During the Great Depression, Black women fought for better pay

The Great Depression came to Bluff City late. A thousand miles from Wall Street, Memphis didn’t feel the effects of the 1929 stock market crash initially — few businesses closed, and river trade was steady. Shantytowns and lines of beggars were distant problems for other cities. That quickly changed. 

By 1932, the city’s unemployment rate was around 14%, according to historian Roger Biles, and “approximately 30% of the city’s unemployed were Black.” Thousands of people begged for food outside of city hospitals, and poor Black migrants crowded into slums. So many people jumped into the Mississippi out of despair that local newspapers urged their readers to find counseling. 

As more Black Memphians struggled to find work, the fight for fair work and fair pay gained new stakes. Yet, even as Black workers started building a labor movement that could fight against exploitative industries and Jim Crow, Black women often found themselves sidelined. Labor unions usually focused on what are commonly known as “skilled trades.” In the process, they often overlooked the kinds of jobs that Black women could get most easily.

Black women were typically excluded from jobs that were traditionally dominated by Black men, like factory and construction work. At the same time, racist employers overlooked them for clerical and professional jobs available to white women — jobs that were higher-paying and less physically demanding. 

When they did find work, Black women were often limited to domestic service jobs, such as laundresses, housekeepers, waiters, and servants. In 1930, Black people made up 83% of domestic workers in Memphis, according to census data. More than 75% of Black domestic workers were women.

Black women were systematically paid less than their peers. In many cases, they were forced into hazardous working conditions, where they faced racism and sexism. In his book series “The Black Worker,” labor historian Philip Foner argued that “Black women felt the impact of the Great Depression earliest and bore the heaviest burdens.”

Bigotry in the workplace and the labor movement resulted in Black women being some of the most exploited and least organized workers in the South. Domestic work was unstable and often happened in private, which discouraged women from challenging their bosses. At the same time, established unions often ignored women unless they worked in majority-male workplaces. 

This doesn’t mean they weren’t an active part of Memphis’ labor movement. In the mid-1930s, Black women in several industries demanded higher pay for their labor. As factory workers, domestic workers and public employees, they experimented with strikes without unions or civil rights groups to support them. That lack of support made their efforts especially risky. Organizing meant risking their personal safety, their livelihoods and the health of their families.

At the Memphis Pecan and Walnut Company, for example, Black women employed to shell nuts by hand went on strike. These women worked 50 hours a week “on a piecework basis,” meaning they were paid based on how many nuts they shelled rather than an hourly wage, newspapers reported at the time. 

They received six cents for every pound of pecans and walnuts they shelled. On average, they made between $4.50 and $5.50 a week (or between $100 and $123 today). This was lower pay than what many women received across Tennessee. The median income of factory workers was $6.75 a week for Black women (or $155 today) and $12.00 for white women (or $276), according to a 1935 survey.  

The working conditions were as bad as the pay. The Poplar Avenue warehouse was unsafe and unsanitary, with “wet floors, steep stairways with no railings, filthy plumbing, and toilets only partially covered by burlap,” a traveling inspector from the U.S. Department of Labor noted. The women were forced to sit on uncomfortable wicker chairs for their long shifts. Many brought pillows from home to help ease their pain.

On March 16, 1937, The Commercial Appeal reported that around 100 Black women had walked off the job. They demanded ten cents a pound for shelling nuts, or a four-cent raise. The company offered a one-cent raise that would begin on April 1, which the women refused. 

“This is a highly competitive business, and we cannot afford to pay more,” argued vice president Gilbert Karchmer. Rather than give in, the plant shut down for the day, hoping the women would give up. 

That same day, 42 Black women at the Forest Products Chemical Company on Chelsea Avenue also went on strike to demand higher wages. These women packed charcoal into bags before they were sold to stores and wholesalers. They made 20 cents an hour, or $4.47 today, while their Black and white male coworkers made five cents more for the same work, or $5.59 today.  

“I don’t believe the women are serious about it,” company president W.H. Matthews told the press. Management chose to circumvent the women entirely, instead shipping their coal unpacked and telling customers to bag it themselves.

The following day, the nut shellers agreed to accept a one-cent raise for pecans and a two-cent raise for walnuts — as long as those raises started immediately. On the other hand, the charcoal packers accepted a two-cent raise instead of the five cents they were hoping for. Management likely felt it was better to give workers a small concession than to replace them on short notice.

Why did these strikes end so quickly? These workers were risking their jobs with no support from the broader labor movement. Black women represented just 5% of manufacturing jobs in Memphis, the 1930 census shows. Getting those jobs was a rarity, and the fear of losing them would have been very real. 

At the same time, as so-called “unskilled workers,” these women were ignored by established unions. The most important union leaders in the city — all of whom were men — often disapproved of strikes that weren’t announced by an established labor union. Memphis Trades and Labor Council president Lev Loring told reporters in 1937, “We will sanction a strike only when an organized body of employees has exhausted every peaceful means of negotiation with their employers.” 

If these women tried to extend their strikes, they likely would have had no support while they faced even bigger challenges: staying fed, motivated and unified as new workers were hired to replace them.

Three weeks later, strike fever hit Newsum-Warren Laundry Cleaners, a commercial laundry plant on South Dunlap Street. Laundries and dry cleaners were major employers for Black women, who commonly endured long hours and low pay. 

Black laundresses earned 14 cents an hour to clean clothes and rugs. Their white counterparts made between 20 and 25 cents an hour. Almost two-thirds of Black laundresses in Tennessee worked more than 40 hours a week, according to a 1935 survey.

On the afternoon of April 6, 1937, around 50 Black women and 20 white women shut down Newsum-Warren to demand pay raises. According to The Commercial Appeal, the striking women “reclined on tables and filled laundry baskets,” refusing to run the laundry machines. After four hours, management agreed to negotiate. Black workers won a two-cent raise, while white workers won a five-cent raise. 

In Michael K. Honey’s history of Memphis labor, he notes that Black and white domestic workers didn’t usually see themselves as equals. “Even lower middle-class white families could often afford to hire Black maids, launderers, and ‘mammies,’ placing white women as a group in a position of dominance over Black women.” At the time, this kind of interracial cooperation was incredibly rare.

These stories are examples of working-class Black women courageously standing up to the compounding injustices of their bigoted workplaces and an exclusionary labor movement. Although all three occurred within a month of each other, there’s no evidence that they were connected. Nevertheless, they helped to fan the flames of labor unrest spreading across the city. 

Bigger walkouts would hit Memphis later that year — including a strike of Black dockworkers that shut down commerce on the Mississippi River. Every great victory that Memphis workers celebrated was built on top of many smaller attempts that went unseen and, often, unremembered.

Justin A. Davis is a freelance journalist, music critic and former grassroots organizer. He’s covered politics, pop culture and history for outlets like Scalawag magazine, Waging Nonviolence, Post-Trash and Science for the People. He lives in Memphis.

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