How Long Is This Post? 5, 000 words, 25 minutes. Read/watch at your leisure (this post is on the Non-Boring History site, like everything else I write). Ready? Fill your Non-Boring History mug with your favorite beverage, pop on your NBH shirt so everyone knows not to disturb you, get your headphones, and take a comfy seat.

Note from Annette

Nothing says “Welcome to 2023” like me getting excited about the New Deal! Right, everyone?

Absolutely!

Wait, Laing. . . What? Um . . . Don’t you mean you’re excited about the New Year?

No, I don’t mean I'm excited about the New Year. I mean I'm excited about the New Deal. I’m excited by the massive recovery program led by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s and early Forties!

UK readers: Nearest UK equivalent in terms of impact is the 1945 Labour Government giving Brits the NHS

Yeah, okay, the New Deal. How, um, festive . . . So this means we’re not leaving behind your FDR obsession in 2022?

Impossible, I’m afraid. FDR is following me . . . Listen. I think I hear squeaky wheels coming down the hallway now . . .

Look, humor me. When you look out your window, what do you see? Perhaps, like me, you see a snowy winter wonderland . . . Oh, wait, it all melted. Never mind. But if you’re in a US city, and you don’t have snow, look at the sidewalks. Imagine the sewers below. Think of flushing your toilet.

Yes, this is getting more celebratory by the minute . . . (What the . . .?)

Think of your old high school auditorium. How old was it, exactly? Think of the visitor center and cabins at your favorite state or national park. Think of that impressive old bridge you crossed going to work this morning, with your fingers crossed, hoping that it’s still structurally sound. If you live out in the country, think of affordable electricity coming into your home.

Chances are good that all of these thingies came from a New Deal program. They were built to last. And they have.

The good news: This infrastructure is nearly a century old, and we’re still using it!

The bad news: This infrastructure is nearly a century old, and we’re still using it.

Indeed, we’ve barely lifted a finger since to maintain, renovate, and replace all this Depression-era accomplishment. We've simply lived off the hard work of the Greatest Generation, with their shovels, who did all this, and then went off to fight in WWII, and who loved FDR with all their hearts and souls.

We don’t reflect as we should that the New Deal accomplished this gobsmacking change during the Great Depression, when the US economy had all but collapsed.

Nor do we pause to wonder why, now, when we've just gone through a period of unprecedented economic growth in the US, large parts of the country, which I have visited in the past year (outside of wealthy enclaves, which I also visited), have a bit of a Third World vibe. Which is a nice way of saying they look pretty crap.

Take a good hard look at where you live, and you tell me.

Of course, that doesn’t apply if you live in a wealthy enclave, in which case, please get out more. I speak as someone who accidentally lived until 2019 in what was improbably rapidly becoming Metro Atlanta’s richest neighborhood. I knew well-off people who never traveled outside the Perimeter [UK: Think M25] except by plane, and who pretended they didn’t actually live in Georgia.

Even so, I don’t know how they could have missed the decrepitude that surrounded us. I mean, one massive pothole three blocks from us didn't get fixed until the guy who lived in the house next to it threw it a birthday party, complete with balloons 🎈 🎉. That isn't my lame joke. That actually happened.

Just like the fine, upstanding Southern white citizens of, say, Carbon Hill, Alabama, in the early 1930s who didn’t mind if poo literally floated down the street, so long as they didn’t have to pay for sewers and wastewater treatment. They agreed to provide matching funds to various New Deal projects for their town, and then congratulated themselves on their self-reliance, while happily accepting scads of federal funding provided by other taxpayers around the nation. I used to teach about this to my students in Georgia.

My conservative American readers may well be looking at me skeptically now. But hey, you want to save taxpayers money, right? And you also don’t want to ruin your car, or your shoes, I assume?

The New Deal gave great value to the taxpayer. Here, from Atlanta, just one of thousands of cities and towns that benefited from New Deal projects, are just a few examples of the New Deal that keeps on giving.

Here’s where Atlanta’s sewer system and first wastewater treatment plants came from, and when. What did citizens do before? Um, pollute the Chattahoochee River, that’s what.

Here’s Georgia State University’s Alumni Hall

Grand Art Deco building — This was originally a public auditorium in Atlanta. The New Deal paid to transform it into a magnificent Art Deco structure. It’s now Alumni Hall at Georgia State University. Image: Keizers Source

Here’s why Atlanta’s iconic Piedmont Park has sidewalks, streetlights, roads, and parking lots.

Road running through park — This photo from 1936 shows the new road, sidewalks, and streetlights, built with federal New Deal funds, that made Piedmont Park in Atlanta more accessible and safer for all. Image Source,

(British readers? Piedmont Park was originally designed in the late 19th century by BBC legend Bruce Forsyth’s great-grandad, Joseph Forsyth Johnson The New Deal improved it. Thought you’d enjoy that.)

The New Deal isn’t history. It’s now. Today, we'll meet Dr. Richard Walker, director of the Living New Deal, a brilliant program that wants us to stop thinking of the New Deal as “back then”, as something that died with FDR.

The Living New Deal wants us to look around now at all the incredibly well-built physical stuff the New Deal created.

Today, the US economy is much larger than it was in 1932, and it has boomed for decades. Yet, in that time, we have carried on relying on the New Deal’s bridges, roads, affordable housing (is that still even a thing?), school buildings, the rail network, and so much more, really. It's still here, still serving its intended purpose, after nearly 90 years. .

The creators and volunteers of the Living New Deal want you to see what a massive difference the New Deal made, bringing the United States into the 20th century. And they also want us to consider what's possible, what a difference we would make to 21st century America, if we invested in infrastructure again.

Living New Deal volunteers are photographing, researching, and mapping New Deal projects, and you (yes, you!) can help, sometimes equipped only with your smartphone, your car, and a love of detective work.

Have a look at the map they’re creating, and take a look around the Living New Deal site. The Living New Deal was recently profiled on PBS Newshour [UK Like BBC News, but with a lot less money, if you can imagine that].

On the map, you'll see just some of what Americans accomplished in the Thirties: There are almost certainly local New Deal legacies near you, just waiting for you to identify them, and share your findings with the Living New Deal.

This is, indeed, a living project, and it’s being created by people like us. Just like the New Deal itself.

Here’s my interview with Dr. Richard Walker, the enthusiastic and knowledgeable director of the Living New Deal. Okay, he’s a geographer, I admit grudgingly, but he gets an honorary history PhD from me here at NBH.

Prefer to read? You’ll find a transcript below, lightly edited for clarity.

Want to get involved in the Living New Deal? It’s like a really awesome scavenger [UK treasure] hunt. Loads of exciting opportunities to put your area's New Deal legacies on the map, and you can spend as much or as little time as you like. Visit the Living New Deal site for info.

Get Involved!

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Chatting About the Living New Deal, with Dr. Richard Walker

ANNETTE LAING Hello, everybody, it's Annette Laing at Non-Boring History, and today, I'm delighted to welcome Richard Walker, who is Professor Emeritus of geography at the University of California, Berkeley. He's editor of numerous books on economic geography, and on California, and he is the director of the Living New Deal. That's a program to document the continuing impact of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal programs on the American landscape. So first of all, welcome Dr. Walker. Good to have you, and lovely to see somebody in California.* So, what prompted this project?

*Annette is a Brit from Sacramento, who spent fourteen impressionable years in the Golden State in her youth.

RICHARD WALKER I think it was Gray Brechin, who was a student of mine, although he's my age. He came back and did a PhD in the 90s. Around 2000, he was looking for a project after he'd written a book on San Francisco.

He started to realize that he was seeing these New Deal projects all around the (San Francisco) Bay Area. He being a historical geographer, you know, these things caught his eye.

And once he started looking around, he thought, this is amazing. There's a lot here. So he set up a kind of volunteer project with friends around the area to document these things.

That didn't go too far, because purely volunteer projects lack funds. So he then turned to me, or I offered, as a professor at that time, that I could, you know, pry loose a little funding out of the university for small help to create a website.

And so it took off as the California Living New Deal back in the Oughts. And then around 2010, we got money to hire a manager for a while. And then we went national. We realized this was a national issue. These things are everywhere and we needed people all across the country to gather the information and send it to us. So, that's the way we work now.

We have over fifty National Associates around the country who send this site information, and we have staff. We have about 10 people who are paid part-time because we're a small nonprofit. We keep rolling along and kind of growing and growing. We've documented almost 18,000 New Deal public works and artwork sites around the country.

ANNETTE And really this is a very big project. This is something that clearly takes a lot of labor. and I think some of my readers and viewers and listeners are going to think, "That's an academic thing, that's what academics do", and I really want to jump in here and say, well, first of all, it's not just about California, let's get that out of the way. And secondly, watching the Living New Deal being featured on PBS NewsHour was just fantastic, because this is clearly something that the media is starting to pick up that the public is interested in. So not just California, not just academic, what's the goal?

RICHARD It started within the university, but it was never meant to be an academic project. It's kind of a combination of a wonderful scavenger hunt and a public education revelation project, and also lessons for today.

So we try to combine all three of those things, and, yes, it is national. New Deal public works were built in every county, every state, every territory of the United States, so everywhere. And they're still there. That's what's amazing. And they're in everybody's daily life, you bump into them everywhere.

I take road trips with my wife and we just go looking for them. And you can find them in every small town, every state park of a certain age, national parks, rural areas. They are everywhere, and people are amazed when they listen to us give talks, or they come to our website and look at our map, our national map, and they realize, you know, if you geolocate yourself on our national map, either on screen or on your phone, it'll zoom in, and you'll start to see these little dots are all around you. And people are kind of amazed by that.

ANNETTE I got very excited when you said this, because it's a running joke at Non-Boring History that everywhere I go, I stumble into FDR. I've started to say, I think he's following me. You know, I turn around [somewhere] and there's an information panel that says, oh, the CCC [Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal public works program that hired the unemployed to build for the public benefit] built this, which I didn't expect.

I spent 15 years in a small town in south Georgia called Statesboro, and I had no idea until I looked at your web page that there was a mural that had originally been in the post office in Sylvania, Georgia, now housed at the Georgia Southern University Museum. I actually did an exhibit in that museum, and I had no clue that this was in the [same] building.

RICHARD I think the key phrase is "no clue." And most Americans have no clue. I mean, we all know that Americans are not particularly aware of history.

ANNETTE I say nothing about that, not in this accent.

RICHARD (laughs) Henry Ford said famously, history is bunk, or you look at the Silicon Valley bros today, it's all about "we're building the future". And yet history has so much to teach us, and as William Faulkner said, the past is not is not even past. It's here with us all the time. There are a lot of intangible ways in which it's with us, but the wonderful thing that we're doing, in documenting New Deal public works and artworks, is showing that they're still with us.

It's like a lost civilization, as Gray Brechin, our founder, loves to say. It's as if you're looking around the forest from Mayan ruins in the Yucatan, and you see a few towers here and there, and you think, okay, yeah, we all remember Social Security or maybe Hoover Dam, but as soon as you get the radar and start flying over, as they're doing now, the anthropologists, it reveals this entire city.

And that's what we're doing: We're revealing some amazing lost civilization that came from a time Roosevelt and his team had an ethical belief in public good and serving the public, serving the mass of the people, and it was a very unusual time in American history.

But most people think that the New Deal is labor law, it's Social Security, a couple things like that, and they go, oh, that's lovely, that's a great legacy. Or they say that at the time, you know, they employed unemployed people, and isn't that nice. But who cares now?

Well, the fact is that the New Deal employed people to build things. They built things in every corner of the country, and it did good for every place. A lot of places today are very conservative, very red states, red counties, and they’re chock-a-block with stuff built by basically, you know, the blue administration of Franklin Roosevelt.

ANNETTE I'm glad you raised that, because so many things are going through my mind at the moment. Among them is that I have heard your colleague using the phrase "lost civilization." And I thought, no, no, it's not lost, just hidden in plain sight, and we're using this stuff all the time.

So the recent PBS Newshour segment on the Living New Deal put great stress on the monumental buildings that were built to last (and you can't trust that with the glass and metal stuff that they're putting up now, that clearly is meant for a quick buck. )

They talked about the murals, but what I kept thinking about, that your site certainly has made me aware of, is the more mundane sorts of things that you wouldn't give a second look. But they're right there, things like sidewalks and sewer systems. I mean some of the sidewalks are still in use because they were built to last. I did a project with my students at Georgia Southern University about Carbon Hill. Alabama, a very conservative town that had raw sewage running down the street, until the New Deal came along and provided a sewage plant, a swimming pool, and all kinds of other things.

I guess I'm trying to phrase this as a question rather than telling you what you already know, Richard, but how do you suggest that people find out a bit more about the buildings in their communities? How do they access this stuff and figure out what they're looking at?

RICHARD Can I just pick up first on what you were saying, because even though it wasn't a question, it is really important. What they did varied from extremely humble projects like sidewalks, curbs, gutters, sewer pipes, and so on, to these monumental things that some of us remember, like Hoover Dam or the San Francisco Bay Bridge, or ones people don't remember, until they go there, and they go, my God.

Something like the fabulous [outdoor] amphitheater, Red Rocks, outside Denver, Colorado. They built it all by hand-placed, hand-carved stones and it's still very much in use.

Striking built amphitheatre built among massive natural rocks — Red Rocks Amphitheatre, Denver, Colorado. Credits: The Big Rocks are by nature or God (you pick) The seating and stage are by FDR’s New Deal Image: David Amirault Source

Now there are a lot of people within the Living New Deal and within the world of New Deal remembrance and enthusiasts, who focus on the arts. And the arts were fantastic. They're still with us, they're very inspirational, and they do speak. The WPA, public arts project, and Writers project, and Theater project , were part of that kind of ethical structure of needing to enlighten and entertain the American public, and bring arts to them. At that time, people almost never saw the arts in their daily lives, like even the post office murals. So that's really an important side of it.

But at the same time, there were improvements in public health, humble clinics, building better sewer systems. Like Washington, DC. It had raw sewage running into the Potomac. The Potomac and the Anacostia River were sewers, and the New Deal rebuilt the sewer system, channeled it down to the first sewage plant, water treatment plant, the first sewage plant that the city ever had, that's still there. In fact, some of the buildings and settling ponds are still there at Blue Plains. So they did the whole gamut.

They also did a lot of service projects which we don't have so much memory or remnants of, which is why the Living New Deal emphasizes the physical material leftovers and results of Public Works. But there were all these service projects like sewing rooms, making clothing for children, shoes for the poor blankets for the poor, feeding kids in schools, food programs that were essential to health and well-being of poor people, of the working people of the time.

Okay, so I do want to answer your question which was, how do people find out about this stuff? We do provide on our website some research tips.

If you're interested, where do you go? Well, local libraries. Librarians at local libraries love to help with these things, and there's often, you know, local histories. There's a lot of little local histories written that you never find anywhere but in the local library that will have gems of information about what was done in the 1930s. Of course, you can take deeper dives into public documents of city council meetings, public works and so on, or if you need, at a national level, you can go into the National Archives, which is full of the materials that were left by the WPA, the PWA, and all these alphabet agencies who did the public works.

The problem is, most of that is not organized, is not written up. The CCC, which built in every park that existed at the time, National Wildlife Refuges that were created at the time, built corrals and fences, erosion features all over rural farm lands, and ranch lands, and so on. They kept almost no records, and there's almost no markers. You referred to markers, but actually markers are the exception rather than the rule, I think FDR missed a bet there. He should have insisted they put a marker on everything, But [because he didn’t], it makes it that much easier to forget, unfortunately.

And so our job is to look into these kind of research sources, like newspapers. Newspapers.com has a lot of old news, local newspapers.

ANNETTE And a public librarian, a reference librarian, can help you gain access. If you say, I want to do this, that person will know specific sources, correct?

RICHARD Absolutely. So, it's not that hard to do, and I've done it. I do this on road trips with my wife, going off to see relatives, or to a park, or a part of the West that we really want to see, like Southern Utah. We stop along the way, we look at the Living New Deal map, which you can look at on your phone while you're traveling, and say, oh, there's a site. But then you'll be traveling through the town and you'll go, wait a sec, look at that high school. That looks suspiciously 1930s, what was called the WPA Moderne [style]. And, lo and behold, there's a plaque, or somebody knows, or you could go to the library and verify, and, lo and behold, it's New Deal. So the stuff, you can stumble on it ,which makes it a kind of scavenger [UK treasure] hunt . . .

ANNETTE I love that!

RICHARD Or you can follow our map to places, just to see what's already been documented. And, actually, you can help us do better, because often we don't have good photographs that we need. We welcome people sending us new information like that.

ANNETTE It's something that can involve just about everybody, and, you know, the more you're looking at this stuff, photographs of it, the more you'll be able to recognize it. I remember my awareness of [New Deal infrastructure] began with WPA [Works Project Administration, a New Deal public works program] stamped on a sidewalk, years and years ago in California.

So, we're going from present to past and past to present, and that's what academic history does, too. And that's something that I'm constantly harping on about at Non-Boring History: This isn't then, this is now, it's right with us. Thinking about the Thirties though, the New Deal itself involved a lot of Americans from all walks of life. And one of the things I've noticed people harping on about recently, in the chattersphere, is that the New Deal excluded African Americans.

Can you address that?

RICHARD Well, you raised at least three things . . .

ANNETTE Sorry, Richard, I'm excited!

RICHARD You know, there's a reason we call our project the Living New Deal, and not Remembering the New Deal, or FDR In The 20th Century, or something like that. It's a Living New Deal because it's still there. So that's the first thing I want to say.

About the people who worked for it, the New Deal employed on public works over the course of less than a decade, from 1933 to 1942, about 15 million people, and that's out of a workforce at the time of about 50 million. That's about a third of the workforce today. So the equivalent would be to hire almost 50 million people today on public works. Now, that's not all at one time. People would sign on for six months, or a year, with the CCC, or the WPA, or whatever it was. Plus there were the private contractors, and their workers who built things for the WPA. American people were involved in this. It isn't just that the government did something for us. This reminds me of JFK's ask not what we can do for you, what the government can do for you, but what you can do for America.

That was part of the genius of the New Deal. It wasn't just, oh, we're going to stimulate the economy, and we're going to hand out welfare. People absolutely wanted to work.

And what they were doing was giving unemployed people, who were both economically desperate and humiliated by their unemployment, which is true to this day. People want to work, you give them work, and it gives them their dignity, gives them meaning, and what's more, then they're building things that they see, that stay there for years.

So you could be a CCC volunteer, and CCC boys. as they were called, because they were all young men, would, for the next 75 years until they all died off ,would have reunions and go back and visit the parks they worked at, because this beautiful stone work that they did, beautiful park rangers' stations and visitor centers, trails, stone walls. This stuff was still there, and they could go and celebrate it.

Statue of young man in front of building — A CCC statue, erected by the men who once built this visitor center and all the cabins in Promised Land State Park, Pennsylvania. Image: Annette Laing, 2022

In fact, they often paid for statues. There's a famous statue of a CCC man in a lot of parks, that the CCC alumni associations paid for, because they remembered that so fondly, as both saving them from penury and contributing to the country in a way that was totally visible.

And now the third part of your question, I've now forgotten because I went through the first two because I got excited too. After doing this for 15 years, I'm still excited.

ANNETTE And I absolutely grasp why! It was really to ask a very leading question about African Americans. There's a perception that they were excluded from New Deal programs.

RICHARD Yeah. And I'm working on a very long paper that's becoming like a small book now on that very question: Was the New Deal racist? You know, as part of recovery of the lost history of America, African-Americans in particular, but people of color, there's a lot of recovery of lost memory and criticism of things like slavery, and Jim Crow and the Chinese Exclusion Act, the treatment of Native Americans, which was, as you know, absolutely god-awful.

So this is a very important project, and it does mean criticizing the Thomas Jeffersons and George Washingtons, even Abe Lincoln, right through FDR. What our project does not do, I hope, is treat FDR as some kind of god to be memorialized. You know, a lot of people looked at him at the time as a savior. A lot of African-American families, by the way, had pictures of FDR up in their houses.

ANNETTE Traveling through the South, in the 90s, I saw a picture of FDR hanging up in an African American barbecue joint. After visiting FDR's house and the FDR Presidential Library in Hyde Park (NY) it struck me . . . My husband is from California, he's Asian American and, you know, we were looking for stuff on [Japanese-American] internment camps [in the Presidential Library museum].

What was very interesting to me was the reminders of the political context in which FDR was working, having to depend on the white South for votes. I guess what I'm trying to lead you into is to say that African Americans were segregated within the New Deal. But thanks in large part to the work of Eleanor Roosevelt and particularly the African Americans advising her, people like Mary McLeod Bethune, and Philip Randolph, you know, they were really pushing for African-American involvement. African Americans were there. They were in New Deal programs, they were segregated programs, but they were programs with an impact on the whole community. Everybody gets involved, one way or another, in this.

RICHARD Oh, yeah, African Americans were not excluded. They were involved. There were a couple million who worked in the public works projects, the WPA and so on. They were in the CCC. People think they weren't, but they were. They also got relief in states in the South where they'd never gotten any relief: The federal government saw that they did get relief payments and so on.

So I wanted to set the stage, that it's so important that we rethink American history and we don't glorify the past as has all too often been done, as a white history, or a whitewashed history. At the same time the, as a result of this, especially in the 2010s, certain key African American historians, intellectuals brought forth the failures of the New Deal, which were many, But they also got carried away, and you got a trope amongst progressives and other right-thinking people, "Oh, the New Deal, that was racist, excluded Black people,"

It did not. There were programs that had exclusions in them. Social Security excluded all farm workers and domestics in its first iteration.Not necessarily because the new dealers like [US Secretary of Labour] Frances Perkins wanted that, and it wasn't just because the Southern Democrats were so powerful. They were, and they changed a lot of programs. But it was also because no social welfare program in Europe or anywhere in the world at that time included, agricultural workers or domestic workers. It was too hard to follow them, too hard to keep track of them, and the farm sector hated the idea. And that was generally true whether you were in Wisconsin or in the South.

Now in the South, they really hated the idea because of the importance of Black labor and sharecropping. And, by the way, Social Security, that was rectified and changed by 1951. So the long-term impact of that was nil, unlike the long-term impacts of the exclusions built into the FHA, but even that was subtle. And with the Federal mortgage loan programs, the rules were written by the realtors. A real failing of the New Deal, although it was helping millions of homeowners, was that the government allowed them to write in these rules that then became racialized all over and created exclusions and segregation.

Now it is true, facilities that were built by the New Deal, like public housing were usually segregated, and the CCC ended up segregated. But it didn't start segregated. Out here in California, they had integrated camps for the first couple years, until the general hoo-ha of local [white] communities, which said "Oh my God, you can't have this."

Jim Crow was a way of life in the South, it was a political economy of the South, but it was a way of thinking that was very prominent around the North and the West as well. So we can't let the North and the West and white people there off the hook for their racism at the time.

It was an incredibly racist world, and it's very hard for those of us today to project ourselves back. You know the old saying, the past is another country. It's hard to project ourselves back, and imagine what it was like to live in this kind of world, where racial inferiority was just written into the rules, was taught, was just a part of everyday thinking of white people about Black people or brown people or Asians.

ANNETTE I can sort of see a lot of my very sympathetic white Southern readers nodding their heads at this. And just knowing the world that I came into, even in the 90s, in Georgia, what I love about your project is that it's refocusing us on how revolutionary the New Deal was, how radical it was, how it's still with us. We're running out of time, so I'm rushing here to talk about this, but only FDR ever managed to unite places, like a county south of Atlanta, that I wrote about at Non-Boring History, where, 97 percent of voters, all of whom would have been white at that time because of restrictions on voting, voted for FDR in 1936. He came in person to bring electricity to this county, and they are still writing their checks to a New Deal program. Most people don't have a clue that that's where it comes from. Oh, you just write a check to the Co-operative without realizing where this is from, and it's still with us.

And that really is to me the most pressing thing: The living part of the Living New Deal. And we look around at our depressingly decaying infrastructure, I know that there is legislation that's been passed, but the potholed roads, the collapsing bridges, the really awful, frankly, new architecture that we're seeing going up in place of lovely old buildings, and this just has so much relevance. I'm sorry to end with me going on long rant, but this is normal unfortunately.

RICHARD I just have to say that, yeah, you're absolutely right. And we have to see this as a very dynamic world. The New Deal itself was dynamic at the time, it changed over time. And so what started with a lot of bowing and scraping to the Southerners ended up with FDR actually fighting the South, trying to reform the South, and over the ten years of the New Deal, properly speaking, the treatment of African-Americans got much better. We have to remember that.

And then FDR completely revolutionized the judiciary. So that the so-called [Earl] Warren Supreme Court that passed Brown versus Board of Education in 1954, was founded on a series of decisions that were passed before that, by a court that had nine FDR appointees, and eased the way for the whole Civil Rights movement, and actually geared it up, along with the Second World War.

The New Deal and the Second World War were absolutely important in mobilizing black people to fight for their rights, to get organized, the NAACP to fight these important cases. The exclusion of black voters in the South started to be overturned as early as 1941, thanks to the New Deal. So it's a more complicated story than people think. It's a more dynamic story, even at the time.

But the point is, they meant to help the people as best they could in the context they had inherited, and they did a hell of a job. And we should do as well today.

ANNETTE And we are part of their continuum. It's not "back then”, it's right now, and you've illustrated that beautifully. Richard Walker, thank you so much for your time and for a really exciting and illuminating conversation. All best to you.

RICHARD Thank you for having me.

For more on the Living New Deal and opportunities to get involved:

Visit The Living New Deal site

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