Roosevelt's Forest Army · Episode 9 of 14 · 28 min
The CCC's Jim Crow: 250,000 Black Men, Segregated by Order
The CCC offered relief and skills to roughly a quarter-million Black men and wrote Jim Crow into federal policy to do it. The episode tells that contradiction through Director Robert Fechner's 1935 order for complete segregation, laying out both the opportunity and the exclusion without erasing either.
Who's who
- Robert Fechner+5 more episodesCCC director who ordered and defended segregation
- Oscar De Priest+1 more episodeIllinois congressman who inserted the non-discrimination clause
- Thomas L. Griffith Jr.Los Angeles NAACP president who protested segregation in 1935
- Harold Ickes+6 more episodesInterior Secretary who pressed for Black supervisors and advisers
- Frances Perkins+3 more episodesLabor Secretary who helped design the CCC
- John B. ScottBlack enrollee at the Grand Canyon in 1935
Where it happens
- Grand Canyon, Arizona+1 more episodeWhere enrollee John B. Scott worked in Company 818
- Camp Castaic, Angeles National Forest, CaliforniaAll-Black company among many all-white camps
- Rockport, TexasGoose Island camp illustrating a statewide pattern
Timeline
- March 31, 1933Founding act bars discrimination by race, color, or creed
- July 1935Fechner orders complete segregation of enrollees
- September 21, 1935Fechner writes that segregation is not discrimination
- 1936Nearly all Black enrollees in segregated companies
- 1942Congress ends CCC funding
Still debated
Estimates of total Black enrollment range from over 200,000 to as many as 350,000, and camp counts are snapshots of a changing system. Fechner claimed equal treatment, but evidence of unequal assignments and advancement contradicts that.
← PreviousHow the CCC Put a Library, a Newspaper, and an Artist in Every CampNext →The CCC Indian Division: A New Deal on the Reservations
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