Newtown Battlefield Preservation held an important place in African Americans' struggle for equality in the United States. When 180 young African-American men of Civilian Conservation Corps Company 1251 arrived in August 1935 to improve the park, all of the company's officers were white because officers for Civilian Conservation Corps camps were drawn from the United States Army, which actively opposed appointing African Americans as company commanders. As President Roosevelt ran for reelection in 1936, criticism from a few congressmen, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and others led to two groundbreaking exceptions, one at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania and the other at Newtown Battlefield Reservation, where Company 1251's white officers were quietly replaced with three African Americans in June 1937. The Civilian Conservation Corps had been created after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, newly elected in April 1933, confronted the Great Depression, and the program organized young men and World War I veterans into companies that carried out badly needed conservation work. Each man received a dollar a day, three meals, a place to sleep, and hope, and from 1933 to 1942 the Civilian Conservation Corps rescued roughly two million men from poverty and desperation.