Drawing upon both a wealth of existing scholarship and selected primary documents, this book offers a new synthesis of African American life during the Great Depression. It also provides a useful text for a variety of African American and U.S. History courses on this turbulent decade in the nation's history.

Joe W. Trotter, Carnegie Mellon University

This well-researched, insightful book includes photographs that enhance a sense of the times and the growing activism that eventually led to the civil rights movement.

Booklist

This accessible, concise [book] describes living and working conditions and the black cultural, social, and political response. The author examines class, gender, health care, education, and the formation of self-help and political organizations, giving each a balanced, thorough analysis. . . . Extremely useful text. . . . Highly recommended.

Choice Reviews

Concise, engaging, deeply grounded in the scholarly literature, and fully accessible to a general readership, To Ask for an Equal Chance provides a compelling account of the economic hardship and racial discrimination that defined the experience of African Americans in the Great Depression. Cheryl Greenberg shows persuasively both the transforming impact and the fundamental limitations of the New Deal's record on race, and she argues provocatively that subsequent civil rights protest was fueled in part by the community action, political organizing, and expansion of economic and educational opportunities among blacks in the 1930s.

Nancy Weiss Malkiel, Princeton University