Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2020/Spring/Section24/Mary Hines

Overview
Mary Hines was an African American teacher, mother, and interviewee for the Federal Writer's Project in 1939.

Biography
Mary Hines was born in Monroe County, Alabama, one of seven children. Her father, David McCants, was a slave as a child, and a tenant farmer as an adult. Hines moved around Alabama several times as a child when her father would change employers. In her twenties, Hines attended the Colored Industrial Seminary at Snow Hill, and after she finished eleventh grade she began teaching. At 25, Hines married Dock Hines, an older widow. She raised their children while her husband worked as a teacher before he switched to a factory job for higher pay. The factory shut down in 1926, and by this time Hines had raised most of their nine children, with four dead. Her husband soon lost his eyesight and was unable to work, and the Great Depression led to the loss of their family home. Hines and her children worked in fields to increase their income. By 1939, the Hines began paying the government five dollars a month to retain their house, and did so for seven years. Hines four daughters all worked as teachers during the school year and in the fields during the summer. Hines death date is unknown.

The Great Depression and African American Inequality
From 1929 to 1939 The Great Depression put The United States into economic ruins. African Americans, known to be “last hired, first fired”, experienced the highest unemployment rate in the 1930s. Before the stock market crash of 1929, African Americans mainly worked unskilled jobs. Afterword, those jobs were either given to unemployed white people or disappeared completely. In the South specifically, African American unemployment rates were double or triple of that of white people. Thousands of Southern African American sharecroppers joined the Great Migration to the urban North during the Great Depression. In the presidential election of 1932, many African Americans who had previously been Republican began to switch their affiliation to the Democratic party in support of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. The New Deal did not benefit African Americans as it did whites. The Agricultural Adjustment Act, “an effort to facilitate farm purchasing power by establishing acreage and production control”, largely excluded African Americans and led white farmers to evict them from their farms as tenants. The National Recovery Administration, designed to increase wages, led to increased expectations of workers and a disproportionate number of black workers to be fired. In the 1930s the United States also experienced a housing shortage. The Federal Housing Administration implemented programs that were “primarily designed to provide housing to white, middle-class, lower-middle-class families” as African Americans and other people of color were put into urban housing projects instead of the new suburban communities. The Federal Housing Administration refused mortgages in and near African American neighborhoods, knowing as “redlining”. The FHA subsidized builders to mass-produce entire subdivisions for white families, with the rule that none could be sold to African-Americans. This segregation led to a cycle of concentrated poverty. Nationally, the New Deal programs were designed to help from the Great Depression, but state regulations and individuals made it so that African Americans did not receive the same benefits as other Americans.

African American Education in the South during the 1930s
Influence of the state government on education for African Americans produced inequality. In 1939-1940, 52.8% of African American schools in the South were one-teacher. The African American school buildings physical conditions were a “state of disrepair that potentially undermined the delivery of instructional services. Among the signs of neglect were rickety benches…holes in the floor and the roof, inadequate heating, poor lighting, unpainted walls…and a lack of desk and other educational supplies”. There were objections from white southerners to provide public transportation for African American students, which prevented many students from being able to regularly attend school. The African American teachers had “substantially higher teacher-pupil ratios…overcrowding, irregular attendance”. Public school teachers worked for the state, were hired by white male school superintendents, who then elected white school board members. The African American public education system was reliant on the state government who largely ignored their needs.

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