia, was the one collaborator America's democracy could not do without. The marks of that collaboration are all over the new Deal. The omnibus programs passed under the Social Security Act in 1935 were crafted in such a way as to protect the southern way of life. Old-age insurance (Social Security proper) and unemployment insurance excluded farm workers and domestics-jobs heavily occupied by blacks. When President Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, 65 percent of African Americans nationally and between 70 and 80 percent in the South were ineligible. The NAACP protested, calling the new American safety net a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through.