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FOREWORD
Florence M. Jumonville, Ph.D.
Louisiana and Special Collections Department, Earl K. Long Library
President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, which began operation in 1933, offered opportunities to improve the impoverished situations, not only of lower classes of white persons, but also of African-Americans, by placing them in jobs suited to their talents and skills. Black participation varied among the different locations and projects, largely because each was administered locally and the attitude of the head of each project influenced the extent to which it welcomed black workers. When the Works Progress Administration (WPA) commenced in 1935, its cultural programs expanded the available options. Special art, theater, music, and writing projects for blacks existed in New York, Chicago, and other Northern cities. In the South, however, the only substantial unit for African-American writers was the one based at Dillard University in New Orleans.1
Lyle Saxon, a prominent author whose books included Old Louisiana and Fabulous New Orleans, headed the Louisiana Writers’ Project. From the time of the program’s inception, black writers sought employment with it. One of them, hired by the WPA but not placed in the writers’ project, understandably complained when he found himself assigned to manual labor despite having had training and experience as a jour-nalist. James B. LaFourche’s complaint reached John Davis of New York, the executive secretary of the Joint Committee on National Recovery. “Davis wrote Saxon that ‘common justice’ required the proportionate employment of Negroes on writers’ projects.
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