“Their Side of the Case”

Chapter 2 maps the labor activism of St. Louis’s largest segment of black working-class women as they mounted a labor reform program that anticipated and challenged New Deal labor legislation. With progressive black women staffers who led the St. Louis Urban League’s Women’s Division and progressive Jewish clubwomen who developed important ties to black communities, domestic workers designed and enforced standardization and rationalization policies to make dignity tangible in their contractual agreements. A predominant female constituency marked the Urban League as a women’s organization during a “radical” phase that extended into the late 1940s. As domestic workers made moves to “industrialize” household labor, they laid the groundwork for black women’s economic battles during the World War II period.

“We Strike and Win”

In the Funsten Nut Strike of 1933, nut shellers shut down production to protest poor working conditions and wage cuts. A group of black working-class women positioned themselves at the center of Depression-era politics through the highly publicized, Communist-organized strike against the Funsten Nut Company. Among the most influential labor battles of its era, the strike carved out a space for black women workers in the growing and increasingly powerful radical labor movement, marking the development of that movement in St. Louis.

The Legacies of Black Working-Class Women’s Political Leadership

Jean King, a St. Louis transplant from Osceola, Arkansas, and Memphis, Tennessee, in the fall of 1968 spotted a young Andre Smallwood eating a piece of bread he found on the snow-covered ground outside of their Darst public-housing development located just south of downtown. King soon learned that Smallwood’s mother had a monthly welfare check that amounted to less than the newly stipulated rent increase. The contrast between King and Smallwood’s mother could not have been more striking, although both resided in the same housing project. King and her husband, employed and married with one child, had the means to avoid routine visits from caseworkers, fluctuating welfare payments, and rent schedules that continually increased. But negotiating these realities was typical for most other black women, many of whom functioned as their family’s breadwinners. Public-housing tenants had already been meeting regularly to discuss the possibility of conducting a rent strike when King attended a tenants’ meeting at the nearby Blumeyer Housing Project in midtown St. Louis. After King shared the story of her encounter with Smallwood’s mother, tenants elected her president of the Citywide Rent Strike Committee. Like many “organic intellectuals” who emerged as leaders of grassroots social movements, King came out of a local movement that was already organized when the time to strike arrived. King, along with other black women community organizers, went on to spearhead one of the nation’s largest and earliest rent strikes in the postwar era. Women’s militant mass action garnered national attention and later influenced public policy reform. Because of the long and distinguished activism of black working-class women, a groundswell of grassroots organizing on a national scale, and federal action in support of antipoverty ...

“Jobs and Homes … Freedom”

Chapter 6 uncovers the links between jobs and public housing. From the vantage point of overlooked historical actors, the chapter examines the massive urban renewal programs that razed black working-class neighborhoods and constructed massive public-housing structures throughout the city. The dignity for which black working-class women struggled pointed to a cluster of trenchant urban problems that St. Louis began encountering in the prewar period and later experienced in much more concentrated fashion. This chapter highlights the lives of public housing tenants and the labor activism of Ora Lee Malone to examine black women’s struggles against urban inequality. It also shows how black middle-class women reformers used their platforms to advance black working-class women’s causes. The work of the women featured in this chapter directly led to the 1969 rent strike, in which public-housing tenants struck against the St. Louis Housing Authority. In one of the first and largest rent stoppages in the nation, strike participants made tenant control a centerpiece of their platform.

“Beneath Our Dignity”

Chapter 5 analyzes the initial rocky years of black working-class women’s entry into the needle trades, boot and shoe, and laundry factories and their unions during the early to mid-1940s. Black working-class women exposed the fault lines of the American racial liberalism espoused by civil rights and union progressives who worked to establish “interracial good-will” in unionism and the industrial workforce. Women’s resistance on the shop floor and in the union hall, demanding respect and fairness, challenged and altered community leaders’ programs. Black working-class women were less interested in breaking the color barrier than in earning fair wages, establishing fair standards, organizing work hours around other commitments, and working and organizing in a hospitable climate. Focusing on black women’s work with the ILGWU, this chapter examines their work and union experiences in the union’s worker theater program to consider why conflicts over historical memory; black women workers’ long demands for dignity, autonomy, and respect; and social reformers’ interracial experiments produced intense battles.

“Riveting the Sinews of Democracy”

Black women’s failed attempts to abandon domestic employment for jobs in the lucrative local defense industry became a central mobilizing agenda around which organizers of the March on Washington movement waged their wartime black freedom struggle. Women aired personal stories of employment discrimination before committees, filed affidavits against large industrial plants, joined picket lines, shared their grievances through letter writing, gave public addresses at large mass meetings, and formed their own civil rights organizations. The narrative that black working-class women activists astutely and persuasively articulated—namely, that of the beleaguered black woman worker excluded from participation in patriotic service—provided a most effective assault on discrimination, exposing the jagged lines of the wartime American democratic practice. Women’s labor activism proved indispensable to the formation of one of the largest and most active March on Washington movement chapters in the country.

“The Fight against Economic Slavery”

The short-lived though influential Colored Clerks’ Circle (CCC) was a black youth organization that used boycotts and picket lines to win jobs at drugstores located in black communities. Formed in 1937, the CCC combined black self-determination, notions of economic nationalism, and consumer power to address the unemployment crisis plaguing black youths. Instead of conceptualizing black economic power through the figure of the black housewife, a method employed by the St. Louis Housewives’ League in the early 1930s, the CCC positioned politically actualized black young women as facilitators of racial leadership and racial progress. Moreover, CCC members made the argument that community change became evident and meaningful when young black women found dignity through employment.

The Labor of Dignity

Not long after St. Louisans entered into the new year of 1969, the final year of a decade of significant social upheaval at the local and national level, thousands of public-housing tenants struck against the St. Louis Housing Authority (SLHA). Together, the black working-class women whose lives were at the center of the debate over the future of the city staged one of the largest and earliest demonstrations of its kind. National news outlets provided coverage, politicians at the local, state, and national level weighed in and amended or adopted policies as a result, and several strike leaders emerged as national figures. While they issued numerous demands to city officials, above all, dissidents called for dignity and control. Drawing upon support from key leaders, public sympathy, and the sustainable political communities that they had built over time, strikers demanded the redistribution of power and a greater allocation of resources to manage their own affairs and become key brokers in decision-making processes. Their hard-hitting politics and critical views about municipal authority and governance were deeply rooted in their insistence on making black working-class women’s survival a matter of public concern....