Racial Tensions

A New Yorker Cover from 1938

In Nelson Algren’s Somebody in Boots, we witness a seemingly usual scene of police brutality towards bums. It is different however because it also highlights the racial tensions that occurred during that time. In the story, Cass finds a travel companion in Matches, a black man bumming around in a similar situation.

Cass’s reaction to the scene with the police and Matches provides an interesting perspective we’ve not seen much in class. Despite the fact that they had been friends traveling together, Cass still thought himself better on the basis of his race. Algren writes, “Cass cocked his head, half-unable to believe what he had just heard. Slowly then he understood: a white man who walked with a ‘nigger’ was a ‘nigger’ too.”

This whole encounter led me to think about race in the Great Depression. Most (if not all, if I’m not mistaken) of the writings we’ve read have been written by white authors and about white people. It seems like in our investigation of the Great Depression we’ve omitted the study of an entire group who was even more marginalized than the poor white farmers we saw encountered in the Grapes of Wrath or the out of work, on the bum educated white man like Tom Kromer.

Really cursory research on racism during the Depression led me to this article about Jim Crow stories. Black Americans had it much worse during the depression than white Americans did due to the added element of racism. The article notes that black people could not even get jobs that were traditionally held by them: “Even ‘Negro jobs’…such as busboys, elevator operators, garbage men…were sought by desperate unemployed whites.” As displayed by the scene in Algren’s story, it would be assumed that those jobs would end up going to whites because of the undesirable association with black men.

It would seem that poverty should be the great equalizer, especially in a time like the Depression. Cass and Matches both basically had nothing, except for the fact that Cass assumed he had his race. At the end, Cass defensively asserts, “Ah’m not no nigger.” Matches responds, “You’re ridin’ jest the same, ain’t you?”