"For the first time since plantation days artists began to touch new material, understand new instruments, and eagerly embrace the challenge of black poetry, black song, and black erudition." The economic destruction caused by the Great Depression had left between eleven and fifteen million people jobless. Ten thousand of these unemployed citizens were artists. A year earlier, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the newly elected president, had signed into law the Federal Emergency Relief Act. Based on a system of job benefits, the primary goal of this bill was simply to get people, including workers, back to work. artists. The government had no particular commitment to the arts, but it realized that artists "must eat like everyone else."2 New Deal employment projects, however, did more than just put food on artists' tables. Through a series of innovative programs, the government created the foundation for a rich era of production in American art. In 1935 Roosevelt created the Works Progress Administration (later Work Projects Administration), or WPA. Its aim was to create all types of jobs at every level of the skills ladder, preserving professional and technical skills and helping people maintain their self-respect. Artists in the program were paid $15 to $90 a month for a wide variety of assignments. Work relief programs operated under this basic design from 1935 to 1939, when the WPA was renamed the Work Projects Administration and placed under the supervision of the Federal Art Project (FAP). The WPA/FAP lasted until 1943, when productivity and employment increased as the country mobilized its resources to fight World War II. From 1935 to 1943 the WPA/FAP had four main areas of activity: artistic creation, artistic education, art as applied to community service, and technical and archaeological research. The most prolific divisions were those responsible for easel painting, murals, sculpture, and fine prints. “Black Printmakers and the WPA” specifically addresses the area of ​​fine prints and the community art centers where they were made. There, arts education and community service have combined to offer a significant number of black artists the rare opportunity to be supported in their chosen line of work, to gain new avenues for expression, and to have contact with white artists , which under other circumstances could not have occurred. The black engraver has only a few recorded historical antecedents. Although documentation exists showing that black engravers were active in this country as early as 1724, the anonymity of the slave makes it nearly impossible to trace individual achievements..