Women Riot for Jobs

During the 1930s, many black women who had been engaged in national campaigns turned toward the economic crisis that was unfolding in the nation’s capital. The crisis of the Great Depression inspired activists to amplify their demands for economic justice, to argue that black women deserved the opportunity to work in a job of their choice, earn a living wage, provide for their families, and enjoy full participation in government programs that regulated hours and wages and provided a safety net in old age. Black women critiqued New Deal programs for marginalizing domestic workers, whether through their exclusion from the National Recovery Administration’s industrial codes, limited access to government relief programs, or their ineligibility to receive benefits from the Social Security Act. In 1938, 10,000 black women rioted for charwomen jobs in the federal government, which illustrated their desire for economic justice in the nation’s capital.

Conclusion

The Conclusion discusses how, after World War II, black women and men in Washington, D.C. achieved important victories in the struggle for racial justice in their city, including the end to racial segregation, desegregation of the public schools, voting rights, and the restoration of Home Rule through the election of mayor and city council. However, Washington, D.C. is not a state, and members of Congress can still use the nation’s capital as a political pawn and deny democracy to its residents. Black women in the nation’s capital put their stamp on post-war movements for justice, including black freedom, feminism, welfare rights, Black Lives Matter, and Say Her Name. Black women’s prescient visions for economic justice, safety from violence, and legal equality remain more relevant than ever before.

Make Washington Safe for Negro Womanhood The Politics of Police Brutality

This chapter chronicles patterns of racialized and gendered interracial police brutality in Washington, D.C. and the efforts of black women and men to end this violence. Between 1928 and 1938 white police officers in the city shot and killed forty black men in the city. While white officers did not shoot and kill black women and girls, but subjected at least twenty nine to a range of violent behaviors, including street harassment, racial epithets, physical assaults, and intrusions into their homes. In addition to these abusive encounters, white officers employed a double standard by refusing to conduct investigates when black women were abused, raped, or murdered; this was a form of negligence. Black women who were the victims of police violence resisted interracial policy brutality by fighting back, alerting the press, and pleading innocence in police court. Black women activists joined with men to stem the crisis of interracial police violence through protest parades, mock trials, mass meetings, and congressional lobbying.

Jim Crow Must Go

Chapter Six illustrates how, during World War II, black women in Washington, D.C. worked to steer the city on a path toward racial integration. Women’s activism became more militant in the 1940s as they built on the rich tradition of resistance from the previous decade in economic justice, civil rights, and campaigns for safety. During World War II, black women protested interstate transportation segregation, staged sit-ins at lunch counters throughout the city, and returned to their position as lobbyists in the federal government. As men departed to fight in World War II, black women crafted gendered arguments, contending that it was their duty to fight for racial equality in the city. At the conclusion of World War II, black women had laid the foundation for the post-war black freedom struggle across the nation.

Washington Needs the Vote

This chapter explores how, during the 1930s, black women waged an early civil rights movement in the nation’s capital. Inspired by the militancy of the Great Depression and influenced by on-going campaigns for safety and economic justice, activists protested racial segregation, lobbied for the passage of a civil rights bill, and pressed for the restoration of voting rights to all eligible residents of Washington, D.C., culminating in a referendum election in 1938. While African Americans waged similar types of movements around the country, activists in Washington, D.C. benefited from their close proximity to the federal government. As memories of the Civil War and Reconstruction surfaced in the 1930s, activists applied the lessons from these eras directly into their political campaigns as they worked to restore the freedoms that their ancestors had once enjoyed in Washington, D.C.

The Women Will Be Factors in the Present Campaign

This chapter examines black women’s national politics in the 1920s. For years, African American women had been organizing in their churches, mutual benefit associations, the Phyllis Wheatley Young Women’s Christian Association, and clubs. The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment and pending presidential election in 1920 inspired women to connect their existing alliances with partisan causes. Black women seized on their location in the nation’s capital to advocate on behalf of African Americans living across the country. Black women across the city formed eight, distinctive political organizations, using them as instruments to lobby for economic justice, protest southern disfranchisement, express opinions about Supreme Court nominations, and weight in on which monuments and memorials would grace the national mall. While elite and middle-class women dominated the leadership of most political organizations, the National Association of Wage Earners attracted a working-class membership through its unique recruitment strategies and mission of economic justice.

The Eyes of the World Are upon Us

This chapter analyses how black women living in Washington, D.C. in the 1920s and early 1930s worked hard to pass a federal anti-lynching law. Over a period of fifteen years, women employed a range of protest tactics, including petitions, pickets, prayer meetings, congressional testimony, and a Silent Parade. The U.S. House of Representatives passed the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill in 1922, but it died in the Senate. Four years later, two women testified in the Senate about the urgency of passing anti-lynching legislation, which reflected the growing visibility of black women in politics. But when activists protested the erasure of lynching at the National Crime Conference in 1934, they recognized that police brutality in the nation’s capital needed to be a political priority. Many of the veterans of anti-lynching activism turned toward eradicating interracial police violence in Washington, D.C. in the 1930s.

Introduction

This introduction contextualizes black women’s politics within the historical and social landscape of political culture in black Washington. While African American women’s political activism stretched back to the seventeenth century, it was during the 1920s and 1930s that their political campaigns gained more visibility, and Washington, D.C. was a key location for this process. Inspired by the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and emboldened by World War I’s message of democracy, black women formed partisan organizations, testified in Congress, weighed in on legislation, staged protest parades, and lobbied politicians. But in addition to their formal political activities, black women also waged informal politics by expressing workplace resistance, self-defense toward violence, and performances of racial egalitarianism, democracy, and citizenship in a city that very often denied them all of these rights. Jim Crow Capital connects black women’s formal and informal politics to illustrate the complexity of their activism.