TOPIC 7.10 The New Deal

New Deal Political Realignment:  The truth about African Americans & the Democratic Party

AP KC-7.1.III.C …the New Deal…fostered a long-term political realignment in which…African AmericanS…identified with the Democratic Party.

Objective: Students will refute the textbook’s ahistorical claims regarding New Deal political realignment, African Americans, and the Democratic Party.

This Key Concept in an Antiracist classroom:

“Blacks, several million of whom had appreciated welcome relief checks, had by now shaken off their traditional allegiance to the Republican Party." - American Pageant, chapter 34, pg. 798

The above statement is a lie based on a racist stereotype.

It is not supported by secondary literature or primary sources. Professional historians disproved this decades ago, yet there it still sits, in the best selling AP US History textbook.

The African American vote cannot be bought. The majority of the American vote is determined by economic conditions. However, the majority African American vote is uniquely focused primarily on issues concerning racial justice. Research of African American intellectual leaders and the black press prove unequivocally that African Americans did not leave the GOP in 1936, the GOP left African Americans.

Notes

Students will work with their “Collaborative Learning Partners” (group of three, switches every three weeks). This lesson is like a DBQ but in more of a proper historical format. First students will review the scholarship on the topic, and will discuss with their CLPs before we have a whole class discussion. Then students will go back to their CLPs to see whether the primary source material corroborates more with the actual historians or with the high school textbook. Students will gain insight into the world of historians, sharpen their “sourcing” skills, and learn a valuable antiracist lesson.