1. Opposition to violence against African Americans, as in the Black Lives Matter movement. FDR refused to support federal anti-lynching legislation, and it wasn’t because he had sudden federalist qualms about asserting federal authority over local matters. First, he didn’t have any interest in bucking the powerful southern wing of his party. (By contrast, FDR’s Republican predecessors all supported federal anti-lynching legislation.) While FDR’s apologists such as Ira Katznelson suggest that’s all there is to it, they aren’t able to come up with any substantial evidence that FDR personally cared about civil rights for African Americans in general, or about lynching in particular. Instead, the (anachronistic) argument seems to be simply that because FDR was a “liberal,” he must have had liberal views on race.

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2. Rights of immigrants, documented and undocumented, especially with regard to Latinos. Somehow, it’s not widely known that the Roosevelt administration engaged in the largest mass deportation of immigrants in American history, expelling hundreds of thousands — perhaps up to two million — of people of Mexican descent who were residing in the United States. An unknown but significant chunk of these deportees were American citizens, but that nicety didn’t stop the deportations.

3. Sympathy of the plight of refugees. FDR was not willing to spend any significant political capital to help Jewish refugees from Europe. While Great Britain took in 20,000 Jewish children in the Kindertransport, FDR let a Congressional bill with similar aims die.

There is much more to be said. As is well-known, Roosevelt interned U.S. citizens and noncitizens of Japanese descent during World War II, setting the precedent for those who plan “Muslim registries” and the like. Less well-known, New Deal legislation was planned with the intentional destruction of jobs held by African Americans in the South in mind.