1934

Claude Neal, a Black farmworker in Marianna, Florida, was accused of murdering Lola Cannady, a white woman. His October 26, 1934 lynching was announced in advance by wire services and newspaper notices across the Southeast. Over 3,000 people, including families with children, traveled to watch. Neal was tortured for hours before being killed; his body was dragged through town and hanged at the courthouse. Photographs were sold as souvenirs. The NAACP sent investigator Howard Kester whose report galvanized national anti-lynching legislation efforts. The FBI took no action.

After being taken from an Alabama jail, Claude Neal was tortured and lynched in Marianna, Florida by a mob of 3,000+. Local radio and newspapers announced the lynching in advance; photographs were sold as souvenirs. The NAACP documented the event in detail to press Congress for anti-lynching legislation.

The Southern Tenant Farmers Union, founded in Tyronza, Arkansas on July 26, 1934 by Black and white sharecroppers, organized 25,000 members across five states by 1936 to protest AAA evictions and demand fair treatment under New Deal programs. The STFU was deliberately interracial in a region where that was dangerous; founding members included H.L. Mitchell, Clay East, and Black organizer E.B. McKinney. Planters responded with evictions, beatings, and murders of organizers. Arkansas Governor J.M. Futrell dismissed organizers as Communist agitators. The union documented AAA abuses that national journalists eventually exposed.

Following the nationally advertised lynching of Claude Neal in October 1934, NAACP executive director Walter White personally appealed to President Roosevelt for federal intervention and a public statement. Roosevelt, facing midterm elections and dependent on Southern Democratic votes, declined to condemn the lynching by name or endorse federal anti-lynching legislation. Eleanor Roosevelt lobbied FDR privately and met with Walter White but could not change her husband's position. The NAACP's Howard Kester report on the Neal lynching was sent to every member of Congress. The Costigan-Wagner bill introduced in 1935 specifically cited Neal's case.

The 1934 National Housing Act created the Federal Housing Administration, which graded Black neighborhoods "hazardous," refused to insure mortgages there, and recommended racial covenants — steering federally backed home loans to white families and suburbs.