Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: The Atlanta Washer Woman Strike

Episode Date: December 14, 2022

One of the very first union strikes in US history was mounted by a group of African American women in the deep South. Listen in and learn all about this little known slice of history.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Munga Shatikler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-Pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too.

Just a Skyline drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh Durst-Chuck and Dave's here sitting in on his own podcast. How about that? Did you just say funeral? No, definitely not. No, this is a much more happy occasion because it's an episode of short stuff and what's happier than that?

I agree. So Chuck, we're talking about something that you dug up. I had never heard of this despite living in Atlanta for more than half of my life. Something called Atlanta's Washer Women's Strike. Granted, I was not alive in the 1880s, but I'm still kind of surprised I never heard of it. I had not heard of it until I went to the fantastic Oakland Cemetery here in Atlanta. Very Halloween, they have what's called Capturing the Spirit of Halloween tour.

And it is Oakland Cemetery is Atlanta's historic, their Parade de la Che, where quite a few prominent people are buried, and it's our big in-town old cemetery. And you walk around during Halloween with a drink, they serve drinks. And groups of like 12 to 15, and then it's a good size. And what they have is, I think, five different stories being told by actors in costume next to the graves of the people whose story it is. Do they tell the stories like this? They do, but that got really old, so we all just said, please stop.

So it's different stories every year. They find different stories from the people buried there. And one of the stories was a woman who was part of this Washer Women's Strike. Emily and I both were like, I'd never heard of this. What a great story. She was like, you got to do this on stuff you should know. And I said, why are you telling me what to do with 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. Oh, hey, Emily. She might listen to this one. So I said, that's actually a perfect short stuff. So here we go. Okay, two things. There's a documentary about Oakland Cemetery. Now, if you watch it closely, our colleague Robert Lamb from Stuff to Blow Your Mind

is in it. He's like in the crowd. Surprised me. It's an uncredited cameo. Wow. The other thing is, you and me and I were over there the other day to see, we went to the Eastern for the first time to see a show. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, it was really cool. Great venue. Yeah. And 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. 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 change. Oh, 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 paper bag 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 her in her crate for longer than three hours.

So we had three hours to get there and back. And we got to see most of a violent fem show, which was really, really good. And we just didn't have time. Yumi was like, should we? And I was like, we just don't have time. Well, the only better end was just like, we got to miss Yonkour, but I gotta go through this bag of shit that chucks out. 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 watershed moment, you could say, in the history of labor in Atlanta, which sounds way more boring than it actually is. Yeah. And big thanks to Washington Post. There's a great article on this and a, I can't remember the website, but a very pro-union

website. I think it was the AFL-CIO website for real. Okay. Yeah. That sounds about right. Yeah. So to paint a picture of Atlanta in the 1880s, it was a city trying to be sort of the big thing in the South, which it ended up being.

But at the time, it was still on its way and had unpaved 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.

And like this was a huge push at the time because the South was still, you know, under reconstruction and rebuilding. And at the time, there was something like 98% 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 occupations of black working women was to be a laundress or a washerwoman. And the reason why is because it was not fun work at all.

And the washerwomen who were performing 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 like professional cleaning, industrialized cleaning businesses for clothing. But they were, you know, manufactured cloth had come along. There were just a lot more clothes now.

And like you said, 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, they just 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 heated up by fire and hang them up all over the place to dry. So these young women were, you know, they started work anywhere from, you know, 10 to

13, 14 years old, and they basically worked for the next 50 years doing this kind of work for $4 to $8 a month. And that today is $116 to $232 a month, which it doesn't matter what time you live in. That is not enough to live on. And yet there were 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? So one of the things about this profession, though, I think attracted so many black women, was it was one of the most autonomous professions around. Like if you were 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 that was really important to a lot of the workers, especially because they had just

been freed from being slaves. Like they had literally been slaves just a couple of years before, and now they're able to run their own lives and run their own business as washerwomen. Yeah. And notably, they did this work at their own homes. So they made their own 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 they're at least there at home. They're doing this work. It is tough, backbreaking work. But like you said, it provided some autonomy, but the wages weren't going anywhere, which set the stage basically for the summer of 1881, and I think we should take a break and talk about what happened. Agreed. I'm Mangesh Atikular, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the

moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in, and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop.

But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so now we're in the summer of 1881, super hot in Atlanta, hot doing this kind of work, and 20 of these washer women, they met up and they said, all right, here's what

we need to do. Our money's going nowhere. The only way to get more is to work harder and to add more accounts. So let's form a trade organization. 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 sort of codified, higher pay to the tune of about a dollar per 12 pounds of wash.

Yeah. So this was enormous. This was a huge deal. This is 1881 in Atlanta. And black women were meeting and saying, let's basically form a cartel, essentially, a washer cartel. And 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 they managed to grow from that first 20 to 3,000 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 1881. That is not something that you saw happening a lot, especially in the deep South. So even though 2% of these laundresses were white, they included them, got 3,000 women together, went on strike, I think about 10 days into the strike, the cops got involved. 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, 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 that rings a bell, it may have been her. She was fined $20, which was, I mean, what, like almost half a year's pay? Yeah, depending on how much she made, but definitely three to five months' pay.

And I could not find out why she was fined 20 and other ones were fined $5. But the purpose that these women had behind their movement was enough that Sarah Collier said, I'm not paying that. And they said, well, you're going to go work on a chain gang, 49-year-old asthmatic mother of two. And she did for 40 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, even more than it was already.

Yeah, absolutely. So the city council comes along, they say, all right, if you want to be a member of this washable woman organization, then you have to pay the city a $25 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 is they said, so $25 is definitely half a year's wage. They wrote a letter to the mayor and said, you know what, fine, we'll pay it.

Yeah. We're not going anywhere. We're not washing any more clothes. We'll pay your organizational fee. And what do you think about that? And the mayor, his monocle popped right off his face as he was reading that letter. And they said, okay. In his dirty shirt.

Yeah, right. There's like flies buzzing around. So it's not entirely clear what happened afterward, but 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 of 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-timey and backwards. And it was, but it qualified essentially as a world's fair that drew 200,000 visitors

to Atlanta, which only had 40,000 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 were 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. There was an actual, another strike, hotel workers went on strike, which was a really big deal if you have 200,000 people coming to your small town. And employers basically were like, we don't have replacement workers this time. 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 $25 fees and they got their wages raised. They won. I think they also gained control of the washing industry in Atlanta so that they couldn't be put out of business by commercial 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 disrespectfully anymore. We're not slaves anymore. We're business women 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. That's right. Good for them. They're going, thanks, Emily.

She's going to gloat about that. Yeah. Well, Chuck doesn't have anything. I don't have anything in Emily's gloating, which means short stuff is out. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.