The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

by Jemar Tisby

FDR’s New Deal had problems as well. Like many churches, the politicians who promoted reforms to the political economy conformed to the contours of Jim Crow. Ira Katznelson argues that the interventions of the New Deal in the 1930s and 1940s “excluded, or differentially treated, the vast majority of African Americans.”37 Due to the resistance of high-level southern politicians seeking to insulate the racial hierarchy in their communities from federal interference, Roosevelt and his administration compromised with racists to pass racially discriminatory laws. For example, while avoiding explicitly race-based language, Social Security provisions excluded most base-level agricultural and domestic workers—the vast majority of whom were black women and men.38 This exclusion was not accidental; it was by design.