On February 6, Brian McCammack, Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, came to Log Lunch to speak about African American labor in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) during the Great Depression. The content of his talk was taken from the last chapter of his book to be published next year by Harvard University Press.
McCammack began by introducing the Corps. Began in 1933 under President Roosevelt, the CCC employed men ages 18-23 at one dollar a day in rural areas across the United States until 1942. The goal of the environmental labor program was twofold. First, the CCC aimed to counter the Great Depression unemployment and delinquency by providing a respectable job opportunity that could strengthen character. Second, as a conservation program, the Corps focused on restoring American land depleted from the last century of industrialization. The program engaged in a variety of environmental activities ranging from planting trees to terracing. As McCammack defined, the Civilian Conservation Corps was building both men and trees.
In his research into the role of African Americans in the CCC, McCammack focused on the case study of the Skokie Lagoons project twenty miles north of Chicago. Of the three million men in the Corps, 250,000 were African American, twenty-five to thirty percent of whom were employed on projects in or near Chicago, such as at the Skokie Lagoons site. This project, the largest in the state, created a network of channels in order to achieve flood control and provide a site for recreation. Still in existence today, the work to establish Skokie Lagoons was backbreaking manual labor; men worked through the harshness of Chicago summer and winters excavating the canals and building the levees with only pickaxes, shovels, and wheelbarrows.
Both white and black men preformed the work, but McCammack argued that the presence of so many African Americans working on projects in this part of the country was “unexpected.” He explained that from 1915 to 1940 many African Americans moved in the Great Migration to northern cities; Chicago’s black population more than sextupled from 1910 to 1940. These men and women came from the agricultural south to work in the factory and mills jobs in the urban center, yet these opportunities ceased during the Depression. So with the advent of the Civilian Conservation Corps, many black men began working with the land. While all races of workers preformed the same CCC jobs, the black experience was different and unexpected because the African American workers had arrived in the North only to preform jobs outdoors, a type of labor that McCammack noted was reminiscent of that in the southern black agricultural history.
The Civilian Conservation Corps established many of the features still enjoyed in modern cities. For example, Skokie Lagoons is still used for recreation in an upscale area in the metro-Chicago region. However, McCammack noted that perhaps there are implications for such a project that, built in large part through the labor of African Americans, mostly benefits white residents. Nevertheless, research like McCammack’s can only help to expose these realities and lead to a greater appreciation of the many nonwhite unsung laborers who largely shaped the landscape of 21st century America.
By Sara Clark ‘15
Megamenu Social