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

In Chapter 9, Hunter explores how tuberculosis (TB) “became a medium for ‘framing’ tensions in labor and race relations, with the rhetoric cloaked in scientific and medical legitimacy” (187). Because African-American women frequently worked in the homes of affluent and middle-class whites, the medical establishment blamed them for what was then a mysterious disease. Targeting African-American women as the agents of contagion gave white employers yet another means of exerting control over the labor and bodies. It fed into racist ideas about the origins of the disease.

Hunter discusses three important moments in the racialized discourse around tuberculosis: “the abolition of slavery in 1865, the validation of the germ theory, the discovery of the tubercle bacillus in 1882” (188).

A common and false narrative about the emancipation of slaves was that slaves suffered less from tuberculosis during slavery because African Americans had been well cared for by their masters and because slaves were confined to their supposedly natural rural habitat. Once African Americans gained their freedom and migrated to urban spaces like Atlanta, the story went that the incidence of the disease rose rapidly. Whites blamed free blacks’ interest in fashionable clothing, lack of rest due to too much time in dance halls, and even dirty churches for tuberculosis among African Americans. White physicians, whose approach to diagnosing and discussing disease was not particularly scientific, co-signed these theories.

The validation of germ theory, the second moment in the consolidation of discourse about tuberculosis, occurred during the latter half of the 19th century. Proponents of germ theory held that disease spread through microbes passed from contagious people to others. Prior to the acceptance of germ theory, people associated TB with artistic creativity, feminine delicacy, elevated spirituality, or even affluence. Germ theory convinced people that TB was spread through contact in public spaces.

Robert Koch’s discovery of the tubercle bacillus in 1882 and the realization that the disease was transmitted when infected people coughed, or their sputum landed on another person, led most people to conclude that sick people were responsible for the spread of the disease. Racial disparities in tuberculosis rates between blacks and whites convinced doctors and the public that blacks were responsible for spreading the disease to whites. By the end of the 19th century, TB had gone from being a white person’s disease to a black person’s disease.

TB then went from being a black person’s disease to a black domestic’s disease because whites still needed to explain why whites had the disease. They accused their servants of being the vectors. Child-nurses, laundresses (and the clothes they washed), and cooks were accused in newspapers and in medical literature of spreading the disease to their employers. White Southerners scapegoated their black servants as the agents of contagion in an effort to fend off accusations that the South as a whole was characterized by laziness.

The poor living conditions of African-American inhabitants of Atlanta—crowded houses, the close proximity of Atlanta’s dumps, and lack of access to medical care—were the actual contributors to the high rates of TB. The cultural significance of the discourse around TB was that “disease constituted a metaphor for evil, dread, and pollution, [and] the black servant was a metaphor for disease […], or social disorder” (203).

Piggybacking on proposed laws designed to prevent black servants’ theft of their white employers’ property, public health officials attempted to assert control over the livelihood, living spaces, and bodies of black washerwomen. Employers required the washerwomen to register to work, submit themselves to inspection, and open their homes to raids and inspections. There was no concern, however, about whites passing the disease to their servants. Hunter argues that the particular hostility toward black women in these efforts occurred because “they were the most independent domestic workers and the most difficult to subjugate” (209).

Candidates for public office, businesses, and public health officials proposed far-reaching laws to criminalize “a wide range of social behaviors” (212). They mandated extreme solutions such as forcing domestics to live inside white homes in an effort to return black labor to the completely subordinate position under which it existed during slavery. Most efforts to pass or enforce such laws failed, but Hunter points out that the police already regularly violated African Americans’ civil rights to achieve the same aims.

When positive steps were taken to address TB, they were at the instigation of self-help groups like the Neighborhood Union. It took years longer for available medical staff and facilities to serve African Americans suffering from TB. The discourse around TB’s last major shift occurred only when African Americans gained access to medical care outside of the South, after they migrated during the Great Migration.