Young people struggled a great deal. The widespread racism and segregation of the time made the suffering of African American youth even worse. In over a third of the 14 million known unemployed were under age The CCC provided conservation jobs for unemployed men, ages 18 to 25, in semimilitary work camps, usually in rural areas.
The enrollee the official term for a CCC participant was to be employed in the corps for no longer than 18 months. His family had to be receiving some form of government financial assistance.
Enrollees received food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and educational and recreational opportunities. They lived in barracks usually wooden cabins and got two standard CCC uniforms.
Yet despite instructions from National Selection Director W. Frank Persons that enrollees be selected without regard to race, CCC administrators in many states refused to select a proportionate share of blacks. By , African American participation in the CCC did reach 10 percent, which might be considered equitable in relationship to the black population in This did not always happen. Because of hostility and harassment from some communities, officials separated black and white enrollees.
In the South, racially segregated camps were the norm from the beginning. Letters in names identified the racial makeup of the camps. Most CCC companies in the state performed a variety of tasks, with the camps best described as multipurpose facilities.
Each superintendent had a crew assigned to a particular task: fire suppression or installation of telephone lines, for example. Specific work projects usually lasted for three weeks, at the most.
Some African American companies worked on special projects. In an area of Forest City, in Rutherford County , for example, Company C workers gullied and fenced over 3, acres.
They planted hundreds of trees and shrubs to reshape the land and stabilize the erosion. It later moved to Rainbow Springs. Community resistance to its placement may have been the reason.
Initial work projects in the forest around Franklin included construction of truck trails, roads, and telephone lines, and prevention and suppression of forest fires.
In addition to contributing to the development of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park , the company worked on construction of the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Four CCC camps were established along the parkway route. A paycheck was not the only good thing about being in the CCC. Oregon St Yreka, CA Tahoe Apache Ave. Ukiah Old River Rd. Ukiah, CA Residential. Santa Maria W. Cypress St. Santa Maria, CA Pomona W.
San Diego W. View the locations of each center using the options below. Blacks were not. They were enrolled only as vacancies occurred in black camps within their home states. By , the percentage of black enrollment in Texas was finally equal to their percentage of the population. But because a larger percentage of blacks than whites were poor, they were not able to participate in proportion to their need.
The main reason administrators and camp commanders gave for not enforcing integration of camps as required by law was that the only purpose of the CCC was to provide work for the enrollees rather than to fight for civil rights. They mainly served at separate camps located on 50 million acres of tribal lands in 23 states, helping mitigate the effects of a severe drought.
The following month, the president ordered the enrollment of up to 25, World War I veterans. They also served at separate camps. The forest projects were coordinated by E. At its peak of operations, 96 Texas CCC camps employed about 19, men at a time. From there they went to individual camps, which housed about men each.
The day usually started with reveille at 6 or a. Morning exercises were followed by a hearty breakfast, plain but ample. After straightening the barracks and policing the camp, they went to the work site by 8 a. Lunch was brought to the site about 1 p.
The workday ended about 4 p. Lights out was at p. Most of the camps had libraries, as well as sports programs, which might include baseball, softball, boxing and football, and other recreation for filling after-work hours. For example, several enrollees at the Hereford camp formed an orchestra, aided by a few townspeople.
The Palo Duro camp held a semi-monthly dance. A number of camps produced their own newsletters. Discovering that many of the enrollees were functionally illiterate, the CCC enlisted the help of the U. Office of Education to provide classes in basic school subjects — English, spelling, arithmetic and writing — and vocational courses. A camp education specialist taught some classes; others might be taken at nearby high schools.
Additional courses might include radio, shorthand or geometry, as at the Brenham camp. Enrollees at Longhorn Cavern could choose from dramatics, debate, social sciences, typing, singing, mechanical drawing and penmanship.
Nationally, by June , 35, men had learned to read and write, more than 1, received the equivalent of a high-school education, and 39 had received college degrees. Texas had a State Parks Board that by had acquired several historical sites and received a few gifts of land for parks, but it had no funds to develop and maintain a park system. As did other states, Texas seized the opportunity to create a large number of state parks using CCC labor and federal relief funds. Texas Canyons State Park was one of those planned in and was to be built in West Texas on a strip of land along the Rio Grande encompassing several canyons.
A CCC camp began developing the park in The transfer to federal ownership was made in ; it opened as Big Bend National Park in Between and , CCC enrollees built lodges, cabins, picnic pavilions, refectories, concession buildings, support buildings, footbridges and restrooms, usually from native rock and timber.
They also constructed swimming pools, strung telephone lines, planted thousands of trees, developed hiking and equestrian trails, installed guardrails, built dams to impound lakes, and constructed culverts to provide drainage. At Longhorn Cavern, the campers dug more than 2 million cubic yards of silt and bat guano out of the cave.
The rock that they also removed was used to construct bridges and entrance gates to the park and the cavern. CCC enrollees at the Balmorhea camp built a huge, one-and-three-quarter-acre swimming pool. The men were also on hand to help with emergencies. In , enrolleees in the Big Spring camp saw a fire on Scenic Mountain.
When the Great Depression began, Texas had no national forests. As governor of New York , he had run a similar program on a smaller scale. The United States Army helped to solve an early logistical problem — transportation. Most of the unemployed men were in Eastern cities while much of the conservation work was in the West. The Army organized the transportation of thousands of enrollees to work camps around the country. By July 1, , 1, working camps had been established and more than , men put to work.
It was the most rapid peacetime mobilization in American history. Under the guidance of the U. Forest Service, the National Park Service and the Departments of the Interior and Agriculture, CCC employees fought forest fires, planted trees, cleared and maintained access roads, re-seeded grazing lands and implemented soil-erosion controls.
Additionally, they built wildlife refuges, fish-rearing facilities, water storage basins and animal shelters. The CCC enrolled mostly young, unskilled and unemployed men between the ages of 18 and The men came primarily from families on government assistance. Men enlisted for a minimum of six months. Some corpsmen received supplemental basic and vocational education while they served.
Despite an amendment outlawing racial discrimination in the CCC, young African American enrollees lived and worked in separate camps. In the s, the U. Enrollment in the CCC peaked in August At the time, more than , corpsmen were spread across 2, camps.
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