To Ask for an Equal Chance - (African American Experience) by Cheryl Lynn Greenberg (Paperback)

About the Book

The Great Depression hit Americans hard, but none harder than African Americans and the working poor. This brief, engaging book covers the range of African Americans' experiences during the 1930s. Cheryl Lynn Greenberg explores employment issues, the New Deal's effect on Afric...

Book Synopsis

The Great Depression hit Americans hard, but none harder than African Americans and the working poor. This brief, engaging book covers the range of African Americans' experiences during the 1930s. Cheryl Lynn Greenberg explores employment issues, the New Deal's effect on African Americans, family and community changes, and how the coming of war affected the population. The book straddles the particular--with examinations of specific communities and experiences--and the general--with explorations of the broader effects of racism, discrimination, family, class, and political organizing.

Review Quotes

Concise, engaging, deeply grounded in the scholarly literature, and fully accessible to a general readership, To Ask for an Equal Chance provides a compelling account of the economic hardship and racial discrimination that defined the experience of African Americans in the Great Depression. Cheryl Greenberg shows persuasively both the transforming impact and the fundamental limitations of the New Deal's record on race, and she argues provocatively that subsequent civil rights protest was fueled in part by the community action, political organizing, and expansion of economic and educational opportunities among blacks in the 1930s.

Drawing upon both a wealth of existing scholarship and selected primary documents, this book offers a new synthesis of African American life during the Great Depression. It also provides a useful text for a variety of African American and U.S. History courses on this turbulent decade in the nation's history.

This accessible, concise [book] describes living and working conditions and the black cultural, social, and political response. The author examines class, gender, health care, education, and the formation of self-help and political organizations, giving each a balanced, thorough analysis. . . . Extremely useful text. . . . Highly recommended.

This well-researched, insightful book includes photographs that enhance a sense of the times and the growing activism that eventually led to the civil rights movement.

About the Author

Cheryl Lynn Greenberg is the Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of History at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. She is the author of several books, including, most recently, Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century.