When you think of the Civilian Conservation Corps, or CCC, you probably picture brawny young men cutting trails and hauling boulders to build dams, footbridges, and cabins. Perhaps you envision black-and-white photos depicting teamwork among the picturesque landscapes of places like Yosemite National Park. You may recall that the CCC was one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal strategies for helping the country cope with the Great Depression. What might not be present in your mental image is a less favorable aspect of the CCC’s execution: segregation.
Upon its founding in 1933, the Civilian Conservation Corps was intended to operate without discrimination. The federal relief program, which offered work and wages to 3 million otherwise unemployed Americans, had equality language written into its charter. The legislation establishing the program included this language, as drafted by Illinois Representative Oscar DePriest, the only Black member of Congress at the time: “That in employing citizens for the purpose of this Act, no discrimination shall be made on account of race, color, and creed.”
But reality didn’t transpire as DePriest envisioned. Black CCC workers were subject to demeaning treatment, denied advancement, and ultimately segregated into separate camps. While this isn’t surprising in a country that’s still grappling with systemic racism and battling hate daily, it’s a reality that’s deserves recognition—as do the efforts of Black laborers who shaped many of our most beloved public parks.
As TPL National Director of Black History and Culture Dr. Jocelyn Imani puts it, “Public lands as they exist today wouldn’t be as they are without Black labor. We need to acknowledge that.” The incredible strides of the CCC were made by laborers of all kinds, including Black and Indigenous Americans, the latter often serving on reservations.

Angels Landing Trail at Zion National Park is just one of many improved through the labor of the CCC. Photo: Udo S/Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
The program’s aims were virtuous: improve park infrastructure, plant trees, build recreational facilities and lodgings, and generally improve public lands. From its creation until the CCC dissolved in 1942, these goals were achieved. Even as early as 1935, the National Park Service estimated that the CCC “had advanced forestry and park development by as much as two decades.”
“Public lands as they exist today wouldn’t be as they are without Black labor. We need to acknowledge that.”
– Dr. Jocelyn Imani, national director of TPL’s Black History and Culture program
In exchange for this backbreaking work, corpsmen were provided with a steady source of income, housing, meals, and access to education from elementary to college level. (The PBS documentary series American Experience estimates that over 40,000 illiterate men, including African Americans, were taught to read and write.) The pay was $1 per day, which is roughly equivalent to $24 per day now. Today, the CCC’s stamp is visible across the country, very likely in a park near you.
At Zion National Park in Utah, the CCC stabilized the Angels Landing Trail against erosion and installed water management infrastructure along the Virgin River. In Ohio, they removed hundreds of chestnut trees killed by a fungal disease, then used the wood to build the Happy Days Lodge (and other structures) at Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Landmarks along the Appalachian Trail were built by CCC workers, and they left their mark on Saguaro, Yosemite, and Haleakalā National Parks in Arizona, California, and Hawai‘i, respectively—all places where Trust for Public Land has protected land, concurrently preserving the CCC’s legacy. (Their work can be seen at lesser-known TPL projects, as well: check out enduring trails and rustic lodgings at Palo Duro Canyon State Park in Texas or at Camp Waskowitz in Washington State. Indeed, the first time you see something built by the Civilian Conservation Corps, you recognize it as special.

A lodging built by CCC members at Palo Duro Canyon State Park in West Texas shows their unique craftsmanship and use of local materials. Photo: Dave Hensley/Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Despite making great strides for America’s public lands, the CCC’s treatment of Black corps members stands as one of the program’s greatest failings. To start, enrollment was capped at 10 percent for Black men seeking admittance into the CCC. This was meant to mirror the Black population in the U.S. at the time, but as is often the case, national hardships hit Black communities disproportionately harder than white communities. The percentage of Black Americans eligible for—and in need of—relief during the Depression, was far greater than 10 percent of the population. In fact, African Americans experienced an unemployment rate two to three times that of white Americans.

Black History Month began as “Negro History Week” in February 1926. Today, its founders, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), establish a theme for every year. The 2025 theme is African Americans and Labor, with a focus on “the various and profound ways that work and working of all kinds—free and unfree, skilled, and unskilled, vocational and voluntary—intersect with the collective experiences of Black people.” At Trust for Public Land, we use land protection and public places, such as parks, to celebrate and tell a full American history.
Edgar G. Brown (front row, left), a Civilian Conservation Corps adviser, visits a CCC camp in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, which had an all-Black administrative and technical staff. Photo: National Archives
Those Black Americans who were accepted into the CCC—an estimated 200,000—endured overtly racist acts such as slurs, and deliberately being given poor equipment. A 1934 article from the Norfolk Journal and Guide reports that Eddie Simons, a young man from Harlem, was fired after refusing to fan flies from a white officer. His discharge was deemed “dishonorable” and his last month’s pay withheld. The NAACP took up his case, eventually earning him an honorable discharge and the wages he was due.
Other forms of racism included Black corpsmen being separated in camp photographs, such as this image of Company 893 in Pineland, Texas. This camp was supposedly “mixed.”

A group photo of Civilian Conservation Corps laborers in Pineland, Texas, shows clear segregation between white and Black members. Photo: Connie Ford McCann, University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, UNT Libraries Special Collections.
The reality is that the CCC existed during the Jim Crow era, and its governance reflects the purported “separate but equal” treatment that took place in the American South—the same doctrine that was later deemed unconstitutional in the Brown v. Board of Education case.
While CCC camps were intended to be integrated—and some, as in Berkeley and San Diego, California, were—this was rarely the case. (When it did occur, it was often due to the number of Black members in a camp simply being too few to warrant separation.) In spite of Representative DePriest’s careful wording, it took only two years for CCC Director Robert Fechner to order that camps be segregated, a shift inspired by complaints from residents living near integrated camps.
In defense, Fechner made the argument that “Negro enrollees themselves prefer to be in companies composed exclusively of their own race.” He also claimed the work and treatment of corps members were the same among white and Black camp, yet there is evidence that some Black corpsmen were relegated to cooking, menial tasks, and routine work rather than priority projects. And even all-Black camps had white supervisors, leaving little hope of opportunity for advancement. President Roosevelt and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes pushed back on Fechner’s approach (Ickes more emphatically), but discrimination prevailed in line with the attitudes of the day.
According to research by Living New Deal, a nonprofit in partnership with the University of California, Berkeley, an African American CCC enrollee in Florida named Willie O’Neal described segregation in the corps as “just the way society was” during an oral history project.
Explore TPL’s Black History and Culture portfolio to discover historic sites we’ve helped preserve nationwide.
Perhaps most tragic is the fact that Black CCC members were often excluded or discouraged from visiting and enjoying the parks they helped create, especially in the South. According to the National Park Service’s African American Outdoor Recreation: A National Historic Landmarks Theme Study, a disturbing display of racism and fear played out at Lake Murray in Oklahoma, where two identical recreation areas were built by the CCC, one for white residents and one for Black residents. Threatened that their supremacy was being challenged, white locals complained and described the park as “far too elaborate for Negroes.” And in Virginia, the state’s first six state parks, built through the conscription of Black CCC labor, were whites-only facilities.
It wasn’t until 1940 that two Black supervisors were appointed, making for two truly all-Black camps. Far from the goal of integration, this step at least acknowledged leadership capability among Black CCC members. One of these camps was at Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania, where Black workers, some of whom may have descended from enslaved people, worked to restore both Union and Confederate monuments—a task that was likely undertaken with ambivalence.

Black CCC members plant trees at Little Round Top, near a monument to the 155th Pennsylvania Infantry, at Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania. Photo: National Archives
Historian Dr. Olen Cole Jr., who literally wrote the book on this topic, laments that the work of Black corpsmen did little to advance an interest in conservation careers among African Americans, writing that this work “must have seemed artificial and impractical—or at the very least, to have little relevance to their past and future lives.” In his view, “It was merely a temporary way to make money, not prepare for a career.”
It’s a shortcoming that’s disappointing yet true. But TPL’s Imani sees a shift in that outlook today: “We all can tell you about the experiences we’ve had on the land, things that have changed our lives,” she says of Black professionals in the environmental sphere. “There’s a devotion to the land; it implores us to steward it.” This Black History Month and well beyond, take time to consider the outdoor places you love—who built them, who’s working to protect and serve them today, and what’s at stake.
Amy McCullough is managing editor and senior writer at Trust for Public Land. She is also the author of The Box Wine Sailors, an adventure memoir.

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