1936

International Harvester's mechanical cotton picker, demonstrated in 1936 and commercially available by 1941, could do the work of 50 pickers. Planters who received AAA payments for reducing cotton acreage used the funds to purchase machinery and evict sharecroppers. The displacement of 2 million Black agricultural workers between 1930 and 1960 drove the Second Great Migration into Northern cities with redlined housing and exclusionary unions. The transition from agricultural to urban labor occurred without any government support or retraining programs.

Between 1936 and 1938, the WPA Federal Writers' Project employed interviewers — primarily Black interviewers supervised by John Lomax and Sterling Brown — to record testimonies of over 2,300 surviving formerly enslaved people across 17 states. The resulting 10,000-page collection, now held at the Library of Congress, constitutes the most significant body of primary source documentation of enslaved experience in American history. The project was imperfect — white interviewers in the South received different, more guarded testimony — but preserved irreplaceable voices. Scholars including Eugene Genovese and Herbert Gutman later used this collection to reconstruct the social world of enslavement.

Between 1936 and 1938, the WPA Federal Writers' Project employed interviewers to record testimonies of over 2,300 surviving formerly enslaved people across 17 states. The resulting 10,000-page collection, now held at the Library of Congress, constitutes the most significant body of primary source documentation of enslaved experience in American history. The project preserved irreplaceable voices; white interviewers in the South received more guarded testimony than Black interviewers. Scholars later used this collection to reconstruct the social world of enslavement.

Mary McLeod Bethune convened an informal network of Black advisers placed in New Deal agencies — including Robert Weaver at Interior and Eugene Kinckle Jones at Commerce — who met regularly to coordinate strategy and push back on racial discrimination within federal programs. They represented unprecedented Black executive-branch presence.

Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics — 100m, 200m, long jump, and 4x100m relay — directly contradicting Nazi racial ideology in front of Adolf Hitler. The American press celebrated Owens while Hitler's discomfort received extensive coverage. What received less attention: Franklin Roosevelt never sent Owens a congratulatory telegram or invited him to the White House. Owens later said: 'Hitler didn't snub me — it was our president who snubbed me.' Owens returned home to segregation, exploitation by promoters, and inability to find dignified employment proportionate to his fame.

Victor H. Green, a Harlem postal worker, published the first Negro Motorist Green Book in 1936, listing hotels, restaurants, beauty parlors, and businesses that would serve Black travelers without harassment, discrimination, or danger across the country. The guide reflected the reality that Black Americans traveling by automobile faced hostile sundown towns, gas stations that refused service, hotels that turned them away, and regular danger of violence. The Green Book grew to list thousands of establishments and sold through Esso gas stations nationwide. Published annually until 1967, it documented both the geography of racism and the geography of Black community institutions.

Lint Shaw was taken from a Georgia jail cell by a mob and lynched while awaiting trial on a charge brought by a white woman. His murder — one of eight documented lynchings that year — prompted renewed NAACP lobbying for the Costigan-Wagner bill. The Senate again refused to vote.