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Forrester Blanchard Washington and his advocacy for African Americans in the new deal.

Article Excerpt
For six months in 1934, before the enactment of the Social Security Act, Forrester Blanchard Washington agitated for social change as director of Negro Work in the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) and used his reputation and accomplishments as a social work leader to create broad awareness of the negative consequences of the New Deal's social welfare policy for African Americans (Kirby, 1980). His advocacy is significant because his efforts represent social work's early attention to the need for work opportunities for African American people. Washington sought to change policies that placed African Americans on public assistance programs and that "reinforced the links of dependence and subordination" between them and elite white people (Lieberman, 2005, p. 65).

Washington's efforts were important to the evolution of social work in the United States because he advocated for a vulnerable African American population at a time when the profession, mirroring the broader society, generally offered little validation for their contributions to the cultural, social, and economic development of the country. Some leading white settlement house leaders and their associates, including Jane Addams, Louise de Koven, Frances Kellor, and John Daniels, blamed the social and economic problems of African Americans "on what they considered [to be] the weakness of the black family, the degradation of the black individual psyche and the annihilation of culture, all resulting from the system of slavery" (Lasch-Quinn, 1993, p. 13). The role of government and public policy in creating these problems was secondarily considered. The perspectives held by these settlement house movement leaders had long-term consequences in that they dominated the thinking of reformers who came after them (Lasch-Quinn). They helped create the social work climate in which Washington worked for equal employment for African Americans.

WASHINGTON'S BACKGROUND

Washington was born in 1887 in Salem, Massachusetts, where his New England location somewhat protected him during his formative years from the open racism that constrained the lives of his southern African American peers. Washington's family raised him in this comparatively tolerant environment and was able to provide him with the opportunity for a rich education, one that was exceptional for African Americans of that era (Barrow, 2002). Washington graduated from Tufts College (now University) in 1909, completing a classical curriculum (Tufts University, 1950). He pursued a post-baccalaureate degree in economics at Harvard University from 1912 to 1914 (Harvard University Archives, 2000) and graduated from Columbia University with a master's degree in social economy in 1917 (Columbia University, 1925). Washington also trained at the New York School of Social Work, with support from a National Urban League (NUL) fellowship.

In the ensuing years, Washington held a number of important leadership positions. He served as the first director of the Detroit Urban League, where he assisted African American migrants in gaining employment. He became director of an NUL affiliate in Philadelphia in 1923 (Barrow, 2002), and three years later he became the director and an educator at the Atlanta School of Social Work (Carlton-LaNey, 1999). It was from this position that Washington was recruited to become director of Negro Work in FERA in February 1934 (Barrow).

Washington was always concerned with the broader social, political, and economic needs of African Americans. In both the North and the South, he took an early stand on the importance of African American employment and self-help because he believed that personal integrity emanated from employment and self-sufficiency (Barrow, 2002). In the 1920s he conducted a newspaper crusade against housing conditions and landlord exploitation in Philadelphia that were contributing to high infant mortality rates and communicable disease in African American communities (Washington, 1925). When he became president of the Atlanta chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1936, Washington began to use cases brought to the NAACP to challenge and publicize the inequities faced by the entire African American community. In the past, the focus had been on only individual circumstances. Moving away from the politics of conciliation and accommodation, in Atlanta Washington helped mobilize interest groups to exert political pressure, conducted voter registration drives to develop an electoral constituency, and used black-owned newspapers to get the word out about issues pertinent to the African American community (Ferguson, 2002).

THE GREAT DEPRESSION, THE NEW DEAL, AND AFRICAN AMERICANS

The Great Depression called for bold new action to alleviate the widespread suffering resulting from the collapse of the economy in 1929 and a massive drought from Virginia to Arkansas. Jobs had been lost, not only because of the economic downturn, but also because new farming technologies had displaced thousands of workers (Day, 2006). When the Hoover administration failed to find remedies to the nation's problems, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president in 1932 with the hope that he could help Americans climb out of crisis. In the first 100 days of his administration, Congress passed a great deal of legislation to address unemployment, "to promote economic recovery and [to] strengthen government regulation of the economy" (American Social History Project, 1992, p. 347).

One piece of legislation enacted in May 1933 was the Federal Emergency Relief...