In 1866, a year after Emancipation, formerly enslaved Black female workers launched a widespread work stoppage and jump-started a wave of Black-led labor organizing.
There is no one location or event that can lay a definitive claim to the founding of the American labor movement, but what is certain is the enormous debt it owes to women.
Laundry, at the time a labor-intensive day-long process, topped that list in an era in which families were large, personal hygiene was negligible, and running water was scarce. The washerwomen’s wages were kept so low that even poor White families could afford to send their laundry out for Black women to clean.
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.
In early July, 20 of them gathered in a church in Summerhill, one of Atlanta’s first predominantly Black neighborhoods, and founded a trade association they dubbed the Washing Society. The organization’s first order of business was setting a higher, standard wage rate for their labor, and they called a mass meeting to make their demands public. They told local Black clergymen to spread the word throughout their congregations, and less than a month later, on July 19, they called for a strike.
These workers had everything riding on this strike; the vast majority of the demonstrators were mothers who had to feed children and keep households afloat during the campaign, and couldn’t count on regular relief checks or a strike fund to pay the rent.
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