Museum Review: Black Americans, Civil Rights, and the Roosevelts, 1932-1962

I went to the FDR Library last week and saw its temporary exhibit, “Museum Exhibit Review: Black Americans, Civil Rights, and Black Americans, 1932-1962.” It’s pretty well known that FDR’s record on Black issues is mixed. FDR basically did not care about Black people anymore than he had to. He loved a racist joke. He was almost as bad on race as Wilson, personally. The New Deal in some ways made things worse for Black Americans. It created systems of segregation where segregation did not exist before. Then there was redlining, which continues to have impacts nearly a century later. A. Philip Randolph had to threaten a march to embarrass the nation in order to get Roosevelt to desegregate defense jobs.

And yet, FDR was the president who started the migration of Black Americans to the Democratic Party because for all its problems, the New Deal provided unprecedented economic opportunities for Black Americans, especially in the North.

This is the paradox that the FDR Library in Hyde Park explores in its new exhibit. It’s a pretty good history exhibit, although it makes the mistake that so many museums do of having enormously long explanatory text that almost no one reads instead of using more multimedia presentations that have been shown to hold visitors attention and teach them more. Like, basically no one reads long historical markers and museum professionals have demonstrated this. So it’s a lot. But if you do spend the time, you can learn quite a bit.

One thing I learned is that Eleanor went on the quite the journey to be the person she became. I had kind of assumed, having never read a biography of her, that she always had pretty good racial politics going back to her early days as a Progressive, but this was very much not true. She held all the racial stereotypes of her day too. It’s just that she had more capacity for personal growth on this than Franklin. It wasn’t until she became First Lady and started doing trips to explore the poverty of the nation (always her interest) that she realized just how much of this was really about race. And of course she went on to become a huge ally of Black Americans and radicals of all stripes, including pushing her husband where he did not want to go. Moreover, her last major political action, shortly before her 1962 death, was building support for the Freedom Riders. It’s not surprising, given that she was always the better person.

It’s a bit disconcerting to see an exhibit that uses the term “civil rights” and have no discussion of Japanese Americans. I realize that brings a different set of conversations into play and takes away from the already large and quite fascinating discussion of Black Americans complex relationship with the New Deal. But, you know, race in this country isn’t just Black and white, as much as that captures 90% of the attention.

Anyway, the whole museum is exceedingly large and overwhelmingly wordy, so I wouldn’t recommend trying to see this and the permanent exhibit in the same day, but if you are in the Hudson Valley, it is worth your time.