The Great Depression Essays

The Great Depression started in 1929, when people were left homeless, many people were unemployed, and banks even had to shut down. The government tried to make programs to help with this issue but they all failed and were a great waste of money. Overproduction and underconsumption made companies make too many products that people weren’t buying.

Margin buyers were a huge cause of the stock market crash. This marked the first day of the Great Depression. The farming industry was a big portion of how the U.S. made money. So when farmers started to overproduce crops and spend too much money on these said crops it also led to the economy collapsing. Businesses had to start lowering prices on goods, because of this. As more people started to put money into the stock market more people would lose tons of money. People didn’t realize how much money affected the country. When there was no more money left to put in stocks the market slowly started to decline until there was no money left. Because there was no money left, people couldn’t make money to buy the products companies were making, which led to many big companies declining. World War I was also another huge cause of the Great Depression because the U.S. gave our money to other countries for aid. The destruction caused by World War I was horrible, leading to the U.S. lending other countries money for relief. Giving billions of billions of dollars to help rebuild this destruction was another main reason for the economic crash. The Great Depression caused many struggles for the American people, people didn’t have the proper resources to have a good quality of life. All of this caused Americans to go into a frenzy, people demanded money, the money we did not have. This was not the life American people were used to. The dust bowl was a huge drought that came along with the Great Depression, The southern planes of the U.S. were affected the most. During this period African Americans suffered from racial discrimination and were forced to migrate.

People of color have been discriminated against for years and years, and this discrimination did not just up and stop in the 1930s. Sure this time was difficult for all racial groups but Black men had to give up their jobs for white men. The only jobs Black men would have obtained at this time were things like coal miners, field workers, busboys, etc. According to the Library of Congress, the unemployment rate of African Americans in 1932 was around 50%, In the south, this percentage was twofold that of the white men percentage of unemployment. A huge number of African American farmers fell under obligation to join the Migration from the rustic South to the Urban North. During this migration, roughly 1.75 Million African Americans migrated from the south to the North and West. All of this caused a great depression in the African American community, which affected them till the 1960s. Nevertheless, African Americans prospered through the Great Depression by creating organizations like the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), Migrating, and voting for president Roosevelt to try and improve their rights. In 1929 The Grassroots protest was led by Chicago Whip editorial manager Joseph which led to the bringing of jobs to 2,000 African American men. The time of 1930s saw the development of African American activism that forecasted the Civil Rights Movement. For a considerable amount of time before the Great Depression, African Americans had customarily voted in favor of the republican party, in 1932 African American votes shifted to the democratic party. But President Roosevelt required the help of southern Democrats to pass his New Deal Motivation, he did not advocate for banning lynching or stopped the hostility, which kept several African Americans from casting a ballot. By 1936 around 70 percent of African Americans voted in favor of Roosevelt, even though Roosevelt helped African Americans it was not nearly enough to stop racial discrimination. Now White Americans also suffered through the Great Depression, everyone did, but it was not nearly as bad as African Americans.

In conclusion, The Great Depression was a very rough patch in American History. With the economy collapsing, Stock markets crashing, and the number of unemployed men being the highest it’s ever been, everyone struggled through the 1930s. African Americans barely managed to get through this time by creating organizations, Migrating, and voting for Roosevelt. Voting for Roosevelt was just a temporary solution as this did not solve all of the Racial discrimination and Lynching. The 1930s American south was no place for an African American man or woman