On July 19, 1881, Black laundry workers in Atlanta formed the Washing Society to demand labor rights. This remarkable moment shows how Black workers continued their struggle for freedom after the end of Reconstruction and how women led that struggle.

The post-Civil War period was not great for Americans who had been enslaved. They were released from slavery into….basically nothing, but it wasn’t slavery. Everything else was effectively just as bad. Formerly enslaved people certainly had their own ideas about the economy, particularly around land ownership and subsistence farming, but that didn’t fit white conceptions of Black labor, north or south. With the failures of Reconstruction in the face of white violence or indifference, there were few economic options for Black people. Those who could left the plantations for the cities. Places such as Memphis, New Orleans, and Atlanta saw enormous influxes of Black people. But there weren’t great economic opportunities there either. For women, working as a laundress was one of the only options.

Cleanliness Is Next To Poverty

Black women made up half the Black workforce in Atlanta. A full 98 percent of these women worked as domestics in some form or another. They started working in their teens or even earlier. If they lived long enough, they worked until they were 65 or so, but most didn’t make it that long. Of all the forms of domestic labor, laundry was the most common. And it was hard, hot work, with lots of opportunities to burn yourself, not to mention the sheer brutal labor of scrubbing day after day, week after week, year after year. It was hot and it was heavy. Hauling water only made it worse. It only got harder over time. The rise of mass-manufactured clothing and middle-class standards of cleanliness meant that people had more clothing and they changed it more often so there was more laundry per household. For all of this work, they made $4 to $8 a month, far below poverty wages.

In the summer of 1881, Atlanta was hosting the International Cotton Exposition. This was a fair intended by the city’s “New South” promoter Henry Grady to show how far the city had advanced from slavery. A docile work force without slavery was part of the image he and others wanted to promote. But the laundry workers had different ideas. On July 19, twenty laundresses and a few men met and decided to form the Washing Society and organize their fellow workers for a strike to demand higher wages. They did have one advantage. Unlike the domestics who worked in white homes, laundry was all outsourced to Black women’s homes. So they were independent on a daily basis, not laboring under the eyes of whites. They could form such an organization.

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