The Epiphany Light of Southern Black Washerwomen

On this last day of Black History month, as we make our way into Women's History month, I want to honor the women known as The Pioneers of American Labor, credited with being the impulse for the Labor Movement in America: Southern Black Washerwomen.

It is significant, I think, that today, the 28th day of February, 2025, there is an international movement to boycott all major corporations (and not use credit cards) as a way to protest corporate greed and corruption, and demonstrate to ourselves and the world, the power we have. In the United States, the emphasis is also on boycotting companies who have reversed their DEI (Diversity Equity and Inclusion) policies, like Walmart, Amazon, Target, Google, and fast food places.

Bank of America has decided to end tracking its DEI goals while Morgan Stanley, and CitiGroup as well as many universities and colleges are simply rewording their DEI language or removing it from public-facing content but to quietly continue DEI policies.

There is also a movement to make a special effort, especially today, to support companies who have reaffirmed their DEI policies - like Costco, Apple, Ben& Jerry's, Delta Airlines, JP Morgan Chase, Microsoft and Patagonia.

It should be noted that Americans are encouraged to support small businesses - especially entrepreneurs - and to use cash, not credit cards.

Those companies and the people who support them may not know it, but the inspiration for the strengthening of their backbone in the face of enormous pressure from the forces of The White House, MAGA and Project 2025 come from Southern Black Washerwomen in the last quarter of the 19th Century who stood up for themselves and their families for economic fairness.

They are mostly anonymous. Of course. They are women and they are Black. I do have the names of some who went to jail for defying orders and, even before I begin to briefly tell their story, I want to call the names of those whose names were published in the newspaper: Matilda Crawford, Sallie Bell, Carrie Jones, Dora Jones, Orphelia Turner and Sarah A. Collier

They were delicately described in the press as “ebony-hued damsels,” but found themselves slapped with charges of disorderly conduct and “quarreling”. Five of the women were fined $5 apiece, but Collier was ordered to pay a $20 fine. She refused to pay, and as punishment, the 49-year-old asthmatic mother of two was sentenced to work on a chain gang for 40 days.

My apologies. As usual, I'm getting out ahead of my skis. Let me briefly tell you their story. You can find more in the recently published book, “Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor,” by Kim Kelly (Normally, I'd add a link to Amazon, but not today, Mr. Bezos. Not today.)

According to Ms. Kelly, there is no one location or event that can lay a definitive claim to the founding of the American labor movement but one thing is clear, women provided the spark and the impulse.  Since the beginning and for hundreds of years, the social fabric of this country was stitched and held together with strong threads of prejudice against and exploitation of women, people of color, and class status.

Upper and middle class women’s choices were limited to marriage and motherhood, or spinsterhood. Waged labor was seen as the exclusive realm of men, and for most middle- and upper-class women, the thought of earning money for their work was wholly foreign.

Of course, this applied to "native-born women". As immigration ramped up during the middle of the 19th century, female workers from other ethnic groups — including Irish immigrants fleeing a colonial famine and Russian Jews seeking to escape brutal repression — were also targeted by the ruling class’s white-supremacist paternalism.

By the 1830s, the American genocide against Indigenous people had been well underway for decades, and the few Indigenous women allowed into the workforce were treated abominably. So, too, were the lives of women of African descent. Following Emancipation, their lives were still often defined by exploitation, abuse and wage theft.

Whether held in bondage or living freely, Black women were considered no differently than work horses, possessing neither intellect nor soul, but whose primary value was in their cheap labor and their ability to produce children who would continue to support the wealthy elite, from generation to generation.

However, the Industrial Revolution not only changed the way people worked, it caused them to reconsider every aspect of their lives. Ms. Kelly reports that "the restrictive social fabric" - especially for women. It was on a balmy spring 1824 day in Pawtucket, R.I., 102 young women launched the country’s very first factory strike, and brought the city’s humming textile industry to a standstill.

In the North, the textile industry was almost entirely white. It wasn’t until 1866, a year after Emancipation, that formerly enslaved Black female workers were able to launch a widespread work stoppage of their own — and by doing so, jump-start a wave of Black-led labor organizing that would spread through multiple industries and set the stage for decades of labor struggles to come.

Ms. Kelly reports,

"On June 16, 1866, laundry workers in Jackson, Miss., called for a citywide meeting. The women — for they were all women, and all were Black — were tired of being paid next to nothing to spend their days hunched over steaming tubs of other (White) people’s laundry, scrubbing out stains, smoothing the wrinkles with red-hot irons, and hauling the baskets of heavy cloth through the streets. At the time, nearly all Black female workers were employed as domestics by White families, to handle the cooking, cleaning and child care, hauling water, emptying chamber pots, and performing various and sundry other tasks that the lady of the house preferred to avoid."

The washerwomen of Jackson presented Mayor D.N. Barrows with a petition decrying the low wages that plagued their industry and announcing their intention to “join in charging a uniform rate” for their labor. As their petition read:

“Any washerwoman who charges less will be fined by our group. We do not want to charge high prices, we just want to be able to live comfortably from our work.”

The prices they’d agreed upon were far from exorbitant: $1.50 per day for washing, $15 a month for “family washing,” and $10 a month for single people. They signed their letter “The Washerwomen of Jackson,” and in doing so, gave a name to Mississippi’s first trade union.

There is no record of the 1866 strike’s outcome, but the action itself had an immediate ripple effect in Jackson and farther afield. Throughout the Reconstruction era of 1865 to 1877, Black workers rose up and struck in Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina and Washington, D.C.

There was a successful organization of Black Washerwomen in Galveston, TX but it wasn't until a hot day in July, 1881, in Atlanta, GA, that the trade organization, "The Washing Society" was founded by Black Washerwomen in their Black neighborhood church in Summerhill, GA that these women, working through their Black clergymen, began to have a major impact on higher wages and improved working conditions. 

When their demands were not met, the Black washerwomen of Atlanta, Georgia went on strike, which hit the city, on the employers side, like a wrecking ball. Ms. Kelly reports:

“The Washerwomen’s strike is assuming vast proportions and despite the apparent independence of the white people, is causing quite an inconvenience among our citizens,” the Atlanta Constitution reported on July 26, a week into the strike. “There are some families in Atlanta who have been unable to have any washing done for more than two weeks. Not only the washerwomen, but the cooks, house servants and nurses are asking increases.”

Imagine! Why, I'll bet even the horses were scared about whatever was about to happen next!

A pathetic counter offer was made by the Atlanta City Council of a $25 annual business license fee on any member of a washerwomen association (more than $670 in 2021 dollars) — a proposition intended to economically hobble the workers at war for a mere $1 per dozen pounds of laundry.

But instead, the washerwomen wrote a letter to Atlanta Mayor Jim English expressing their willingness to pay the fees — so long as the city agreed to formally grant them control over the local hand-laundering industry. The strikers’ letter ended with a warning:

“Don’t forget this. We hope to hear from your council on Tuesday morning. We mean business this week or no washing.”

Atlanta’s City Council backed down, and while history is murky on the resolution, it appears that the workers had successfully shifted the balance of power not only for themselves as Washerwomen but all Black women and men. Atlanta’s Black female workers had prevailed in making their collective power felt. The city’s white-supremacist employer class had come face-to-face with the reality of Emancipation: Black workers would tolerate injustice no more.

I love this story - these stories - of the Southern Black Washerwomen which illustrate, over and over again, that Black History is American History and we can learn so much about ourselves from reading these stories.

These stories of the Southern Black Washerwomen and all of the stories I have been privileged to read and reflect on and write and post on this blog also offer is a blueprint - a plan and a playbook - of what we need to do in the next four years.

That is already happening today with the worldwide economic boycott. Whether or not we want to admit it, we have learned a great deal from our Black sisters. If we open our eyes and our ears and our hearts, we may just find the courage and the intelligence and the moral strength to elect one of them President of the United States one day.

I hope something good happens to you today.

Bom dia.