Traditionally the last hired and the first fired, blacks occupied the lowest rungs on the industrial and agricultural ladders. “The depression brought everybody down a peg or two,” the African American poet Langston Hughes wryly commented. “And the Negroes had but few pegs to fall.” Despite the great migration to the North during and after World War I, three-quarters of the black population still lived in the South. They worked mostly as farmers, but 80 percent did not own their own land. Mainly sharecroppers and tenant farmers, black southerners were mired in debt that they could not repay as crop prices plunged to record lows during the 1920s. As white landowners struggled to save their farms by introducing machinery to cut labor costs, they forced black sharecroppers off the land and into even greater poverty. Nor was the situation better for black workers employed at the lowest-paying jobs as janitors, menial laborers, maids, and laundresses. On average, African Americans earned $200 a year, less than one-quarter of the average wage of white factory workers.

The economic misfortune that African Americans experienced was compounded by the fact that they lived in a society rigidly constructed to preserve white supremacy. The 25 percent of blacks living in the North faced racial discrimination in employment, housing, and the criminal justice system, but at least they could express their opinions and desires by voting. In Chicago, the growing African American community elected a black congressman, the Republican Oscar DePriest. By contrast, black southerners remained segregated and disfranchised by law. The depression also exacerbated racial tensions, as whites and blacks competed for the shrinking number of jobs. Lynching, which had declined from fifty-nine murders of blacks in 1921 to seven in 1929, surged upward—in 1933 twenty-four blacks lost their lives to this form of terrorism.

Events in Scottsboro, Alabama, reflected the special misery African Americans faced during the Great Depression. Trouble erupted in 1931. Two young, unemployed white women, Ruby Bates and Victoria Price, snuck onto a freight train heading to Huntsville, Alabama. Before the train reached the Scottsboro depot, a fight broke out between black and white men on top of the freight car occupied by the two women. After the train pulled in to Scottsboro, the local sheriff arrested nine black youths between the ages of twelve and twenty. Charges of assault quickly escalated into rape, when the women told authorities that the black men in custody had molested them on board the train. The accused narrowly escaped a mob lynching when the governor sent in the National Guard to ensure that they stood trial.

Going to court, however, did not guarantee a fair trial. The court-appointed attorney was less than competent and had little time to prepare his clients’ cases. It probably made little difference, as the all-white male jury swiftly convicted the accused; only the youngest defendant was not sentenced to death. The Communist Party, whose membership had increased as despair over the depression mounted, rushed to defend the youths, providing legal and financial assistance for them and their families. The Supreme Court spared the lives of the Scottsboro Nine by overturning their guilty verdicts in 1932 on the grounds that the defendants did not have adequate legal representation and again in 1935 because blacks had been systematically excluded from the jury pool. Although Ruby Bates had recanted her testimony and there was no physical evidence of rape, retrials in 1936 and 1937 produced the same guilty verdicts, but this time the defendants did not receive the death penalty—a minor victory considering the charges. State prosecutors dismissed charges against four of the accused, all of whom had already spent six years in jail. Despite international protests against this racist injustice, the last of the remaining five did not leave jail until 1950.

Racism also worsened the impact of the Great Depression on Spanish-speaking Americans. Mexicans and Mexican Americans made up the largest segment of the Latino population living in the United States at the outset of the depression. Concentrated in the Southwest and California, they worked in a variety of low-wage factory jobs and as migrant laborers in fruit and vegetable fields. The depression reduced the Mexican-born population living in the United States in two ways. The federal government began deporting unemployed workers back to Mexico, as many as 500,000, some of whom may have been American citizens. Many more returned to Mexico voluntarily when demand for labor in the United States dried up.

Those who remained endured growing hardships. Relief agencies refused to provide them with the same benefits as whites. Like African Americans, they encountered discrimination in public schools, in public accommodations, and at the ballot box. Conditions remained harshest for migrant workers toiling long hours for little pay and living in overcrowded and poorly constructed housing. Employers had little incentive to improve the situation because there were plenty of white migrant workers to fill their positions. The same held true in factories. Employers justified keeping pay low by claiming that Mexican workers would only spend pay raises on “tequila and worthless trinkets in the dime stores.”

The transient nature of agricultural work and the legal vulnerability of Mexican laborers who were not citizens made it difficult for workers to organize, but Mexican American laborers engaged in dozens of strikes in California and Texas in the early 1930s. Most ended in defeat, but a few, such as a five-week strike of pecan shellers in San Antonio, Texas, led by Luisa Moreno, won better working conditions and higher wages. Despite these hard-fought victories, the condition of Latinos remained precarious.

On the West Coast, Asian Americans also remained economically and politically marginalized. Barred from entry into the United States after passage of the 1924 National Origins Act, the Japanese population remained steady. Japanese immigrants (issei) eked out a living as small farmers, grocers, and gardeners, despite California laws preventing them from owning land. Many college-educated Nisei (U.S.-born children) found few professional opportunities available to them, and they often returned to work in family businesses. The depression magnified the problem. Like other racial and ethnic minorities, the Japanese found it harder to find even the lowest-wage jobs now that unemployed whites were willing to take them. As a result, about one-fifth of Japanese immigrants returned to Japan during the 1930s.

The Chinese suffered a similar fate. They remained isolated in ethnic communities along the West Coast. Discriminated against in schools and most occupations, many operated restaurants and laundries. Chinese immigrants had been barred from entering the United States since the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Yet approximately 45 percent of people of Chinese ancestry had been born in the United States and thus were citizens. During the depression, those Chinese who did not obtain assistance through governmental relief turned instead to their own community organizations and to extended families to help them through the hard times.

Filipinos, who lived mainly on the Pacific coast and worked as low-wage agricultural workers, were subject to the same kind of racial animosity as other darker-skinned minorities, despite their colonial relationship with the United States. In 1934 anti-Filipino hostility reached its height when Congress passed the Tydings-McDuffie Act. The measure accomplished two aims at once: The act granted independence to the Philippines, and it restricted Filipino immigration into the United States.