When the Great Depression was at its worst, around 12,830,000 in the United States were unemployed, and others lost their livelihoods. For a lot of families, their lives turned upside down immediately when their primary providers stopped being able to afford to keep a roof over their heads.
In an interview (via the American Archive of Public Broadcasting), John Hope Franklin recounted how his family losing their home during the Great Depression caused him to have a lifelong fear of homelessness. Franklin’s father was a popular Black lawyer in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he catered to Black clients, but when the Depression devastated their community, his clients were unable to pay their legal fees, and the Franklin family lost their home. Franklin explained, “It is impossible for me to tell you what a remarkable impact that had on me, in the way, in a manner of depressing me and of disappointing me, and of feeling really homeless.”
While the Franklin family was able to survive by moving into a small apartment, other families were forced to live on the streets. Tent cities known as Hoovervilles sprung up around the country, which sometimes had thousands of people living in them at a time. There, people who had lost their homes had to build whatever kind of shelters they could to keep their families safe, sometimes using nothing more than cardboard.
