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 farmworkers 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.
( Ta-Nehisi Coates )
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