Short Stuff: The Atlanta Washer Woman Strike

One of the very first union strikes in US history was mounted by a group of African American women in the deep South. Listen in and learn all about this little known slice of history.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, there's
Chuck and Dave's here sitting in on his own uh podcast,
how about that? And this is just a funeral, right? Uh? No,
definitely not. No, this is a much more happy occasion
because it's an episode of Short Stuff. And what's happier
than that? I agree? So, Chuck, we're talking about something

(00:25):
that you dug up. I had never heard of this,
despite living in Atlanta for more than half of my life. Um,
something called Atlanta's washer Women's Strike. Granted I was not
alive in the eighteen eighties, but I'm still kind of surprised.
I never heard of it. I had not heard of
it until I went to, uh, you know, the fantastic
Oakland Cemetery here in Atlanta. Every Halloween they have what's

(00:49):
called Capturing the Spirit of Halloween tour and it is
Oakland Cemeteries, Atlanta's you know, historic, their Parade de Lachey.
We're quite a few prominent people are buried and it's
our our big in town old cemetery and you walk
around during Halloween with a drink. They serve drinks in
groups of like twelve to fift and then it's a

(01:13):
good size. And what they have is I think five
different stories being told by actors in costume. Uh, next
to the graves of the people whose story it is.
Do they tell the stories like this? They do a
but if that got really old, so we all just
said we please stop. So it's different stories every year. Um,

(01:35):
they find different stories from the people buried there. And
one of the stories was a woman who was part
of this washer woman strike. And Emily and I both
were like, I've never heard of this, What a great story.
She's like, you gotta do this on stuff you should know?
And I said, why are you telling me what to
do the stuff you should know? You've never even listened
to stuff you should know? And she said, well, I'd
listen to this if you ever did anything I'm interested in, Emily,

(02:00):
she might listen to this one. So I said that
that's actually a perfect short stuff. So here we go. Okay,
two things. There's a documentary about Oakland Cemetery and if
you watch it closely, our colleague Robert Lamb from Stuff
to Blow Your Mind is in it. He's like in
in the crowd, surprised it's an uncredited cameo. The other

(02:21):
thing is you and I were over there the other
day to see We went to the Eastern for the
first time to see a show. Yeah, yeah, it was
really cool. And um, the the whole area, I didn't
even recognize it until I looked at the street name.
I was like, oh my god, we're like right by
the cemetery. It's just completely changed. Uh, well, yeah, that

(02:42):
area is definitely different over there now, but it's five
minutes down the road, so I've seen the slow gradual.
To me, it was like night and day. Well, yeah,
I guess when you don't go by there, I'm a
little offended that you didn't. You were that close and
you didn't come by and like throw a paperbag full
of poop on my doorstep and light it on fire. No,
we were in and out. Momo wasn't with us, which
means we have three hours. We don't leave in a

(03:04):
crate for longer than three hours, so we had three
hours to get there and back, and um, we got
to see most of a violent fem show, which was
really really good. Um, and we just didn't have time.
You mean, was like, should we And I was like,
we just don't have time. Well, the only better in
was just like, we gotta missiencore through. This's exactly right.
So okay, back to it, Chuck, we understand where this

(03:26):
idea came from. Thank you, Emily, but let's tell everybody
about it, because this was a huge, um, a watershed moment,
you could say, in um the history of labor in Atlanta,
which sounds way more boring than it actually is. Yeah
and big thanks to Washington Post is a great article
on this and a I can't remember the website, but

(03:46):
a very pro union website. I think it was the
nfl c i oh website for real. Okay, yeah, that
sounds about right. Uh So, to paint a picture of
Atlanta in the eighties, it was a city trying to
be uh sort of the big thing in a South,
which it ended up being, but at the time it
was still on its way and had unpaid streets and
you know, it wasn't quite where it needed to be.

(04:07):
But politicians wanted to sort of send message to the north, like, hey,
Atlanta's ripe for business down here. We got a lot
of labor down here that you don't have to pay much.
It's not too far after the Civil war. Wink wink.
If you know what I mean and bring your business
down here. Yeah, like this was a huge push at
the time because the South was still you know, under

(04:30):
reconstruction and rebuilding um and at the time there was
something like nine percent of black working women because again
these were emancipated, enslaved people, but they weren't being paid
very much. They weren't being treated very well. And one
of the most prominent UM occupations of black working women

(04:50):
was to be a laundress or a washer woman. And
the reason why is because it was not fun work
at all and the washer women who were performing this
this work, this service were paid so little that even
like generally poor white families could afford to hire a

(05:11):
local black laundress to do the laundry for the family. Yeah,
they didn't have up north. They already had um like
professional cleaning, industrialized cleaning businesses for clothing, but there were
you know, manufactured cloth had come along. There were just
a lot more clothes now. And like you said, if
you had if you had any extra money as a family,

(05:33):
one of the first things you might do is to
pay for your clothes to be done because it was
you know that this didn't have washing machines. You had
to like wash clothes by hand, you had to boil clothes,
you had to iron them with irons that you uh
heat it up by fire and hang them up all
over the place to dry. So these uh, these young

(05:54):
women were you know, they started work anywhere from you know,
ten to twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old, and they basically
for the next fifty years doing this kind of work
for four to eight dollars a month and that today's
a hundred and sixteen to two thirty two dollars a month,
which it doesn't matter what time you live in, that
is not enough to live on. And yet there are

(06:15):
a lot of black moms, especially a lot of black
single moms, who managed to eke out a life for
them and their families from those wages just by working really,
really hard. Because as you progressed and became better at it,
it's not like you started making more money. The way
to make more money was to work harder and harder
and to take on more and more clients. Right. Um.

(06:35):
So one of the things about this this profession, though,
I think attracted so many black women was it was
one of the most autonomous professions around. Like if you're
a washerwoman. You didn't answer to anybody but yourself. It
was one of the first ways that you could be
an independent business person in the South after the Civil War.

(06:56):
And um, that was that was really important to a
lot of the workers, especially because they had just been
you know, freed from being slaves, like they had literally
been slaves just you know a couple of a couple
of years before. And now they're able to run their
own lives and run their own business as washer women. Yeah,
and notably, they did this work at their own homes,

(07:18):
so they made their own uh, washing soap. They would
get the clothes dropped off on a Monday, and then
they would do everything all week long and then drop
the clothes back off on a Saturday. So there at
least they're at home. They're doing this work. Uh. It
is tough, backbreaking work, but like you said, it provided
some autonomy, but the wages weren't going anywhere, which set up,

(07:40):
uh set the stage basically for the summer of one
and I think we should take a break'll talk about
what happened. M Alright, So now we're in the summer

(08:09):
of eight one, super hot in Atlanta hot doing this
kind of work and twenty of these washer women. Uh,
they met up and they said, all right, here's what
we need to do. Our money is going nowhere. The
only way to get more is to work harder and
to add more accounts. So let's form a trade organization. Uh.
They called it the Washing Society, and let's see if

(08:29):
we can get a little more respect and a little
more autonomy and more than anything, let's see if we
can get some some sort of codified higher pay to
the tune of about a dollar per twelve pounds of wash. Yeah. So, um,
this was enormous, Like, this is a huge deal. This
is eight eighty one in Atlanta, and black women were

(08:50):
meeting and saying, let's let's basically form a cartel, essentially
a washer cartel. And um, they set up the Washing
Society and started canvassing door to door because remember there
were a lot of laundresses working in the town at
the time. And um, they managed to grow from that
first twenty to three thousand members of this washing Society

(09:13):
in three weeks, just from going door to door. And
even more impressive, Chuck, they included white women too, right, Yeah,
which you know this is one that is not something
that you saw happening a lot, especially in the Deep South.
So even though two percent of these laundresses were white,
they included them. Got three thousand women together went on strike.

(09:34):
I think about ten days into the strike, the cops
got involved. Um. They arrested six of the leaders and
basically said, hey, you know you've been harassing people with
this door to door campaign, so we're going to charge
you with disorderly conduct and quarreling and charge you these
fines that are like I think one of these women,

(09:56):
Sarah A. Collier, was um and I wish I could
remember the name of the woman at the cemetery. I
looked it up, but they took all that down after Halloween,
but uh, that rings a bell. It may have been her.
But she was find twenty dollars, which was I mean,
what like for like almost half a year's pay. Yeah,
depending on how much she made, but definitely three to

(10:18):
three to five months pay. Um and I could not
find out why she was find twenty and other ones
were find five dollars. But this this, the purpose that
these women had behind their movement was enough that that
Sarah Collier said, I'm not paying that, and they said, well,
you're gonna go work on a chain gang, forty nine
year old asthmatic mother of two, and she did for

(10:39):
forty days. And that's the kind of thing that other
people look at and find genuine inspiration from. And that
really helped, I think, kind of solidify this is if
even more than it was already. Yeah. Absolutely. Um, So
the city council comes along, they say, all right, if
you want to be a member of this washerwoman organization,

(11:01):
then you have to pay the city a twenty annual fee.
And also if you want to start a commercial laundry
like so we can put them out of business. We'll
give you a nonprofit tax exempt status even so we can. Yeah,
so we can drive them out of their work. And
you know what these women did, as they said, so

(11:21):
twenty dollars is that's definitely half a year's wage. They
wrote a letter to the mayor and said, you know what, fine,
we'll pay it. We're not going in, we're not going anywhere,
we're not washing any more clothes. Will pay your organizational
fee and what do you think about that? And the
mayor his monocle pop right off his face as he
was reading that letter, right, and they said in his

(11:44):
dirty shirt, right, there's like flies buzzing around. So, um,
it's not entirely clear what happened afterward. Um, but from
from what it seems is that the city council backed
down and they said, okay, well, we're not going to
try to run you out a bit business. We're not
going to arrest anybody anymore. And a few weeks went
by and there was this really big deal thing that

(12:06):
was coming along, the International Cotton Exposition, which sounds old
timing and backwards and it was, but it qualified essentially
as a world's fair that drew two hundred thousand visitors
to Atlanta, which only had forty people who lived there
at the time, So it was a big deal. And
the city boosters, who were trying to lure northern companies
down south, we're really on edge about this. This had

(12:30):
to go really well because this is Atlanta's chance to
show it was the capital of the new South. Now well,
and in this interim time period, the washerwoman organization word
gets around and all of a sudden, you have other domestics.
You have cooks, and you have house cleaners and maids
and even nurses that were like, wait a minute, you

(12:50):
know our wages aren't going up either. We want more money. Uh.
There was an actual another strike. Hotel workers went on strike,
which was a really big deal. If you have two
hundred thous and people coming to your small town and
employers basically are like, we don't have replacement workers this time.
Like this is an entire workforce of people that are

(13:10):
saying they want more money, and we can't just say fine,
we'll just hire someone else this time. So the city
council the next week got together, they struck down those
twenty five dollar fees, and they got their wages raised.
They won. Yeah. I think they also gained control of
the washing industry in Atlanta so that they couldn't be

(13:32):
put out of business by commercial um companies laundries anymore.
Great story it is. It's really cool because these women
just basically said, hey, we're you can't treat us disrespectful anymore.
We're not slaves anymore. We're businesswomen and we're washing your laundry,
which you don't want to do, so you better treat
us better. And the South, at least Atlanta responded essentially,

(13:53):
it's right, yeah, good for them. That was a good one.
Thanks Emily. She's going to clothe about that. So yeah,
well Chuck doesn't have anything. I don't have anything in
Emily's gloating, which means short stuff is out. Stuff you
Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For
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(14:15):
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