The Depression didn't seem so bad in the beginning. Hoover had predicted that the crisis would be shortlived and that the economy would be back to where it was before the crash. But when the weeks dragged on into months and the months turned into years, people began to realize that the Depression would not be as easily remedied as their president had foretold. At the peak of the Depression, a quarter of the population was put out of work. A million people were unemployed in New York alone. Some cities like Detroit experienced unemployment rates of more than 50 percent. Minorities and women experienced the worst discrimination and composed a large number of those statistics. Jobs that were typically held by African Americans before the crash were given to white employees after it. And when African Americans and women did manage...