Short Stuff: The Atlanta Washer Woman Strike

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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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

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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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.

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,

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, 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 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 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 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

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. 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, 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 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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

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