To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War

In Chapter 5, Hunter explores the hardening of racial discrimination into legal segregation, commonly know as “Jim Crow” laws. At the turn of the century, African Americans faced increasing challenges. The state of Georgia passed Jim Crow laws that relegated African Americans to rear and standing areas only in the electric streetcars, the newest transportation in the state, and Atlanta followed suit.

The city also used Jim Crow laws to define where African Americans could live—outside of the city center. Where blacks and whites did live close together, they did so in clumps with clear racial boundaries. Black districts on the periphery expanded. In the east, Auburn Avenue became a black business district. West of the city, black neighborhoods were anchored by educational institutions like Atlanta University; more affluent African Americans had their own enclaves in the midst of poorer neighborhoods.

Whites moved north and south of the city. In the north, affluent whites flocked to Peachtree Street. White suburbs sprang up in the northeast, starting with Piedmont Park in 1910. A result of white movement to these suburbs was the creation of small black communities on the outskirts that placed black household workers closer to the homes of their white employers. Working-class whites, meanwhile, were distributed along the northwest and southwest of the city.

Despite the growth of the city, public services and utilities did not keep pace. Utilities and services were extended to serve affluent whites, but African Americans and some working-class whites had to content themselves with unpaved roads, poor housing, and filthy streets. Despite the poor housing stock, African Americans still paid inflated lease rates. Even affluent African Americans were forced out of the better served white communities by residential segregation ordinances in 1913. Servants, of course, were excluded from these laws for the convenience of affluent whites, who preferred live-in workers when possible.

During this period, African-American domestic workers contended with low wages. Even working-class whites could afford to hire black workers to buy the time they needed to work in industry or other wage-earning activities. The reality was that “[w]hite Southern domesticity at nearly every level of society was built on the backs of black women” (111), and “[m]ore than 90% of black female wage-earners were still confined to domestic work at the turn of the century” (111).

This number dipped slightly between 1900 and 1910, when a growing fashion industry led to some additional job options. There were also a few professional black women who worked as teachers, nurses and midwives, clerks, and salespeople. African-American women also worked in underground economy jobs as gamblers, bootleggers, sex workers, and live-in workers in white, female owned brothels.

Mostly, however, black women were unable to move into some of the better paying jobs opening up for white women. White women called a strike at the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill, for example, to protest the hiring of a small number of black female workers in 1897. The Textile Workers Protective Union, made up mostly of men, took leadership of the strike and used calls for racial purity to consolidate support for the labor union. Labor unions like the American Federation of Labor took note and used the same tactic.

One upshot of the exclusion of black female laborers was that black and white women had few social spaces where they were likely to encounter each other. The 1897 strike also “reinforced the pervasive association among black women, degradation, and domestic work just when more employees were in search of women workers” (119).

Meanwhile, there were also increasing tensions around criminal justice. White police officers regularly violated the civil rights of African Americans. Blacks responded by impeding arrests in their neighborhoods: filing complaints, pursuing lawsuits, and engaging in self-defense efforts. Whites were particularly fearful of black self-defense.

Whites responded with violence when faced with “increased black political leverage, the retaliatory campaign against police brutality, the acquisition of property by blacks, and the development of thriving African-American social and educational institutions” (124). During the 1905-1907 governor’s race, both the Democratic and Republican candidates ran on explicitly white supremacist campaigns promising to restore white control. White progressives framed their campaigns as necessary “civic reform that would alleviate racial conflict and improve race relations” (125).

African Americans had already lost the vote by 1891, but anti-vagrancy and anti-vice campaigns in 1906 worsened their status, along with the governor’s race. Vagrancy laws allowed law enforcement to arrest African Americans in their homes, and the crusade against vice—particularly drinking alcohol, which was reputed by reformers to make black men lust after white women—culminated in “racial hysteria” (125).

Atlanta newspapers published numerous stories in August and September of 1906 about a supposed wave of black crime against white women. For four days at the end of September, a white mob, encouraged by the police and prominent whites, rampaged through the city “beating, torturing, and killing” African Africans without regard to gender or age (126). The reports of rapes of white women that inspired the riot proved to be false. The riot revealed “the contradictory nature of segregation—a modern, but retrograde, political tool initiated in the self-styled progressive cities of the South” (127). Race riots occurred in other cities across the nation. In Atlanta, the riot ushered in institutionalized racism in the form of Jim Crow laws, shifting the labor struggle in favor of whites.

With the arrival of Jim Crow laws, African-American women focused on private institutions to fill the gap left by the lack of access to public services. Reformers were usually “middle-class professionals and their objects of reform were generally, working-class women and men” (131) who refused to be passive recipients of reform. Working-class African-American women were active reformers and continued to use “[t]heir neighborhoods as the launching pads for informal and formal collective action and mutual support, to meet the goals of mobilizing resources for daily sustenance and fighting against oppressive working and living conditions” (131).

Working-class black women used many strategies to address the impact of low wages and poor labor conditions. They engaged in pan-toting—taking home table scraps and dry goods with or without an employers’ consent, withholding laundry or stealing from employers for nonpayment of wages, salvaging and re-selling items from their neighborhoods, and taking in lodgers. They also organized themselves into mutual aid societies to pool resources. Hunter notes that the race riots accelerated black institutional development (136).

Hunter reviews the work of Lugenia Burns Hope, wife of John Hope (a president of Morehouse College) as well as an educator and social worker in her own right, as an example of the work black reformers did to meet community needs. Hope helped organize a kindergarten program and the Neighborhood Union (NU) settlement house, which provided social services, playgrounds for African-American children, healthcare services, and wholesome social activities.

The NU engaged in political activity such as lobbying, as well as collecting and presenting research designed to convince the city government to improve city services. Members also advocated for vulnerable members of their own communities and led crusades to clean up black neighborhoods, going so far as to spy on people who engaged in what they saw as immoral activities.

Unlike white settlement workers, however, African-American settlement workers found that Jim Crow prevented too much distance from the working-class people whom they hoped to reform. The NU and other similar organizations were dependent on a foundation of the neighborhood-by-neighborhood, grass-roots organizations built by working-class women prior to the advent of reformers. As a result, working-class and more affluent African-American women collaborated in these reform efforts. After 1920, however, social work was professionalized. Before the professionalization, working-class women took the lead in many reform efforts. Institutional churches—ones with “explicit goals similar to those of social settlement organizations in addressing the holistic needs of the urban poor” (143) also played a role in social services.