NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1 Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White, 86-110.

2 Gwaltney, Drylongso, 173.

3 Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race”; Hull, Scott, and Smith, eds., All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men. See the pioneering literary-historical study by Noble, Beautiful, Also, Are the Souls of My Black Sisters, as well as the invaluable collections of documents edited by Lerner, Black Women, and Sterling, We Are Your Sisters.

4 See, for example, Moynihan, The Negro Family.

5 See, for example, Royster, Lugenia Burns Hope; Harley and Terborg-Penn, eds., The Afro-American Woman; Hine, When the Truth is Told; Terborg-Penn, “Discontented Black Feminists,” in Scharf and Jensen, eds., Decades of Discontent; Jones, “Mary Church Terrell”; Davis, ed., Contributions of Black Women to America, 2 vols.; Hine, ed., Black Women in Nursing; special issue on black women in education in Journal of Negro Education (Summer 1982); Giddings, When and Where I Enter ; White, Too Heavy a Load.

6 Fields and Fields, Lemon Swamp, xiv.

7 Langston Hughes, “Mother to Son,” in Hughes and Bontemps, eds., Poetry of the Negro, 186.

8 Washington, ed., Black-Eyed Susans, xxxi.

9 Ladner, Tomorrow’s Tomorrow; Wallace, Black Macho.

10 Lorde and Rich, “An Interview with Audre Lorde,” 729.

CHAPTER 1

1 Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, 31-32. Novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist, Hurston (b. 1901, d. 1960) had collected a massive amount of primary data on the culture and folklore of black Americans before she began work on Their Eyes Were Watching God. In 1938 she served as supervisor of the Negro Unit of the Florida Federal Writers Project, which compiled interviews with former slaves. Her various writings are finally receiving long-overdue literary attention and critical acclaim. See Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, and an anthology: Hurston, I Love Myself When I Am Laughing, ed. Walker.

2 General works on slavery include Young, Domesticating Slavery; Smith, Mastered by the Clock; Dew, Bond of Iron; Berlin and Morgan, eds., Cultivation and Culture; Oakes, The Ruling Race; Gutman, The Black Family; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll; Owens, This Species of Property; Blassingame, The Slave Community; David et al., Reckoning With Slavery; Escott, Slavery Remembered; Webber, Deep Like the Rivers.

3 For works that focus on enslaved women in particular, see, for example, Berry, Swing the Sickle; Camp, Closer to Freedom; Wood, Women’s Work, Men’s Work; Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We; Schwartz, Birthing a Slave; Morton, ed., Discovering the Women in Slavery; White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?; Gaspar and Hine, More Than Chattel; Davis, “Reflections,” and Obtiko, “‘Custodians,’” in Hiller and Sheets, eds., Women and Men, 256-259; Hine and Wittenstein, “Female Slave Resistance,” in Steady, ed., Black Woman, 289-300; hooks, Ain’t I a Woman, 15-49. The volumes edited by Lerner, Black Women in White America, and Sterling, We Are Your Sisters, include material on the history of slave women.

4 Clinton, Plantation Mistress; Scott, Southern Lady; Fox-Genovese, Plantation Household; Wiener, Mistresses and Slaves; Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor.

5 On women’s “productive-reproductive” functions and the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism, see Kelly, “Doubled Vision of Feminist Theory,” Hartmann, “Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Job Segregation,” and Eisenstein, “Developing a Theory of Capitalist Patriarchy” and “Relations of Capitalist Patriarchy” in Eisenstein, ed., Capitalist Patriarchy; Kuhn and Wolpe, “Feminism and Materialism,” and Beechey, “Women and Production” in Kuhn and Wolpe, eds., Feminism and Materialism.

6 See, for example, Jones, American Work, 23-80; Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom; Galenson, White Servitude in America.

7 “become . . . color”: Allison, ed., Life of Olaudah Equiano, 45-46. See also Piker, “Indians and Race in Early America,” 3; Stewart, ‘What Nature Suffers to Groe’; Silver, “Learning to Live with Nature”; Spear, “Race Matters in the Colonial South”; Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade.

8 Berlin, Many Thousands Gone; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint.

9 Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks; Diouf, Servants of Allah.

10 Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery; Jones, American Work, 64-76.

11 Stevenson, Life in Black and White; Sidbury, Becoming African in America; Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks; Berlin, Many Thousands Gone; Creel, “A Peculiar People.”

12 Interviews with former slaves have been published in various forms, including Rawick, ed., American Slave; Social Science Institute, Fisk University, Unwritten History of Slavery; Perdue and others, Weevils in the Wheat; Cade, “Out of the Mouths of Ex-Slaves”; Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony. The narratives as a historical source are evaluated in Escott, Slavery Remembered, 3-18 (“The slave narratives offer the best evidence we will ever have on the feelings and attitudes of America’s slaves”); Goodson, “Introductory Essay”; Woodward, “History from Slave Sources”; Bailey, “A Divided Prism”; Sekora and Turner, eds., The Art of Slave Narrative. The Davidson quotation is from Rawick, ed., American Slave, series 1, Ohio Narratives, 16:26-29. Hereafter all references will include the series number, name of the state, and volume and page numbers. The other major source of slave interview material taken from the Federal Writers Project (FWP) collection for this book—Perdue and others—will be referred to as Weevils in the Wheat. The Fisk University study is listed as Unwritten History of Slavery. Jacobs has compiled a useful index to the FWP narratives: Index to the American Slave.

13 Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk; Dusinberre, Them Dark Days; Pruneau, “All the Time is Work Time.”

14 Supp. Series 1, Mississippi Narratives, pt. 2, 7:350; Supp. Series 1, Oklahoma Narratives, 12:110; Davis, “Reflections,” 8; “they . . . Massa”: Kemble, Journal, 60, 92. See also Unwritten History of Slavery, 286; Camp, Closer to Freedom. For discussions of women’s work and the inadequacy of traditional economic and social-scientific theory to define and analyze it, see Acker, “Issues,” in Stromberg and Harkess, eds., Women Working; Brown, “Division of Labor.”

15 Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We; Pruneau, “All the Time is Work Time”; Wood, Women’s Work, Men’s Work; Berlin, “Time, Space, and the Evolution,” 66; and Morgan, “Work and Culture.”

16 Kemble, Journal, 28; Olmsted, Slave States, 470. Gray, History of Agriculture, 533-548; Weevils in the Wheat, 199; Series 1, Florida Narratives, 17:305; Sydnor, Slavery in Mississippi, 20. See also Rivers, “‘Dignity and Importance’,” 422-423; Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters, 13-17.

17 Olmsted, Slave States, 387; Series 1, Alabama Narratives, 6:87. Work descriptions were gleaned from the Federal Writers Project Slave Narrative Collection (Rawick, ed., American Slave, and Perdue and others, Weevils in the Wheat) and Gray, History of Agriculture. Goodson (“Introductory Essay”) has indexed a sample of the interviews with women by subject (for example, candle-making, carding wool, fieldwork, splitting rails.) See also Bruchey, ed., Cotton, 174. See the documents under the heading “Making Cotton” and “The Routine of the Cotton Year,” 171-80. For pictures of early-twentieth-century black women of St. Helena’s Islands, South Carolina, wearing the second belt, see photographs in Dabbs, Face of an Island. The caption of one photo entitled “Woman with Hoe” reads: “Adelaide Washington sets off for her day’s work in the field. The second belt or cord tied around the hips lifted all her garments a little and protected the long skirts from both early morning dew and contact with the dirt. . . . [According to] an African superstition . . . the second cord also gave the wearer extra strength” (no pp.). Olmsted, in Slave States, 387, includes a sketch of this form of dress.

18 Pruneau, “All the Time is Work Time,” 4; Weevils in the Wheat, 26; Gray, History of Agriculture , 1:251; planter quoted in Owens, This Species of Property, 39.

19 Berry, Swing the Sickle; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 495; Burke quoted in Gray, History of Agriculture, 549; Olmsted, Back Country, 81. For former slaves’ descriptions of women who plowed, see Series 1, Oklahoma Narratives, 7:314; Series 1, Florida Narratives, 17:33.

20 Olmsted quoted in Sydnor, Slavery in Mississippi, 68; Weevils in the Wheat, 77. Of the women who worked in the South Carolina Sea Islands cotton fields, Harriet Ware (a northern teacher) wrote, “They walk off with their heavy hoes on their shoulders, as free, strong, and graceful as possible.” Pearson, ed., Letters from Port Royal, 52.

21 Bruchey, ed., Cotton, 174. See the documents under the heading “Making Cotton” and “The Routine of the Cotton Year,” 171-180. For examples of outstanding female pickers see Series 1, Alabama Narratives, 6:275 (“Once I won a contest wid a man an’ made 480 pounds”); Weevils in the Wheat, 199.

22 Supp. Series 2, Texas Narratives, pt. 1, 2:93-96; Supp. Series 1, Mississippi Narratives, pt. 1, 6:235-236, and pt. 2, 7:404; Series 1, Texas Narratives, pt. 3, 5:231; Series 1, Indiana Narratives, 6:25; Series 1, Georgia Narratives, pt. 1, 12:113; Series 1, Oklahoma Narratives, 7:314; Series 1, Alabama Narratives, 6:338, For additional examples, see Unwritten History of Slavery, 203, 217, 241.

23 For a general discussion of slave artisans in the South, see Gray, History of Agriculture, 1:548, 565-567; Sydnor, Slavery in Mississippi, 9; Newton and Lewis, eds., The Other Slaves. Ransom and Sutch, in One Kind of Freedom, discuss “Occupational Distribution of Southern Blacks: 1860, 1870, 1890” in appendix B, 220-231. The works of Starobin (Industrial Slavery) and Brewer (The Confederate Negro) focus almost exclusively on male slaves. See also Gutman and Sutch, “Victorians All?” in Davis and others, Reckoning with Slavery, 160; Gutman, Black Family, 599-600. The “hiring out” of men and children frequently disrupted family life.

24 Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom, 233; Olmsted, Slave States, 388; Series 1, Ohio Narratives , 16:28; Kemble, Journal, 121; Series 1, South Carolina Narratives, pt. 4, 3:78; Weevils in the Wheat, 223-224. Genovese describes the plantation system as a “halfway house between peasant and factory cultures” (Roll, Jordan, Roll, 286). For further discussion of the grueling pace of fieldwork, see Gutman and Sutch, “Sambo Makes Good,” in Davis and others, Reckoning with Slavery, 55-93.

25 Olmsted, Back Country, 58-59; Johnson, “Smothered Slave Infants”; Schwartz, Birthing a Slave; Tadman, “Demographic Cost of Sugar,” 1536; Follett, “Heat, Sex, and Sugar.” See also Gutman and Sutch, “The Slave Family,” in Davis and others, Reckoning with Slavery, 94-133; Eblen, “New Estimates”; Gray, History of Agriculture, 562, 888-907.

26 Johnson, Soul by Soul; “there’s a”: quotation in Schwartz, Birthing a Slave, 72.

27 Savitt, Medicine and Slavery, 115-120; planter quoted in Olmsted, Slave States, 190; Gutman and Sutch, “Sambo Makes Good,” in Davis and others, Reckoning with Slavery, 67; Series 1, Virginia Narratives, 16:51. See also Owens, This Species of Property, 38-40.

28 Douglass, Narrative, 42; Oakes, Ruling Race, 24, 156, 174-175; Olmsted, Back Country, 61; Series 1, Virginia Narratives, 16:11. See also Kemble, Journal, 121. For other descriptions of overseers and their treatment of slaves, see Olmsted, Back Country, 56-61, 81-82, 207, and Slave States, 438-439; Gray, History of Agriculture, 1:245-246; Escott, Slavery Remembered, 87-89. Slaves recall overseers (among them, “the meanest men that ever walked the earth”) and their disciplinary techniques in Series 1, Oklahoma Narratives, 7:146; Florida Narratives, 17:88, 118; Texas Narratives, pt. 4, 5:210.

29 Grandy, The Life of Moses Grandy, 18; Series 1, Alabama Narratives, 6:66; Series 1, Indiana Narratives, 6:200. See also Supp. Series 2, Louisiana Narratives, 6:1939-1943, 2025, 2299. I wish to acknowledge Professor Michael P. Johnson for bringing to my attention additional examples of this practice.

30 Series I, Mississippi Narratives, 7:171.

31 Douglass, Life and Times, 52; Owens, This Species of Property, 218-219; Series 1, Oklahoma Narratives, 7:347; Series 1, Tennessee Narratives, 16:9.

32 Series 1, Alabama Narratives, 6:46; Series 1, Florida Narratives, 17:185; Weevils in the Wheat, 259, 216; Series 1, Virginia Narratives, 6:51; Escott, Slavery Remembered, 86-93; Faust, “Culture, Conflict and Community,” 90. Escott includes an extensive discussion of resistance as revealed in the FWP Slave Narrative Collection and provides data on the age, gender, and marital status of registers and the purposes and forms of resistance. Gutman argues that the “typical runaway” was a male, aged sixteen to thirty-five years (Black Family, 264-265). See also M. E. Obtiko, “‘Custodians of a House of Resistance’: Black Women Respond to Slavery,” in Hiller and Sheets, eds., Women and Men, 256-259; Owens, This Species of Property, 38, 88, 95; Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters, 56-84.

33 Pruneau, “All the Time is Work Time”; Weevils in the Wheat, 26, 157, 282. According to Gutman, plantation work patterns “apparently failed to take into account enlarged slave kin groups, and further study may show that a central tension between slaves and their owners had its origins in the separation of work and kinship obligations” (Black Family, 209). See also Webber, Deep Like the Rivers, 2; Faust, “Culture, Conflict, and Community,” 87.

34 Series 1, Florida Narratives, 17:191; slaveholder quoted in Gutman, Black Family, 263; Starobin, ed., Blacks in Bondage, 54.

35 Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 328, 340; Series 1, Alabama Narratives, 6:273; Supp. Series 1, Mississippi Narratives, pt. 2, 7:400; Series 1, Texas Narratives, pt. 3, 5:45; Unwritten History of Slavery, 51. Some historians have emphasized that the distinction between house and fieldwork was not always meaningful in terms of shaping a slave’s self-perception or defining his or her status. See Owens, This Species of Property, 113; Escott, Slavery Remembered, 59-60.

36 Burge quote in Wood, “Broken Reeds and Competent Farmers,” 45; Series 1, Alabama Narratives , 6:416-417.

37 Series 1, Texas Narratives, pt. 4, 5:11; Series 1, Indiana Narratives, 6:183. See also Supp. Series 1, Mississippi Narratives, pt. 1, 6:54-55, 216, 257, 365, 380-381; Unwritten History of Slavery, 56, 60; King, Stolen Childhood; Schwartz, Born in Bondage.

38 The FWP Slave Narrative Collection and Unwritten History of Slavery provide these examples of children’s work and many more. See Series 1, Alabama Narratives, 6:157; Unwritten History of Slavery, 263; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 502-519; Supp. Series 1, Georgia Narratives, pt. 1, 3:185; Weevils in the Wheat, 264-265; Series 1, South Carolina Narratives, pt. 4, 3:257; Schwartz, Born in Bondage.

39 Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 226; Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, 255.

40 Clinton, Plantation Mistress, 16-35; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 333-338; Olmsted, Slave States, 421; Series 1, South Carolina Narratives, pt. 4, 3:126; Florida Narratives, 17:356.

41 Wood, “Broken Reeds and Competent Farmers,” 46. For specific incidents illustrating these points, see Series 1, Oklahoma Narratives, 7:135, 165-166; Tennessee Narratives, 16:14; Weevils in the Wheat, 63, 199; Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, 160-161, 131, 149. See also “A Seamstress Is Punished,” in Lerner, ed., Black Women in White America, 18-19.

42 Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 285, 288-91, 308, 321; Series 1, Oklahoma Narratives, 7:347. See also Unwritten History of Slavery, 261; Brent [Harriet Jacobs], Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Jones, Saving Savannah, 83.

43 Johnston, Race Relations, 246-247.

44 Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 281-283; Clinton, Plantation Mistress, 80-81.

45 See, for example, Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, 132.

46 Olmsted, Slave States, 421; Series 1, South Carolina Narratives, pt. 4, 3:126; Series 1, Florida Narratives, 17:356; Escott, Slavery Remembered, 64; Kemble, Journal, 98; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 346-347; Unwritten History of Slavery, 201.

47 Series 1, Florida Narratives, 17:356; Gutman and Sutch, “Sambo Makes Good,” in Davis and others, Reckoning with Slavery, 74; Kemble, Journal, 153; Gray, History of Agriculture, 1:553; Owens, This Species of Property, 113; Faust, “Culture, Conflict, and Community,” 86.

48 Series 1, Georgia Narratives, pt. 1, 12:243; Davis, “Reflections,” 4-7. For general discussions of women’s work as it related to slave communal life, see also Owens, This Species of Property, 23, 225; White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?; Polly Cancer recalled that, when she was growing up on a Mississippi plantation, the master “wudn’t let de mammies whip dey own chillun [or “do dey own cookin”] . . . ef he cum ’cross a ’oman whuppin’ her chile he’d say, ‘Git ’way ’oman; dats my bizness.’” Supp. Series 1, Mississippi Narratives, pt. 2, 7:340-341.

49 Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 127.

50 Stewart, ‘What Nature Suffers to Groe,’ 102; Pollitzer, The Gullah People; Turner, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect.

51 For a theoretical formulation of the sexual division of labor in preindustrial societies, see Brown, “A Note on the Division of Labor by Sex.”

52 Wood, Black Majority, 59-62; Lloyd, “Osi fakunde of Ijebu,” in Curtain, ed., Africa Remembered , 263; Marguerite Dupire, “The Position of Women in a Pastoral Society,” in Paulme, ed., Women of Tropical Africa, 76-80. Kemble, Journal, 42; Pearson, ed., Letters from Port Royal, 58, 106.

53 Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro, 33-85; Wood, Black Majority, 179, 250; Baumann, “The Division of Work.” On the role of women in hoe agriculture, see also Mullings, “Women and Economic Change,” in Hafkin and Bay, eds., Women in Africa, 239-264; Leith-Ross, African Women, 84- 91; Boserup, Woman’s Role in Economic Development, 15-36; Goody and Buckley, “Inheritance and Women’s Labour.” No tribes in precolonial Africa used the plow. See also Griffin, “West African and Black Working Women.”

54 Stevenson, Life in Black and White; Kaye, Joining Places; White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?; Malone, Sweet Chariot, 5, 256-262.

55 Berry, Swing the Sickle.

56 Fett, Working Cures; Gray, History of Agriculture, 1:563; Olmsted, Slave States, 424-425, 697- 698; Owens, This Species of Property, 47; Series 1, Florida Narratives, 17:175; Series 1, Alabama Narratives , 6:216; Supp. Series 1, Mississippi Narratives, pt. 1, 6:10, 23, 25, 123; Supp. Series 1, Georgia Narratives, pt. 1, 3:27. Savitt (Slavery and Medicine) includes a section on black medicine (171-184) and confirms Rebecca Hooks’s recollection that “on the plantation, the doctor was not nearly as popular as the ‘granny’ or midwife.” Series 1, Florida Narratives, 17:175.

57 Series 1, Georgia Narratives, pt. 1, 12:70; Oklahoma Narratives, 7:314-315; White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? 22-23; Supp. Series 1, Texas Narratives, pt. 1, 2:98. Group quilting projects served the same functions for women. See Webber, Deep Like the Rivers, 236.

58 The FWP Slave Narrative Collection contains many descriptions of slaves engaged in household industry. Earle details comparable techniques used by white women in colonial New England in Home Life in Colonial Days.

59 See, for example, Series 1, South Carolina Narratives, pt. 3, 3:15, 218, 236; Texas Narratives, pt. 3, 5:20, 89, 108, 114, 171, 188, 220; Supp. Series 1, Mississippi Narratives, pt. 1, 6:36; Unwritten History of Slavery, 56.

60 Weevils in the Wheat, 88-89. (George White of Lynchburg reported that his mother sang a similar version of this song to women while they were spinning. See p. 309.) White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?

61 Unwritten History of Slavery, 53. See also Faust, “Culture, Conflict, and Community,” 91.

62 Gutman, Black Family, 220-227; Wetherell, “Slave Kinship”; Edwards, Scarlet Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, 140.

63 Penningroth, Claims of Kinfolk; Clifton, ed., Life and Labor on Argyle Island; Kaye, Joining Places, 106-111, 147-149, 161-162.

64 Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 319; Gutman, Black Family.

65 Series 1, Georgia Narratives, pt. 1, 12:203. For other examples of change from children’s to adults’ clothing, see Series 1, Texas Narratives, pt. 3, 5:211, 275; pt. 4, 5:109-110; Georgia Narratives, pt. 1, 12:277; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 505. On childhood in the quarters, see also Schwartz, Born in Bondage; King, Stolen Childhood; Webber, Deep Like the Rivers; Wiggins, “The Play of Slave Children.”

66 Gutman and Sutch, “Victorians All?” in Davis and others, Reckoning with Slavery, 146; Gutman, Black Family, 61-67, 75-80; Escott, Slavery Remembered, 52-53; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 415, 459, 465-467; Trussell and Steckel, “The Age of Slaves at Menarche.”

67 Escott, Slavery Remembered, 59-65; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 339; Series 1, Oklahoma Narratives, 7:322; Alabama Narratives, 6:370; Weevils in the Wheat, 49, 131-132; Series 1, South Carolina Narratives, pt. 3, 3:106. For examples of courting practices, see Owens, This Species of Property, 195-196; Series 1, South Carolina Narratives, pt. 3, 3:78, 106, 167; pt. 4, 3:249; Texas Narratives, pt. 3, 5:15; Indiana Narratives, 6:139-140; Oklahoma Narratives, 7:264; Mississippi Narratives, 7:87; Georgia Narratives, pt. 1, 12:164; Weevils in the Wheat, 122; Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters, 31-43.

68 Gutman, Black Family, 50, 67-68; Gutman and Sutch, “Victorians All?” in Davis and others, Reckoning with Slavery, 139-142; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 466-467; Series 1, South Carolina Narratives, pt. 3, 3:167-168. In Black Family, Gutman points out that “violence, even murder, sometimes followed suspected or actual infidelity” (p. 67). The aggrieved husband was almost always the aggressor. Webber suggests that “more community disfavor probably fell upon female than male adulterers,” Deep Like the Rivers, 149. The marriage ceremony in the fields is described in Sydnor, Slavery in Mississippi, 63.

69 Sutch argues in “The Breeding of Slaves,” in Engerman and Genovese, eds., Race and Slavery , that slaveowners in the breeding states “fostered polygamy and promiscuity among their slaves” and sold the children (“predominantly as young adults”) to planters in the southwestern slave states (p. 198). Cf. Trussell and Steckel, “Age of Slaves”; Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross, 78-86.

70 Series 1, South Carolina Narratives, pt. 4, 3:53; Texas Narratives, pt. 4, 5:176-178; Kemble, Journal, 167, 205. Botume, First Days, 161-163; Escott, Slavery Remembered, 43-44; Series 1, Texas Narratives, pt. 4, 5:189; Alabama Narratives, 6:134, 221; Mississippi Narratives, 7:4; Florida Narratives, 17:167.

71 Schwartz, Birthing a Slave, 67; Gaffney quote in Perrin, “Resisting Reproduction,” 261-262.

72 Gutman, Black Family, 75; Sutch, “The Care and Feeding of Slaves” in Davis and others, Reckoning with Slavery; Gutman and Sutch, “Victorians All?” in Davis and others, Reckoning with Slavery, 231-301 and 134-162; Owens, This Species of Property, 38.

73 Owens, This Species of Property, 40-41; Eblen, “New Estimates,” 301-319; Steckel, “Slave Mortality”; Kiple and Kiple, “Slave Child Mortality,” 284-309. Kiple and Kiple attribute the high rates of slave infant mortality to “a conspiracy of nutrition, African environmental heritage, and North American climatic circumstances rather than planter mistreatment” (p. 299). But see also Johnson, “Smothered Slave Infants.” On the high fertility rates of slave women in the upper South, see Sutch, “Breeding of Slaves,” in Davis and others, Reckoning with Slavery, 173-210. Quotations from Weevils in the Wheat, 150; Botume, First Days, 164. For discussions of the demographic effects of the cotton boom, see Owens, This Species of Property, 38; David, “Time on the Cross,” in Davis and others, Reckoning with Slavery, 339-357; Eblen, “New Estimates,” 312.

74 Series 1, Alabama Narratives, 6:9; Supp. Series 2, Texas Narratives, pt. 5, 6:2036-2037; Series 1, Florida Narratives, 1:22-23; Kaye, Joining Places, 51-118; Webber, Deep Like the Rivers, 112-113, 167-171; Unwritten History of Slavery, 251. On naming practices in the quarters, one scholar observes, “One function of naming a child for his father or paternal kin was to assert the child’s place in slave society.” See Cody, “Naming, Kinship, and Estate Dispersal,” 203.

75 Gutman, Black Family, 67-68, 142, 267-268; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 318, 482-494; Series 1, South Carolina Narratives, pt. 3, 3:192; Supp. Series 1, Mississippi Narratives, pt. 2, 7:382.

76 Series 1, Oklahoma Narratives, 7:210; Escott, Slavery Remembered, 49-57, 87; Owens, This Species of Property, 201; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 512; Gutman and Sutch, “Victorians All?” in Davis and others, Reckoning with Slavery, 152; Steckel, “Miscegenation.” For accounts of the rape of slave women, see Supp. Series 2, Mississippi Narratives, 7:2531, Louisiana Narratives, 4:1238-1240. See also Williamson, New People; Reed, Heminingses of Monticello.

77 Supp. Series 2, Texas Narratives, pt. 2, 2:23-24; Weevils in the Wheat, 207; Steckel, “Miscegenation,” 251; Brown, “Sexuality and the Slave Community,” 8; Series 1, Florida Narratives, 17:89- 90. See also Unwritten History of Slavery, 44; Olmsted, Slave States, 619, 622; Weevils in the Wheat, 202, 207-208; Kemble, Journal, 141, 210. The social-scientific literature on rape reveals the antipathy toward the victim on the part of husbands or lovers who feel personally humiliated by the incident. See, for example, Notman and Nadelson, “The Rape Victim.” This issue is complicated by the fact that the rape of slave women by black drivers did occur on occasion. As the supervisor of a gang of field-workers (sometimes of women exclusively), the driver had temptations and opportunities similar to those of white overseers, and not all of them showed the respect toward their fellow slaves that Frank Bell’s uncle did. Some apparently harbored feelings of resentment that found at least partial release in attacks upon enslaved women. See Kemble, Journal, 228; Series 1, Mississippi Narratives, 7:13; Gutman, Black Family, 83-84; Olmsted, Slave States, 430, 436-38, 470, and Back Country, 81; Series 1, Oklahoma Narratives, 7:50; Mississippi Narratives, 7:171; Owens, This Species of Property, 123-125.

78 Gutman and Sutch, “Sambo Makes Good,” in Davis and others, Reckoning with Slavery, 63; Owens, This Species of Property, 195; Supp. Series 1, Mississippi Narratives, pt. 1, 6:59-60. For mention of corn shuckings in particular, see Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 318; Series 1, Mississippi Narratives , 7:6; Series 1, Oklahoma Narratives, 7:230. In the context of traditional male-female roles, what Genovese calls the “curious sexual division of labor” that marked these festivities was not “curious” at all (p. 318).

79 Eblen, “New Estimates,” 306; Pearson, ed., Letters from Port Royal, 25; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 522-523; Andrews, Journal of a Georgia Girl, 101; Escott, Slavery Remembered, 108-109; Owens, This Species of Property, 140; Gutman, Black Family, 218; Olmsted, Slave States, 433; Gray, History of Agriculture, 548; Kemble, Journal, 164, 247; Douglass, Narrative, 76-78. According to Genovese, the ability of these elderly enslaved persons “to live decently and with self-respect depended primarily on the support of their younger fellow slaves” (Roll, Jordan, Roll, 523). See also Supp. Series 1, Mississippi Narratives, pt. 1, 6:242; Pollard, “Aging and Slavery”; Series 1, Alabama Narratives, 6:216, 256, 334; Supp. Series 2, Nebraska Narratives, 1:319-320; Webber, Deep Like the Rivers, 175-176.

80 Series 1, Georgia Narratives, pt. 1, 12:214; Weevils in the Wheat, 128.

81 Stevenson, Life in Black and White, 228; Fett, Working Cures; Jones, Gullah Folktales, 171; Blassingame, “Status and Social Structure,” in Owens, ed., Perspectives, 142. See also Raboteau, Slave Religion, 238, 275; Webber, Deep Like the Rivers, 226; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 225-227.

82 Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, 133.

83 Jones, American Work, 222-232; Jones, Saving Savannah, 3-116; Goldin, Urban Slavery; Wade, Slavery in the Cities; Southern Claims Commission, Chatham County Claim no. 18222, RG 217 (M1658), National Archives.

84 Adams, South-Side View, 29-30; Hunt, “The Struggle to Achieve” in Morton, ed., Discovering the Women in Slavery; Johnson and Roark, Black Masters; Koger, Black Slaveowners; Lightner and Ragan, “African American Slaveholders”; Walker, ed., African American Business, 50.

85 See, for example, Johnson, “African American Women” and “Free Blacks.”

86 Melish, Disowning Slavery; Jones, American Work, 245-272; White, Somewhat More Independent ; “In the Northern”: Douglass quoted in John P. Pittman, “Douglass’s Assimilationism and Antislavery,” in Lawson and Kirkland, eds., Frederick Douglass, 72.

87 Truth quoted in Painter, Sojourner Truth, 126; Yellin, Harriet Jacobs; Yee, Black Women Abolitionists .

88 Larson, Bound for the Promised Land; Clinton, Harriet Tubman; Humez, Harriet Tubman; Walker, ed., African American Business, 601.

CHAPTER 2

1 Berlin and Rowland, eds., Families and Freedom, 185-187.

2 “evil”: De Forest, A Union Officer, 94; “an abolitionist”: Whitelaw Reid quoted in Powell, New Masters, 218; Foner, “Crisis of Free Labor,” in Foner, Politics and Ideology. For a discussion of the Republican Party’s “free labor” ideology, see Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men. On the northern work ethic, see also Rodgers, Work Ethic. The party’s postwar southern economic program is placed in political context by Gerteis, From Contraband to Freedman, and McFeely, Yankee Stepfather, 149-165. For a case study of the bureau, see Cimbala, Under the Guardianship.

3 Roark, Masters Without Slaves; “retired”: Loring and Atkinson, Cotton Culture, 4. This work is a compilation of data based on an 1868 survey of labor and economic conditions in the South. See also Wiener, “Class Structure,” 970-992.

4 “Those”: Trowbridge, The South, 23; Robinson, Bitter Fruits of Bondage.

5 Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, 162. Several studies are particularly useful in their treatment of the deinstitutionalization of slavery at the regional, state, and local levels: Mohr, On the Threshold of Freedom; Ripley, Slaves and Freedmen; Engs, Freedom’s First Generation; Robinson, “In the Shadow of Old John Brown”; Cimprich, “Slave Behavior.” See also Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters, 237-261.

6 Higginson, Army Life, 247. The quotations from former slaves are taken from Rawick, ed., American Slave, Series 1, Ohio Narratives, 16:29; Series 1, Indiana Narratives, 6:165-166.

7 Series 1, Mississippi Narratives, 7:52; Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, 3-63.

8 Andrews, War-Time Journal, III, 127-128, 355; Series 1, Florida Narratives, 17:74; Haviland, A Woman’s Life-Work, 266; Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, 162; O’Donovan, Becoming Free, 94- 95, 103.

9 Botume, First Days, 140; Series 1, Texas Narratives, pt. 4, 5:193-194. See also Haviland, A Woman’s Life-Work, 254, 268; Towne, Letters and Diary of Laura M. Towne, 24; Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, 10-11, 13, 54, 58, 182-183; O’Donovan, Becoming Free, 113. Mohr documents the effects of wartime food shortages and the escalation of antiblack violence in On the Threshold of Freedom.

10 Schwartz, Birthing a Slave, 295-296.

11 “put so much”: quoted in Dunaway, African-American Family, 185; O’Donovan, Becoming Free, 21, 86-88. Durden, The Gray and the Black; Brewer, The Confederate Negro; Ripley, Slaves and Freedmen, 9-16, 151-157; Campbell and Pickens, “Document: ‘My Dear Husband.’”

12 Botume, First Days, 15. Compare the description of a black woman on her way to Columbia, South Carolina, in December 1865 by Dennett, The South As It Is, 233: “She was a middle-aged woman, and appeared to be accompanied on her pilgrimage by her family. A little boy was following her, a little girl she led by the hand, and on her back was an infant slung in a shawl. A heavy bundle was balanced on her head. They all seemed weary as they trudged along through the mud, and their clothing was too scanty for the winter weather.” See also Mohr, “Before Sherman”; Ripley, Slaves and Freedmen, 150; Gutman, Black Family, 268-269; Engs, Freedom’s First Generation, 27.

13 Haviland, A Woman’s Life-Work, 304; Botume, First Days, 55; Towne, Letters and Diary, 45; Taylor, Reminiscences, 16-21; Gutman, Black Family, 22-24; Series 1, Virginia Narratives, 16:43; Berlin, Reidy, and Rowland, eds., Black Military Experience, 12. On the willingness of black men to fight on behalf of their families, see also Gutman, Black Family, 371-385; Mohr, “Before Sherman,” 339-341. Recruitment policies and tactics are discussed in Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction, 264-269; Ripley, Slaves and Freedmen, 108-109, 153-155; Gerteis, From Contraband to Freedman; Berlin, Reidy, and Rowland, eds., Black Military Experience, 37-299. Mathew Brady, the Civil War photographer, was primarily interested in corpses, cannon, and Union officers, but his Illustrated History of the Civil War contains pictures of black refugees (pp. 24, 146) and black laundresses at the camp in Yorktown (p. 141). The women in the picture on p. 146 are wearing kerchiefs; the two men are wearing different kinds of hats. The picture shows eight women, two men, and eight children.

14 “all the”: “Affidavit of a Kentucky Black Soldier’s Wife”; and “they are”: “Missouri Slave Woman to Her Soldier Husband,” in Berlin, Reidy, and Rowland, eds., Black Military Experience, 87, 686-687, 694-695; “ large”: quoted in Dunaway, African-American Family, 198.

15 “Affidavit of a Northern Missionary”; “Commander of a Tennessee Black Regiment to the Headquarters of the Department of the Mississippi and a Report by the Superintendent of Freedmen in West Tennessee”; “Superintendent of the ‘Refugee Home’ at Camp Nelson, Kentucky, to the Freedmen’s Bureau Commissioner,” in Berlin, Reidy, and Rowland, eds., Black Military Experience , 715-719; Howard, “The Civil War in Kentucky,” 250-252; Schultz, Women at the Front, 37, 200-202. See also Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, 64-103; Ripley, Slaves and Freedmen, 155; Taylor, Reminiscences, 16. For other firsthand accounts of black soldiers’ families and their living conditions, see Trowbridge, The South, 288; Pearson, ed., Letters from Port Royal, 41; Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment. Issues related to the health of refugees in particular and freedpeople in general are discussed in Raphael, “Health and Social Welfare”; Legan, “Disease and the Freedmen.”

16 Botume, First Days, 53-63.

17 “Such a colony”: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies (hereafter ORUCN), Series 1, 12:634; Heard, “St. Simons Island”; Hayes, ed., DuPont Letters, 336.

18 “I had about”: Clinton, ed., Reminiscences of My Life, 11; “children presented”: quoted in Mohr, On the Threshold of Freedom, 82-83.

19 “great dislike”: Hayes, ed., DuPont Letters, vol. 2: The Blockade, 1862-63, 71; ORUCN, Series 1, 13:145.

20 Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We, 124; “worked”: Moses Stikes and Binah Butler, Chatham County Claim no. 17563, Southern Claims Commission, National Archives; Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk, 82; Jones, Saving Savannah, 204-214.

21 Patience quoted in Burton, “Ungrateful Servants?” 136; Andrews, The South Since the War, 353.

22 “Commander of the Post of Port Hudson, Louisiana, to the Louisiana Freedmen’s Bureau Assistant Commissioner and the Latter’s Reply,” in Berlin, Reidy, and Rowland, eds., Freedom, 701- 702.

23 “the insolence”: quoted in Fitzgerald, Urban Emancipation, 33-34; Johnson, “Looking for Lost Kin,” in Clinton, ed., Southern Families, 15-34; Foner, “Thaddeus Stevens, Confiscation, and Reconstruction,” in Foner, Politics and Ideology; Wiener, Social Origins of the New South; Wayne, The Reshaping of Plantation Society; Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom.

24 Cohen, At Freedom’s Edge; Roark, Masters Without Slaves, 111; Taylor, Reconstruction of Virginia , 105-110; Richardson, Negro in the Reconstruction in Florida, 53-54; Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed , 324, 331-32.

25 McPherson, Abolitionist Legacy; Foner, “Crisis of Free Labor,” in Foner, Politics and Ideology, 101; Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction; McFeely, Yankee Stepfather; Gerteis, From Contraband to Freedman, 65-82.

26 Howard, Autobiography, 221; “Commander of the Department of Virginia to the Commander of the District of Eastern Virginia,” in Berlin, Reidy, and Rowland, eds., Black Military Experience , 721-722; planter quoted in Powell, New Masters, 117; Hancock, South After Gettysburg, 218. See also Ripley, Slaves and Freedmen, 75, 90-101; Engs, Freedom’s First Generation, 106-108.

27 “she waits”: quoted in Frankel, Freedom’s Women, 21-22; Dunaway, African-American Family , 223; O’Donovan, Becoming Free, 112, 155-173.

28 “a worn, weary”: Sarah E. Chase in Swint, ed., Dear Ones at Home, 203-204; Dennett, South As It Is, 105. Sarah E. Chase and her sister Lucy served as teachers in Columbus (and other parts of the South) under the sponsorship of the Boston Educational Commission, later the New England Freedmen’s Union Commission. For other accounts of persons unable to work turned off plantations, see Gutman, Black Family, 210; Kolchin, First Freedom, 58.

29 “A Settlement Made Between Presley George, Sr., and his Freedmen by W. H. Gentry . . . ,” Jan. 23, 1866, Reports of Outrages, Greensboro, N.C., Subass’t. Comm. (Box no. 36, In. #2656), Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (hereafter BRFAL). Record Group 105. See National Archives for Note.

30 Towne quoted in McFeely, Yankee Stepfather, 157. See also Andrews, The South Since the War, 100; Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, 183-184; Richardson, Negro in the Reconstruction of Florida, 56-58. Richardson writes that in Florida, “The Bureau literally forced some of the freedmen to work on plantations, and the contracts approved by the agents often specified inadequate payment to the worker” (p. 59). Contract between A. B. Littlejohn and Bettie and Patsy, July 15, 1865, Contracts, Jacksonville, Alabama, Subass’t. Comm. (Box no. 32, In. #137), BRFAL.

31 Case 104 (Sept. 9, 1867, p. 78), Register of Complaints, Cuthbert, Georgia, Agent (No. 238; In. #859), BRFAL. A “moderate” position was stated by Maj. George D. Reynolds, acting assistant commissioner for the Southern District of Mississippi in a letter to his “lieutenants” in the field, Aug. 12, 1865, District of Vicksburg: “Allow no cruelty or abuse of employees. Prevent or discourage as far as possible all Freedmen from leaving their present places of employment and show them the necessity of work.” Records Relating to the Division of Crops on Cotton Plantations, 1867-68, Vicksburg, Miss., Subcommissioner (In. #2366), BRFAL. Gerteis discusses the “pattern of repression” that characterized the labor contract system from its inception in From Contraband to Freedman, 83-98.

32 Series 1, Mississippi Narratives, 7:116-117; Series 1, Alabama Narratives, 6:420-421; Dennett, South As It Is, 247; Trowbridge, The South, 413-414; Sitterson, Sugar Country, 235-245; Handy, “In a Tobacco Factory.” See also Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters, 309-344.

33 Andrews, South Since the War, 224; Swint, ed., Dear Ones at Home, 181. For other examples of petty tradeswomen after the war, see Dennett, South As It Is, 278; Towne, Letters and Diary, 19; Campbell, White and Black, 338; King, The Great South, 554.

34 Clinton, ed., Reminiscences of My Life in Camp, 54; O’Donovan, Becoming Free, 173-177; Williams, Self-Taught, 96-125; Jones, Soldiers of Light and Love, 63-65, 69-76, 238-239. See also Lerner, ed., Black Women in White America, 103-107; Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters, 261-305; Perkins, “The Black Female,” in Crow and Hatley, eds., Black Americans, 122-136; Ronald Butchart, “‘We Can Best Instruct Our Own People’,” and “Perspectives.”

35 Ripley, Slaves and Freedmen, 22-23; Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement: From Colonial Times to the Eve of World War I, 124-25.

36 Pearson, ed., Letters from Port Royal, 11; Leigh, Ten Years, 57-58; Trowbridge, The South, 543; Botume, First Days, 228. Foner discusses the relative autonomy of Sea Island blacks before and after emancipation in Nothing But Freedom.

37 See, for example, O’Donovan, Becoming Free, 137-147, 226; Wayne, Reshaping of Plantation Society, 116-132; Armstrong, “From Task Labor to Free Labor”; Foner, Nothing But Freedom, 74- 110.

38 See, for example, Penningroth, Claims of Kinfolk; Shaffer, “In the Shadow of the Old Constitution,” in Clinton, ed., Southern Families, 59-75; Crouch, “The ‘Chords of Love.’”

39 Record and Account Book of Mrs. Bayner’s Plantation, Feb.-Dec. 1867, 5, 20, 23, Pine Bluff, Arkansas, Subordinate Field Office (vol. 148, In. #422), BRFAL. This record book chronicles the difficulties of overseer O. B. Nichols in managing his workforce during the entire cotton-growing season of 1867. Women were often listed as absent from the field, “waiting on their children.” Some days Nichols reported that the women and children had “done nothing” in the fields. See also pp. 3, 5, 9. For other examples, see Leigh, Ten Years, 25, 57; Brooks, Agrarian Revolution, 20; Powell, New Masters, 109. Estimates of postbellum labor force participation rates are included in Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom, 232-236.

40 Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We, 222; Rodrigue, Reconstruction in the Cane Fields, 90-91; Frankel, Freedom’s Women, 76.

41 Newspaper article quoted in Burton, “Ungrateful Servants?” 347. For evidence of the withdrawal of female labor from the fields between 1865 and 1875, and the reaction of Southern whites, see the following examples: Loring and Atkinson, Cotton Culture, 4, 13, 14, 15, 18, 20; Nordhoff, The Cotton States, 72, 99; Somers, Southern, 59, 272; De Forest, Union Officer, 94. Secondary accounts include Kolchin, First Freedom, 62-63; Wiener, Social Origins of the New South, 47; Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom, 44-45, 55, 195; Gutman, Black Family, 167-168; Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, 244-245, 341, 393, 434; Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 326-327; Powell, New Masters, 60, 108. A survey of contracts contained in the Freedmen’s Bureau archives indicates that fewer women than men signed labor contracts. However, this is not necessarily an accurate measure of female participation in the labor force because husbands and fathers often signed for entire families.

42 Richardson, Negro in the Reconstruction of Florida, 63; Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, 244-245; Loring and Atkinson, Cotton Culture, 15; Wiener, Social Origins of the New South, 47.

43 “myriads”: De Forest, Union Officer, 94; Campbell, White and Black, 145.

44 Planter quoted in Loring and Atkinson, Cotton Culture, 13; mistress quoted in Myers, ed., The Children of Pride, 1370; freed woman quoted in Trowbridge, The South, 394.

45 Neal quoted in Gutman, Black Family, 393. See also pp. 22-25, 393-412. For the dramatic account of a husband who was wounded in an attempt to protect his wife from white men, see W. W. Woodward to Pvt. Maj. L. Walker, May 7, 1868, Labor Contracts, Anderson Court House, South Carolina, Acting Subass’t. Comm. (Box no. 50, In. #3073), BRFAL.

46 Pearson, ed., Letters from Port Royal, 112; Somers, Southern States Since the War, 120; O’Donovan, Becoming Free. The records of settlements between planters and freedpeople supervised by bureau agents include examples of squads. For example, in the case Freedmen v. Carland Graham, near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, an agent wrote, “The Freedpeople were working the plantation in two separate squads, comprising four different families.” The squads included, first: Jack and Ann Gray, Jack Gray Jr. and William Randolph; second: David and Victoria Butler, Frank and Celestine Benjamin, Lewis, Ed, Benjamin, Harriet, and Delia Buckner. “Freedmen v. Carland Graham,” Dec. 13, 1867, 12-13, Register of Complaints, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Assistant Subass’t. Comm. (vol. 2231/2, In. #1499), BRFAL. For examples of other squads and lists of their members, see Register of Complaints, 2-6, Bayou Sara, Louisiana, Agent and Subass’t. Comm. (vol. 234, In. #1523), BRFAL. See also Shlomowitz, “Origins”; Kolchin, First Freedom, 46; Gutman, Black Family , 209; Wayne, Reshaping of Plantation Society, 124.

47 De Forest, Union Officer, 94; Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom, 87-88. Roark states that “sharecropping was a compromise, and it satisfied neither planters nor freedmen” (p. 142). See also Wynne, “Role of Freedmen.”

48 Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom, 88. On the rise of the sharecropping system, see (in addition to Shlomowitz, “Origins” and Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom) Reid Jr., “White Land, Black Labor”; Mandle, The Roots of Black Poverty; Wiener, Social Origins of the New South; Wayne, Reshaping of Plantation Society, 123-129; Davis, Good and Faithful Labor; Higgs, Competition and Coercion, 37-61; Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism. For a contemporary account of the transition from gang labor to sharecropping on a Georgia plantation, see Barrow Jr., “A Georgia Plantation.”

49 This analysis is based on a sample of 338 black households in the twenty-seven counties in eight states that formed the basis for Ransom and Sutch’s study of the postbellum Southern economy. The states and counties were: Alabama—Lowndes, Perry, Pike, Russell; Florida—Gadsden; Georgia—Coweta, Gwinnett, Terrell, Thomas, Twiggs; Louisiana—Claiburne, Grant; Mississippi—Attala, Clay, Jefferson, Lincoln, Pike, Rankin, Tunica, Washington, Yalobusha; North Carolina—Nash; South Carolina—Barnwell, Union; Texas—Cherokee, Red River, Robertson. The households were selected from the 1870 (and, for Chapter 3, the 1880 and 1900) federal population census at specific intervals. Data analyzed included information on the “race” (black, white, or mulatto), size, and type of household; presence, occupation, literacy, and age of household head and spouse; number and sex of working children and adults; number and sex of children who attended school; age of youngest person in the household; and listing of persons with the identical surname near the household in question. For confirmation of the findings discussed in the text (based on studies of other parts of the rural South), see, on two spouses present: Burton, “Ungrateful Servants?” 325; Kolchin, First Freedom, 69; on male-headed households: Smallwood, “Emancipation and the Black Family,” 859; Burton, “Ungrateful Servants?” 321, 328-29, 331; on relative ages of spouses: Escott, Slavery Remembered, 170-171 (Escott found that among slave-narrative interviewees, the men married at an average of 27.6 years, the women at 19.5 years); on fertility rates: Kolchin, First Freedom, 69; Higgs, Competition and Coercion, 15; Eblen, “New Estimates,” 306.

50 Nordhoff, Cotton States, 38; Series 1, Tennessee Narratives, 16:29; Contract between Patrick Broggan and freedpeople: “Carter-Dock and family—wife Diana and 2 daughters Flora and Bella,” Miscellaneous Record Book, 1865-1867, Greenville, Alabama, Subass’t. Comm. (vol. 127, In. #106), BRFAL.

51 Case 29 (May 30, 1868, pp. 104-105), Register of Complaints, Cuthbert, Georgia, Agent (vol. 238, In. #859), BRFAL; Regosin, Freedom’s Promise, 12. See Labor Contracts for Spartanburg District, Spartanburg, S.C. (Box no. 87, In. #3343), BRFAL, for examples of women with dependents who were given less land than men with similar-sized families under a sharecropping arrangement on various plantations from 1865 to 1867.

52 Campbell, White and Black, 150, 156, 297; Taylor, Negro in South Carolina, 72; Botume, First Days, 241; Dennett, South As It Is, 326, 331; Nordhoff, Cotton States, 21, 38-39, 72. According to Shlomowitz, “The higher value placed on labor during the months from April to July can probably be attributed to the fact that female labor was a much closer substitute for male labor in picking than in plowing, planting, and cultivation” (“Origins,” 568). After the war, Willis Cofer and his father worked in the fields and his mother wove cloth “for all de folkses ’round ’bout” for fifty cents a day. Series 1, Georgia Narratives, pt. 1, 12:209-210.

53 Compare other studies on household size: Burton, “Ungrateful Servants?” 336; Kolchin, First Freedom, 67-70; Smallwood, “Emancipation and the Black Family,” 853; on working spouses and children: Smallwood, “Emancipation and the Black Family,” 855-856. See also Magdol, “Against the Gentry,” in Magdol and Wakelyn, eds., Southern Common People, 191-210. According to Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom (based on 1880 data), “Whites could afford greater leisure and have a smaller fraction of the family at work than could blacks” (pp. 184-185). Higgs, Competition and Coercion , includes estimates (made by the United States Department of Agriculture) of black land ownership for 1876: Tennessee and Alabama: 4 percent; North Carolina and Georgia: 4-5 percent; South Carolina and Texas: 5 percent; Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas: 5-6 percent; Florida: 8 percent. These figures, he states, are based on “admittedly incomplete returns of information” (p. 52). See also Smallwood, “Emancipation and the Black Family,” 855.

54 Campbell, White and Black, 376; Series 1, Mississippi Narratives, 7:70; Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom, 108, 113, 123-124, 130-131, 147, 161-163; Richardson, Negro in the Reconstruction of Florida, 61, 65; Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 87-88, 393, 402-406.

55 Series 1, Texas Narratives, pt. 3, 5:192; Series 1, Tennessee Narratives, 16:77. See also Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom, 232-236; Botume, First Days, 234; Loring and Atkinson, Cotton Culture, 14; Nordhoff, Cotton States, 21, 38, 39, 99; Campbell, White and Black, 156; Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, 244; Dennett, South As It Is, 132.

56 Series 1, Tennessee Narratives, 16:44, 64. See also Jones, Soldiers of Light and Love, 128-133; Mack, Parlor Ladies and Ebony Drudges, 135-136.

57 Gutman, Black Family, 213, 224-229; Magdol, A Right to the Land, 11. Magdol discusses the ways the African American associational impulse was manifested in the social, economic, and institutional life of freedpeople. The following procedure was employed to estimate the extent of local kin groupings: Each household for which data were coded was the first complete household on a certain census page. That page, plus the previous and subsequent pages (a total of three), were examined for individuals with a surname identical to that of any member of the household in question. If such a person or persons were located, the answer to the question “kin living nearby?” was coded 1 for “yes.” This index is necessarily crude for several reasons. It takes into account only paternal relationships. Identical surnames do not necessarily indicate blood ties. The households involved might have been a considerable distance from one another, precluding frequent contact among family members. Finally, the order of listing was determined by the route taken by a census taker (up one side of a road and down the other, or across the road to the next house, and so on).

58 Leigh, Ten Years, 24, 124.

59 De Forest, Union Officer, 29, 99.

60 Harding, There Is A River; Robinson, “Realm of Social Consensus”; Hahn, Roots of Southern Populism; McDonald and McWhiney, “Self-Sufficiency to Peonage”; Woodman, “Postbellum Social Change,” 229. According to Foner, “Reconstruction allowed scope for a remarkable political and social mobilization of the black community,” and “for a moment, American freedmen had enjoyed an unparalleled opportunity to help shape their own destiny” (Nothing But Freedom, 72-73.) On black politicians during this period, see Rabinowitz, ed., Southern Black Leaders; Dray, Capitol Men.

61 Botume, First Days, 273; Kelly, “Black Laborers, the Republican Party, and the Crisis of Reconstruction.” Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long (pp. 502-556), provides an overview of freedmen’s conventions throughout the South. See also Harding, There Is a River, 277-297. In “Sources at the National Archives,” Drago states, “In 1869, a convention of Georgia’s top black leaders declared that women should not be subject to the same kind of work as men and urged ‘upon the laboring men of this state, in behalf of their wives and daughters . . . that they take their wives from the drudgery and exposure of plantation soil as soon as it is in their power to do so’” (p. 82). See the drawing in Harper’s Weekly, July 25, 1868, reproduced in Edwards, Scarlet Doesn’t Live Here Anymore , 141.

62 Ames, New England Woman’s Diary, 92; Leigh, Ten Years, 164; Botume, First Days, 166. The role of Sea Island religious institutions in ordering relations between the sexes is discussed in Gutman, Black Family, 70-73. See also Levine’s discussion of “Freedom, Culture, and Religion,” in Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 136-189.

63 Towne, Letters and Diary, 144-145; Pearson, ed., Letters from Port Royal, 43-44; Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, 434.

64 The analytical framework developed here for studying the sharecropping family is based on Tamara K. Hareven’s critique of modernization theory as it applies to family history. Hareven, “Modernization and Family History.” Jonathan Wiener suggests that the black rejection of gang labor and preference for family share units “represented a move away from classic capitalist organization.” See Wiener, “Class Structure and Economic Development,” 984.

65 Andrews, South Since the War, 187.

66 Cooley, Homes of the Freed, 169-170; Fitzgerald, Urban Emancipation, 33-34.

67 Nordhoff, Cotton States, 72. See also Campbell, White and Black, 264; Brown, My Southern Home, 168-170; Knox, Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field, 410; Swint, ed., Dear Ones at Home, 33; Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, 258, 315; Myers, ed., Children of Pride, 1308.

68 Ravenel quoted in Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, 259; “A South Carolinian,” “South Carolina Society,” 677. See Taylor, The Negro in the Reconstruction of Virginia, for the example of a black woman who was charged with stealing a dress and described by the Richmond Enquirer in September 1866 as “a walking fashion plate in borrowed plumage” (p. 46). See also Leigh, Ten Years, 94.

69 Powell, New Masters, 109; Case 121, Sept. 16, 1867, Register of Complaints, Cuthbert, Georgia, Agent, BRFAL; “with sticks . . . kind”: Savannah Morning News, Jan. 18, 1869; “all jabbering”: Savannah Morning News, Jan. 20, 1869; Drago, “Militancy and Black Women.” Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, for example, includes many examples of women who defied Southern whites and asserted their rights in the workplace. See also Foner, Nothing But Freedom, 87.

70 Dennett, South As It Is, 292; Pearson, Letters from Port Royal, 53, 88; Knox, Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field, 374.

71 De Forest, Union Officer, 74-75, 94. See also Trowbridge, The South, 544; Campbell, White and Black, 134, 146; Pearson, Letters from Port Royal, 88, 250, 300-301; Stearns, The Black Man of the South, 43-46. In January of 1865 Edward Philbrick wrote of a group of black women who confronted him and, “like a flock of blackbirds all talking at once,” protested the terms he had stipulated for their work for the corning year. He listened impatiently to their complaints that, despite growing a good deal of cotton for him, they were paid very little. His response: “I told them . . . that if some of those people who made so much noise didn’t look out, they would get turned off the place, just as Venus and her gang got turned off last year. The fact is, they are trying to play brag, as such people often will; but they will all go to work in a few days, I feel sure” (Pearson, ed., Letters from Port Royal, 303-304).

72 Clinton, ed., Reminiscences of My Life in Camp, 27.

73 Shaffer, After the Glory, 56, 64, 121-123, 132, 137, 206; O’Donovan, Becoming Free, 193; Krawl, “For Better or for Worse,” in Clinton, ed., Southern Families, 35-58; Edwards, Scarlet Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, 143-147; Crouch, “The ‘Chords of Love’”; Regosin, Freedom’s Promise; Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom.

74 “talking . . . pleased”: quoted in Edwards, Scarlet Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, 143. D. S. Harriman to Merritt Barber, Panola, Mississippi, Dec. 3, 1867, Registered Letters Received, Office of the Assistant Commissioner for Mississippi (In. #2052; Microfilm series M826, reel 31), BRFAL.

75 Athens, Wilkes County, October 31, 1868, Reports Relating to Murders and Outrages, Letters Received, Georgia Assistant Commissioner (In. #631; microfilm series M798, reel 32), BRFAL. Senate Testimony of Lucretia Adams, Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States, Report 41, Pt. 5 (South Carolina), 3:1577-1578. See also the case of a freedwoman whipped with a leather strap because she left her employer’s residence to look for her brother. Report dated April 10, 1866, Reports of Outrages, Trial Records of Assistant Superintendent, June 1867-Oct. 1868, Greensboro, North Carolina, Subass’t. Comm. (Box no. 36, In. #2656), BRFAL; Report dated Sept. 23, 1865, Reports of Outrages, June 1867-Oct. 1868, Greensboro, North Carolina, Subass’t. Comm., BRFAL.

76 Deputy quoted in D. S. Harriman to Merritt Barber, Panola, Mississippi, Registered Letters Received, Office of the Assistant Commissioner for Mississippi, BRFAL.

77 These examples are based on cases in the Freedmen’s Bureau archives for Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia. An agent’s account of the last case includes the following information: “States that Fanny Murry [sic] was severely beaten by Robert Singleton without any cause, then when the case was tried before John Can, J.P., Singleton did again strike Fanny in the presence of the Court, that in the face of incontestable proof of guilt Singleton was discharged and costs charged to Fanny.” Case 35, June, 1868, Upperville, Virginia, Report of Outrages, Jan. 1, 1868-Dec. 31, 1868, Office of the Virginia Assistant Commissioner (Vol. 43, In. #3810), BRFAL. See also Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters, 344-355.

78 Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom; Trelease, White Terror; Clinton, “Freedwomen, Sexuality, and Violence,” in Clinton, Half Sisters of History, 136-153.

79 Howard N. Rabinowitz, Race Relations, 18-30. For further discussion of urban in-migration during this period, see Taylor, The Negro in the Reconstruction of Virginia, 111-120; J. G. Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 326; Huffman Jr., “Town and Country in the South” in Magdol and Wakelyn, eds., Southern Common People, 239-251.

80 Goldin, “Female Labor Force,” 92, 99; Somers, Southern States, 36; John W. Blassingame, Black New Orleans, 94-95; Kolchin, First Freedom, 62-63, 75; Burton, “Ungrateful Servants?” 359; Harris, “Work and the Family,” 323; Reiff, Dahlin, and Smith, “Rural Push and Urban Pull.” Goldin compared the black female populations of Atlanta, Charleston, Richmond, Mobile, New Orleans, Norfolk, and Savannah.

81 Williams, Self-Taught; Goldin, “Female Labor Force,” 94-99; Rabinowitz, Race Relations, 72. In Women and the American Labor Movement, Foner points out that free black women dominated urban laundering even during the early colonial period. The occupation of course required little equipment or capital investment and could be carried out in the woman’s home (p. 10).

82 Goldin, “Female Labor Force,” 94; Blassingame, “Before the Ghetto,” 466. See also Woodman’s “Comment” [on Goldin].

83 Goldin, “Female Labor Force,” 94-100; Somers, Southern States, 52, 66; Rabinowitz, Race Relations, 120; Blassingame, “Before the Ghetto,” 468-469, and Black New Orleans, 164-167; Higgs, Competition and Coercion, 21-24; Woodman, “Sequel to Slavery.” Goldin’s argument concerning the primacy of “race” (as opposed to class) as a determining factor in a woman’s decision to work is somewhat weakened by her assumption that black and white men with identical jobs earned the same amount of money and by her low estimates of urban unemployment rates for black men. Very few black men could afford not to have their spouses work. John Blassingame (“Before the Ghetto,” 466) argues that Savannah artisans who made from $1.80 to $3.50 per day (probably about the same amount earned in a week by a day laborer, servant, or laundress) refused to let their wives seek employment, out of a sense of pride. The seasonal and unpredictable nature of black men’s employment might have meant that almost all urban families—regardless of the husband’s occupation—relied in varying degrees on the small sums contributed regularly by wives who washed clothes, cleaned, or cooked for whites. In addition, the finding (Goldin, “Female Labor Force,” 96-97) that 20 percent of all women worked as servants and that as many as 75 percent of these (15 percent of all black working women in the seven southern cities) lived in the homes of their white employers merits further investigation to determine whether they were young, unmarried women, or mothers with children.

84 Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom, 34-36; Rabinowitz, Race Relations, 61-96; Blassingame, Black New Orleans, 49-77; Burton, “Ungrateful Servants?” 348-353; Taylor, Negro in the Reconstruction of Virginia, 114-120.

85 Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom, 67; Barr, “Black Urban Churches”; Rabinowitz, Race Relations, 152-181; Blassingame, “Before the Ghetto,” and Black New Orleans, 107-171; Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed , 455-479.

86 Brown, “Womanist Consciousness”; Walker, ed., African American Business, 589; Jones, Saving Savannah, app. 2; Rabinowitz, Race Relations, 227; Blassingame, “Before the Ghetto,” 473-474, 485, and Black New Orleans, 146-147; Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement, 124, 176, 188.

87 Swint, ed., Dear Ones at Home, 41; Williams, Self-Taught; Jones, Soldiers of Light and Love, 49-84; Morris, Reading, ’Riting, and Reconstruction.

88 Botume, First Days, 236, 250; Ames, New England Woman’s Diary, 38; Case 121 (Sept. 16, 1867), Register of Complaints, Cuthbert, Georgia, Agent, BRFAL. For examples of working mothers who washed, scrubbed, ironed, and sewed so that they could send their children to school “looking respectable,” see Lemer, ed., Black Women in White America, 102.

89 Ames, New England Woman’s Diary, 33; Andrews, The South Since the War, 338. De Forest, Union Officer, 117. See also Kolchin, First Freedom, 185-186.

90 Census of Black Citizens (1865), Huntsville and Athens, Alabama, Claims Agent (No. 79 1/2, In. #123), BRFAL.

91 Ibid.

92 Ibid.

CHAPTER 3

1 Interview with Maude Lee Bryant in Wilson, Hope and Dignity, 42.

2 Pickens, Bursting Bonds, 26-27.

3 Wiener contrasts the “Prussian Road” of southern postbellum economic development with the “classic capitalist path” taken by the North in his article “Class Structure,” pp. 970-992. See also Ransom and Sutch, “Growth and Welfare”; Kousser, Shaping of Southern Politics; Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery.

4 Logan analyzes the deterioration of black people’s social and political status during this period in Betrayal of the Negro. Woodruff, American Congo; Beckert, “Emancipation and Empire”; Flynn Jr., White Land, Black Labor; Mandle, The Roots of Black Poverty, 11; Jones, “Negroes of the Southern States”; U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Negro Population, 1790-1915, 503-523; Higgs, Competition and Coercion, 30-33, 77; Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism; Woodman, “Comment,” 997-1001, and “Postbellum Social Change”; McDonald and McWhiney, “The South From Self-Sufficiency to Peonage”; Jones, The Dispossessed.

5 Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers, 7-8. The autobiography of this remarkable black man, Ned Cobb (Nate Shaw was a fictitious name used to protect Cobb while he was still living), is a major source of primary material related to black sharecroppers’ family and community life. The text is in the form of transcribed interviews conducted by Rosengarten with Cobb.

6 Cooley, Homes of the Freed, 71. A Vassar College graduate, Cooley began her work as a teacher-social worker on St. Helena (South Carolina Sea Islands) in 1906.

7 Painter, Exodusters, 184, 194, 196; Gutman, The Black Family, 435, 437; North Carolina Governor James S. Jarvis quoted (from a speech he made at the opening of the Colored Industrial Fair in Raleigh in 1883) in Logan, Negro in North Carolina, 75; Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet.

8 For relevant studies, see Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom; Wiener, Social Origins; Mandle, Roots of Black Poverty.

9 Woodman, “Postbellum Social Change”; Baker, Following the Color Line, 76; U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Plantation Farming in the United States (1916), 17; Edwards, “Negro Farmers,” 536.109. Edwards, “Negro Farmers,” 536. In his study of sharecroppers, Kelsey notes, “The size of a man’s family is known and the riders see to it that he keeps all the working hands in the field,” The Negro Farmer, p. 48. (Although written from a racist perspective, this work contains much useful information pertaining to the daily routine and material condition of rural southern blacks around 1900.) For evidence of planters who compelled sharecropping families to pay for additional workers to harvest their crop, see Edwards, “The Tenant System and Some Changes Since Emancipation,” American Academy of Political and Social Science Annals 49 (September 1913).

11 Wilkison, Yeomen, Sharecroppers, and Socialists; Pickens, Bursting Bonds, 26-27; Baker, Following the Color Line, 99; Holmes, “The Peons of the South”; Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers, 115, 124.

12 Mandle, Roots of Black Poverty, 16, 23-25; Booker T. Washington’s story about the chickens quoted in Dillingham, “Black Belt Settlement Work,” 441.

13 Krech, “Black Family Organization”; Darling, “Growth and Decline.”

14 This analysis is based on a study of 359 black households in 1880 and 353 black households in 1900 selected from the federal manuscript census (at specific intervals) for twenty-seven Cotton Belt counties (see Chapter 2). See also Drago, “Sources at the National Archives,” 83-85; Gutman, Black Family, app. A.

15 Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers, 117; DuBois, “The Negro in the Black Belt,” 410; Gutman, Black Family, 212-214; Krech, “Black Family Organization.”

16 Shifflett, “Household Composition,” 241; Hareven, “The Family Process.” Shifflett finds that in Louisa County in 1880, nine out of ten black newlywed families included relatives or boarders (p. 242). He suggests that very young as well as mature households “often became caretakers of aged dependents and homeless outsiders” (p. 258).

17 Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers, 108-109 (Shaw used these terms to describe the first parcel of land he worked as a married man in 1907); Harper, “Coloured Women of America”; Cooley, Homes of the Freed, 146-147; Terrell and Hirsch, eds., Such As Us, 34-37. Shifflett discusses the consumer-to-worker ratio and its significance for household structure in “Household Composition,” 245.

18 DuBois, ed., “The Negro American Family,” Atlanta University Study no. 13, 50-54 (hereafter AUS with number). This description is compiled from Barrow, “A Georgia Plantation,” 832; DuBois, “The Problem of Housing the Negro”; Kelsey, Negro Farmer, 45; Baker, Following the Color Line, 100; Cooley, Homes of the Freed, 33-34, 129-130.

19 Housewives quoted in Dillingham, “Black Belt Settlement Work,” 442; and Cooley, Homes of the Freed, 64-65, 143. See also Tindall, South Carolina Negroes, 95. See also Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens; Glave, “A Garden So Brilliant with Colors.”

20 Clowes, Black America, 124; Faragher, Women and Men, 45. The latter work facilitates comparison between mid-nineteenth-century white commercial-agriculture families in the Midwest and late nineteenth-century southern sharecropping blacks.

21 Kelsey, Negro Farmer, 45; Cooley, Homes of the Freed, 77-78; Kiser, Sea Island to City, 254; Drago, “Sources at the National Archives,” 88; Wilson, Hope and Dignity, 42.

22 Kiser, Sea Island to City, 71; Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers, 9; Baker, Following the Color Line, 100. For photographs of women field-workers during this period, see Willets, Workers of the Nation, 2:717; and Dabbs, Face of an Island.

23 Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers, 9; Willets, Workers of the Nation, 716; Kelsey, Negro Farmer, 73; Barrow, “Georgia Plantation,” 834.

24 Bradley and Williamson, Rural Children, 34.

25 Pickens, Bursting Bonds, 13; Kiser, From Sea Island to City, 253; Tindall, South Carolina Negroes , 95.

26 Kelsey, Negro Farmer, 45; Thomas J. Edwards, “Negro Farmers of Alabama. pt. 2: Sharecroppers.” Southern Workman 40 (September 1911): 536. Water-toting women and children are described in Barrow, “Georgia Plantation,” 832; Cooley, Homes of the Freed, 120; Washington, “Condition of the Women,” 74. This last article provides an invaluable description of the sharecropping wife’s daily schedule. On the diet of rural blacks, see Higgs, Competition and Coercion, 105-109; Brown, Southern Home, 189; Kelsey, Negro Farmer, 45. Child mortality rates are discussed in Gutman, Black Family, 450, 502; Clowes, Black America, 108-110; Higgs, Competition and Coercion, 21- 24; Laycock Jr., “Infantile Mortality,” 78-81. The fertility of American black women fell by one-third from 1880 to 1910. See Higgs, Competition and Coercion, 16; Eblen, “New Estimates,” 312. Cutright and Shorter argue that the decline was the result of the poor health of black women as a group, “The Effects of Health.” See also McFalls Jr. and Masnick, “Birth Control.”

27 Washington, “Condition of the Women,” 74, 77; Baker, Following the Color Line, 100; Brown, Southern Home, 189; Kelsey, Negro Farmer, 74. See the detailed description of individual families’ living and working conditions in DuBois, ed., “Negro American Family,” AUS 13, 134-137.

28 Wilson, Hope and Dignity, 42.

29 Washington, “Condition of the Women,” 75; Cooley, Homes of the Freed, 59-62, 90-91; Kelsey, Negro Farmer, 30, 34, 37, 50; Harper, “Coloured Women”; Hammond, The Cotton Industry, 187-189; DuBois, “Negro in the Black Belt,” 403; Janiewski, “From Field to Factory,” 38-39, 44.

30 Holt, Making Freedom Pay; Biggert, “Legacy of Resistance,” 80. Faragher includes a description of this type of petty commercial activity and its significance for farm wives in the Midwest. He suggests that “cross-cultural studies indicate that the responsibility for exchanging goods and services with persons outside the family tends to confer power and prestige.” See Women and Men, 62.

31 Janiewski, “From Field to Factory,” 46-47; Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers, 14-15; Edwards, “Wage Earners”; Tindall, South Carolina Negroes, 99; U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Negro Population, 1790-1915, 506. Only 13.2 percent of all white women engaged in agriculture worked for wages for even part of the year in 1910.

32 Pickens, Bursting Bonds, 11; Kiser, Sea Island to City, 253-254; Kelsey, Negro Farmer, 30; DuBois, “Negro in the Black Belt,” 403; Edwards, “Wage Earners,” 459. In “Negro American Family,” AUS 13, DuBois notes that the “whole tendency of the sharecropping labor system is to separate the family group—the house is too small for them, the young people go to town or hire out on a neighboring farm” (p. 129).

33 Kiser, Sea Island to City, 249, 253-254; Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers, 15, 19-20, 56-58, 128; Kelsey, Negro Farmer, 62; Pickens, Bursting Bonds, 27; DuBois, ed., “Negro American Family,” AUS 13, 135-137; United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Negro Population, 403- 415, 377-387; Fairclough, A Class of their Own. E. Wilbur Bock defines the “farmer’s daughter’s effect” as the willingness of black parents to enable their daughters to attend college in greater numbers compared to their sons. According to Bock, parents have a “clearer picture of occupational opportunities for their daughters than their sons, and greater assurance that aspirations for their daughters will be realized.” Bock, “Farmer’s Daughter Effect,” 18-19.

34 Laws, “Negroes of Cinclare Central”; Cooley, Homes of the Freed, 110; DuBois, ed., “Negro American Family,” AUS 13, 129, 134-147; Janiewski, “From Field to Factory,” 22. The age at marriage among males and females was identical to that of rural midwestern whites in the mid-nineteenth century. See Faragher, Women and Men, 58.

35 Eblen, “New Estimates,” 301-319; Cutright and Shorter, “Effects of Health,” 191-218; Jones, “Social Studies,” 317-318; Meeker, “Mortality Trends.”

36 Planter quoted in Cohen, At Freedom’s Edge, 232; Laws, “Negroes of Cinclare Central,” 114. See also U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Negro Population, 1790-1915, 506; Greene and Woodson, Negro Wage Earner, 26-27.

37 Kiser, Sea Island to City, 65, 89-91, 105, 119, 126; Cooley, Homes of the Freed, 90-91; Kelsey, Negro Farmer, 37, 42, 50; Tindall, South Carolina Negroes, 125-127; Greene and Woodson, Negro Wage Earner, 30, 61, 72-73; Laws, “Negroes of Cinclare Central,” 114; Lamon, Black Tennesseans, 132.

38 Shifflett, “Household Composition,” 255; DuBois, ed., “Negro American Family,” AUS 13, 129.

39 Cooley, Homes of the Freed, 72, 76; Harper, “Coloured Women,” 12. Photographs of Aunt Adelaide are featured in Dabbs, Face of an Island.

40 Cooley, Homes of the Freed, 95, 72-77, 90-91, 93-101; Wilson, Hope and Dignity, 49; Kiser, Sea Island to City, 67; Barrow, “Georgia Plantation,” 834; DuBois, ed., “Negro American Family,” AUS 13, 129. For the Moore family example, see the federal population manuscript census for 1900, Perry County, Alabama, subdistrict 5, enumeration district 72, sheet 4, National Archives of the United States (available on microfilm). Other Moores are listed on the pages immediately following and preceding. See also Pickens, Bursting Bonds, 5-6.

41 Tilley, The Bright Tobacco Industry; Byrne, “Child Labor,” 12, 23; Handy, “On the Tobacco Plantation,” 653.

42 Tilley, Bright Tobacco, 93-102; Janiewski, “From Field to Factory,” 7-62.

43 George W. Henderson, “Life in the Louisiana Sugar Belt.” Southern Workman 35 (April 1906): 209; Sitterson, Sugar Country, 313, 320; Laws, “Negroes of Cinclare Central”; Kelsey, Negro Farmer, 58-60.

44 Sitterson, Sugar Country, 253-263; Kelsey, Negro Farmer, 59; Laws, “Negroes of Cinclare Central,” 110, 115-116.

45 “Truck Farming in Tidewater Virginia”; Thorn, “The Negroes of Litwalton, Virginia”; Work, “The Negroes of Warsaw, Georgia”; Williams, “Local Conditions Among Negroes.”

46 DuBois, ed., “Negro American Family,” AUS 13, 129; Washington, “Condition of the Women,” 76.

47 Pickens, Bursting Bonds, 17; Cooley, Homes of the Freed, 79-80, 174; DuBois, ed., “The College Bred Negro,” AUS 5, 53-54.

48 Harper, “Coloured Women,” 10-11.

49 For the Burleson example, see the federal manuscript population census for 1900, Pike County, Alabama, subdistrict no. 3, enumeration district no. 120, sheet 11. See also U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Negro Population, 1790-1915, 405; Woofter, “The Negroes of Athens, Georgia,” 22-26; DuBois, “The Negroes of Farmville,” 13.

50 Kiser, Sea Island to City, 248.

51 Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers, 26. See also DuBois’s story-essay, “Of the Coming of John” in DuBois, Souls of Black Folk, 228-249.

52 Pickens, Bursting Bonds, 11, 16-17; Higgs, Competition and Coercion, 32-35. See also DuBois, “Negroes of Farmville,” 2-11.

53 Pickens, Bursting Bonds, 11-13.

54 Miller, “Surplus Negro Women”; DuBois, “Negro in the Black Belt,” 403-411; Ransom and Sutch, “Growth and Welfare,” 211; Reiff, Dahlin, and Smith, “Rural Push and Urban Pull.”

55 Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers, 26; Cooley, Homes of the Freed, 127-128. Compare the role of black women in the southern urban in-migration with the reluctance of pioneers’ wives to begin the journey on the Overland Trail. Faragher suggests that the decision of midwestern farm families to move to the West Coast was invariably made by the husband, often over his wife’s strenuous objection. Women and Men, 163-168.

56 This discussion utilizes the definition of “culture” provided by Howe in his essay, “American Victorianism”: “An evolving system of beliefs, attitudes, and techniques, transmitted from generation to generation, and finding expression in innumerable activities people learn: religion, politics, child-rearing customs, the arts and professions, inter alia” (p. 509).

57 Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers, xxi, 28; Lamon, Black Tennesseans, 118. Compare this attitude to the ambitiousness of even poor (white) commercial farmers on the midwestern frontier. See Faragher, Women and Men, 41.

58 Laws, “Negroes of Cinclare Central,” 117; Baker, Following the Color Line, 77, 87; Barry, “Slavery in the South To-Day,” 488; Woofter, “Negroes of Athens,” 55. For a discussion of the “New South” ideology, see Woodward, Origins of the New South, 142-174; Gaston, The New South Creed.

59 Rowe, “The Negroes of the Sea Islands,” 709; Cooley, Homes of the Freed, 22-24, 99, 124. See also Kiser, Sea Island to City, 58, 63-65, 81; Kelsey, Negro Farmer, 43.

60 Laws, “Negroes of Cinclare Central,” 117; Shifflett, “Household Composition,” 259.

61 Kiser, Sea Island to City, 206; Washington, “Condition of the Women,” 75; DuBois, “Negro in the Black Belt,” 403. In “Negro American Family,” AUS 13, DuBois includes a section entitled “The Social Life of the Country,” 130-132. See also DuBois, ed., “Some Efforts of American Negroes,” AUS 3, “Economic Cooperation,” AUS 12, “Efforts for Social Betterment,” AUS 14, and “Morals and Manners,” AUS 18.

62 This assessment of the importance of religion to black women is offered by Loewenberg and Bogin, eds., in their introduction to Black Women, 4, 8-14. See also Cooley, Homes of the Freed, 90; DuBois, ed., “The Negro Church,” AUS 8, 161; Washington, “Condition of Women,” 75; Tillman, “Afro-American Women”; Brooks, “The Women’s Movement.”

63 Fields and Fields, Lemon Swamp, 123. Mamie Fields describes James Island, South Carolina, as “very poor and very neglected . . . a place behind God’s back”; “ethos”: Magdol, A Right to the Land, 11.

64 For evidence of domestic violence among rural blacks, see Kelsey, Negro Farmer, 62; Baker, Following the Color Line, 100. In his study of sharecroppers in DeKalb County, Georgia, DuBois describes a poverty-stricken family with twenty-one members in which “Now and then the father and mother engage in a hand-to-hand fight”; “Negro in the Black Belt,” 403.

65 Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers, 5, 9, 13, 23-25.

66 Washington, “Condition of the Women,” 74; Cooper, “Colored Women as Wage-Earners.”

67 Relevant essays and books by these women include Cooley, Homes of the Freed; Washington, “Condition of the Women”; Tillman, “Afro-American Women”; Harper, “Coloured Women”; Williams, “Employment for Negro Women,” 432-437; Cooper, “Colored Women as Wage Earners,” and A Voice from the South. For excerpts from the writings of Harper, Williams, and Cooper, see Loewenberg and Bogin, eds., Black Women. See also Jefferson, “The Southern Negro Women,” for a succinct statement of this view. The best known example from the mid-twentieth-century literature on the black family is of course Moynihan, The Negro Family.

68 Fields, “Ideology and Race,” in Kousser and McPherson, eds., Region, Race, and Reconstruction , 165-166; Woodman, “Sequel to Slavery”; Hahn, Roots of Southern Populism; McDonald and McWhiney, “South from Self-Sufficiency”; Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom, 153, 159, and “Growth and Welfare,” 218-224; Flynn, White Land, Black Labor; Temin, “Patterns of Cotton Agriculture.” For a discussion of the northern-industrial work ethic, see Rodgers, Work Ethic in Industrial America.

69 Hagood, Mothers of the South, 87.

70 Ibid., 23.

71 Jones, “Encounters, Likely and Unlikely.” For examples of agrarian radicalism during this period, see Postel, Populist Vision; Ayers, Promise of the New South; Goodwyn, Democratic Promise; Schwartz, Radical Protest and Social Structure; Kremm and Neal, “Challenges to Subordination”; Holmes, “The Demise of the Colored Farmers’ Alliance.”

72 In “From Field to Factory,” Janiewski details this process in relation to North Carolina tobacco tenants (pp. 7-62).

CHAPTER 4

1 Goldfield, Cotton Fields.

2 DuBois, ed., “The Negro American Family,” AUS 13, 54. Gottlieb describes the incremental nature of intra- and interregional migration in “Making Their Own Way”; see the chapter entitled “The New Economic Structure” in Rabinowitz, Race Relations, 61-96.

3 U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Negro Population, 1790-1915, 87-98; Johnson and Campbell, Black Migration in America, 57-70. Cities with the largest proportions of blacks included New Orleans (26.3 percent), Nashville (33.1), Atlanta (33.5), Richmond (36.6), Birmingham (38.4), and Memphis (40.0). With the exception of New Orleans (total population 339,075), each of these cities had fewer than 155,000 residents, only a fraction of the size of the largest northern population centers. See also Rabinowitz, Race Relations, 329-339; Henri, Black Migration.

4 The percentages of all southern black women gainfully employed who worked as servants or laundresses in 1910 are:

STATE	% SERVANTS	% LAUNDRESSES
Alabama	12	13
Arkansas	11	10
Florida	19	28
Georgia	14	18
Louisiana	21	16
Mississippi	8	7
North Carolina	16	16
South Carolina	9	10
Tennessee	27	28
Texas	17	20
Virginia	34	27

The rest were mostly agricultural workers. Totals for the entire South include 253,464 servants and 257,738 laundresses. U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Negro Population, 1790-1915, 521-522.

5 Gutman, Black Family, 442-450; Janiewski, “From Field to Factory,” 8-9; Blassingame, Black New Orleans, 236-238; Burton, “Ungrateful Servants?” 347-375; Miller, “Surplus Negro Women”; Reiff, Dahlin, and Smith, “Rural Push and Urban Pull.” In his study of post-Civil War Atlanta, Harris holds class variables constant and finds “no significant differences” between black and white skilled workers’ families in terms of household structure, number of children, or frequency of school attendance among children (“Work and the Family in Black Atlanta,” p. 323). Of all black males over twenty years of age in Atlanta in 1880, 97.4 percent were manual laborers and 2.1 percent were nonmanual workers. The figures for white males were 40.4 and 55.8 percent, respectively.

6 Goldin, “Female Labor Force”; Rabinowitz, Race Relations, 64-67; Gutman, Black Family, 442-450, 483-484; Janiewski, “From Field to Factory,” 125, 127. In the Durham case, comparable employment figures for white female household heads included 50 percent of all women aged twenty and over with the exception of those in the twenty-five- to thirty-four-year age bracket, 100 percent of whom worked in 1900.

7 DuBois, ed., “Negro American Family,” AUS 13, 147; Rabinowitz, Race Relations, 77; Woodman, “Comment [on Goldin, “Female Labor Force”].”

8 Reiff, Dahlin, and Smith, “Rural Push and Urban Pull,” 39-48; Miller, “Urban Blacks in the South,” in Schnore, ed., New Urban History, 184-204.

9 DuBois, ed., “Social and Physical Conditions,” AUS 2, app. A, 1-6; Blassingame, Black New Orleans, 236.

10 Reiff, Dahlin, and Smith, “Rural Push and Urban Pull,” 39-48.

11 For the demographic data, see Engerman, “Black Fertility”; Lantz and Hendrix, “Black Fertility and the Black Family”; Cutright and Shorter, “Effects of Health”; Higgs, Competition and Coercion , 18-19; Eblen, “New Estimates”; McFalls, and Masnick, “Birth Control.” The physician’s quotation is from H. R. Butler, “Negligence a Cause of Mortality,” in DuBois, ed., “Mortality Among Negroes,” AUS 1, 21.

12 U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Negro Population, 1790-1915, 298-372; Jones, “The Negroes of the Southern States,” 461; Rabinowitz, Race Relations, 120; DuBois, ed., “Social and Physical Conditions of Negroes in Cities,” AUS 2, app. B, 11, 12; Gutman, Black Family, 502; DuBois, ed., “Mortality Among Negroes in Cities,” AUS 1; Higgs, Competition and Coercion, 20-23; Meeker, “Mortality Trends.”

13 Goldin, “Female Labor Force,” 100-101.

14 Gutman, Black Family, 441-443; Rabinowitz, Race Relations, 61-96; Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom, 31-39; DuBois, ed., “The Negro Artisan,” AUS 7, 95, 116-117 (see the chart on p. 97 for a comparison between the wages of black and white artisans in Memphis); Blassingame, Black New Orleans, 63, 238; DuBois, ed., “Social and Physical Conditions of Negroes in Cities,” AUS 2, app. A, 6; Hopkins, “Status, Mobility, and the Dimensions of Change” in Jackson and Schultz, eds., Cities in American History, 216-231. In his study of Athens, Georgia, in 1913, Woofter found that the uncertainty of public work “means that in many instances some other member of the family besides the father has to seek some steady source of income, such as washing or domestic service”; Woofter, “The Negroes of Athens” 41-42. The problem of chronic unemployment among construction and unskilled workers was not limited to southern black men during this period. For an overview of the subject, see Garraty, Unemployment in History, 103-145.

15 Janiewski, “From Field to Factory,” 210; DuBois, ed., “Negro American Family,” AUS 13, 57; Fleming, “Servant Problem,” 2. See also Engs, Freedom’s First Generation, 181, 183; DuBois, “The Negroes of Farmville,” 22. Janiewski makes this crucial distinction between the “male ‘public’ sphere” and women’s domestic activities in her discussion of Durham tobacco workers, “From Field to Factory,” 210.

16 English, “I Have . . . a Lot of Work to Do”; Dorsey, To Build Our Lives Together, 42; U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Statistics of Women at Work (1916), 166; Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom , 37-38.

17 Fleming, “Servant Problem,” 4-5; Rabinowitz, Race Relations, 74; Janiewski, “From Field to Factory,” 38, 174; Woofter, “Negroes of Athens,” 42, 44-45; Pickens, Bursting Bonds, 41.

18 Gutman, Black Family, 448, 500. For an analysis of the social-welfare functions performed by black families for needy kin and neighbors, see Shifflett, “Household Composition.”

19 Krech III, “Black Family Organization”; Reiff, Dahlin, and Smith, “Rural Push and Urban Pull,” 39-48.

20 DuBois, ed., “Some Efforts of American Negroes,” AUS 3, 17-18; Blassingame, Black New Orleans, 167-171; Blassingame, “Before the Ghetto,” 476-477. According to Fleming (“Servant Problem,” p. 3), when an Auburn, Georgia, black “goes regularly (one or two days in a week) to a place to work, it becomes known as ‘his place,’ and if discharged, no amount of persuasion will induce another ‘to take his place.’” This article demonstrates Fleming’s antiblack bias, but it contains useful information revealing the ways in which blacks’ customs and preferences could affect the employee-employer relationship in a nonrural setting.

21 Maya Angelou, “When I Think About Myself,” in Just Give Me A Cool Drink, 25. Reprinted by permission of Hirt Music.

Sixty years in these folks’ world
The child I work for calls me girl
I say ‘Yes ma’am’ for working’s sake.
Too proud to bend
Too poor to break,
I laugh until my stomach ache,
When I think about myself.

Also, for a theatrical presentation on the same themes, see Tony Kushner’s musical, Caroline, or Change.

22 Katzman, Seven Days a Week, 184; Williams, “The Problem of Employment,” 434; Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom, 111.

23 “provided”: Stone, American Race Problem, 224.

24 U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Statistics of Women at Work (1916), 41-55, 59; Katzman, Seven Days a Week, 198-199. As one white southerner noted of black women’s preference for living out, “‘They think it is more like being free to have their own home.’” Quoted in Katzman, 198-199. Information on wages is compiled from Women in Industry Committee, “Conditions of Women’s Labor in Louisiana”; DuBois, “Negro in the Black Belt,” 407; Woofter, “Negroes of Athens,” 47. See also Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out. A “Negro Nurse” describes her “treadmill life” in an article entitled “More Slavery” (though this is probably a composite view provided by a social worker or academic).

25 Smith, “The Care of Neglected Children,” in DuBois, ed., “Social and Physical Conditions,” AUS 2, 41; Woofter, “Negroes of Athens,” 62.

26 Butler, “Need of Day Nurseries,” Smith, “The Care of Neglected Children,” and Bass, “Need of Kindergartens,” in DuBois, ed., “Social and Physical Conditions” AUS 2, 41-43, 63-68; Butler, “Mortality Among Negroes in Cities,” Bass, “Poverty as a Cause of Mortality,” and Laney, “General Conditions of Mortality,” in DuBois, ed., “Mortality Among Negroes in Cities,” AUS 1, 20-25, 30-34, 35-37; Holtzclaw, “A Negro’s Life Story”; Terrell, “Club Work of Colored Women,” 437 (“The infants of wage-earning mothers are frequently locked alone in a room from the time the mother leaves in the morning until she returns at night”). According to Rosa Bass, “We find great mortality among the children of the poor. Even before they can make their wants known, the mother is compelled to leave them daily, and a surprising number are burned to death”; in DuBois, ed., “Mortality among Negroes in Cities,” 31.

27 Negro Nurse, “More Slavery,” 197; Fleming “Servant Problem,” 5-7; Holtzclaw, “Negro’s Life Story,” 79-89; DuBois, ed., “Morals and Manners,” AUS 18, 85-90.

28 Woofter, “Negroes of Athens,” 44; Williams, “Problem of Employment,” 432-437; Negro Nurse, “More Slavery,” 196-197; Katzman, Seven Days a Week, 185.

29 Negro Nurse, “More Slavery,” 196; Burrell, “Report of the Committee,” 44-45; Woofter, “Negroes of Athens,” 60; Katzman, Seven Days a Week, 201.

30 Janiewski, “From Field to Factory,” 39, 206; Angelou, “When I Think About Myself” in Just Give Me a Cool Drink; Burrell, “Report of the Committee,” 44; A Southern Colored Woman, “The Race Problem,” 587; Katzman, Seven Days a Week, 200-220. “Occasionally a pert”: A South Carolinian, “South Carolina Society,” 675.

31 DuBois, “Negroes of Farmville,” 21; A South Carolinian, “South Carolina Society,” 679; Charlotte woman quoted in Logan, The Negro in North Carolina, 89. See the revealing responses of Athens mistresses to Woofter’s questionnaire in “Negroes of Athens,” app. D, 59-62 (“Remarks on Domestic Service, Taken from Answers to Questionnaire Sent to Housekeepers”).

32 “no matter . . . and so on”: Senate testimony quoted in Katzman, Seven Days a Week, 192-193; Woofter, “Negroes of Athens,” 35; Fleming, “Servant Problem,” 13; Renoff, Under the Big Tent.

33 Fleming, “Servant Problem,” 8; Woofter, “Negroes of Athens,” 62; Negro Nurse, “More Slavery,” 199; Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom, 132.

34 Katzman, Seven Days a Week, 3-43, 241; Campbell, Prisoners of Poverty, 222-231; Work, “Negroes of Warsaw,” 36; Murray, “In Behalf of the Negro Woman”; Thorn, “The Negroes of Litwalton,” 1127, 1131; Fleming, “Servant Problem,” 17.

35 Fleming, “Servant Problem,” 3, 13; Woofter, “Negroes of Athens,” 45. Another Athens mistress noted, “I think if the employers were as well organized as the employed, we would have more competent servants” (p. 62).

36 Rodgers, “Tradition, Modernity,” 660-661. For a theoretical discussion of the clash between premodern and industrial work patterns (and values), see Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline,” 56-97.

37 Wiener, Social Origins, 137-221; see Woodward, Origins of the New South, 107-141. For studies of the iron and tobacco industries, see Kulik, “Black Workers and Technological Change” in Reed, Hough, and Fink, eds., Southern Workers and Their Unions, 22-42; Janiewski, “From Field to Factory.”

38 U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Negro Population, 1790-1915, 521-522; U.S. Dept. of Labor, Report on the Condition of Women and Children Vol. 1 (1913), 118; Rabinowitz, Race Relations, 66; Hall, et al., Like a Family. Wright discusses the relationship between the stunted pre-1880 textile industry and the unique southern labor market in “Cheap Labor.” For evidence of the use of black workers as textile operatives in the antebellum period, see Starobin, Industrial Slavery, 12-14; Mitchell, Rise of Cotton Mills, 25, 41, 168, 209-212; Kohn, “The Cotton Mills of South Carolina,” 24; Tindall, South Carolina Negroes, 130; Miller, “The Fabric of Control”; Jones, American Work, 222-232. For a general discussion of this topic, see Stokes, “Black and White Labor.”

39 Several historians have cited the decline in cotton prices and the increase in tenancy among poor whites as an impetus to the creation of an all-white labor force in the postbellum textile industry. See, for example, Wright, “Cheap Labor,” 678; Wiener, Social Origins, 192-194; Lemert, Cotton Textile Industry, 31-32; Mitchell, Rise of Cotton Mills, 174; Brewer, “Poor Whites and Negroes,” 34; Stokes, “Black and White Labor.” See also Carlton, Mill and Town, 115; Heardon, Independence and Empire.

40 White men quoted in Mitchell, Rise of Cotton Mills, 219.

41 Campbell, White and Black, 309, 347; Copeland, Cotton Manufacturing, 47-48; Dowd, “Negro Labor in Factories,” 588-589. See also Greene and Woodson, The Negro Wage-Earner, 50.

42 U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Negro Population, 1790-1915, 521-522. Janiewski finds that “in 1890, the annual wages for male tobacco workers averaged $212, adult females earned $111 annually, and children received $66. Ten years later men’s wages had fallen to $166 per year, women’s and children’s had risen to $140 for adults and $70 for children.” Wages for North Carolina tobacco workers “did not even equal the notoriously low wages paid in textiles in the early years.” “From Field to Factory,” 117-118.

43 Tilley, Bright Tobacco; Shields, “A Half Century”; Abbott, “Cigar Making,” in Meyer, ed., Woman’s Work in America, 186-214.

44 U.S. Dept. of Labor, Report on the Condition of Women and Children, Vol. 18 (1913), 86-101, 308-11, 317; Tilley, Bright Tobacco, 318, 515-17; Shields, “Tobacco Industry,” 421-422; Janiewski, “From Field to Factory,” 139, 150; Handy, “In a Tobacco Factory.”

45 DuBois, ed., “The Negro Artisan,” AUS 7, 92; Tilley, Bright Tobacco, 320-321. For wage data, see also U.S. Dept. of Labor, Report on the Condition of Women and Children, Vol. 18, 320-321; Women in Industry Committee “Conditions of Women’s Labor in Louisiana,” 28-50; Tindall, South Carolina Negroes, 93.

46 Jacobstein, Tobacco Industry, 142-143; employer quoted in Shields, “Tobacco Industry,” 424; Janiewski, “From Field to Factory,” 140.

47 Shields, “Tobacco Industry,” 219-223. See also Tilley, Bright Tobacco, 318-320; Landon, “Tobacco Manufacturing”; Rhine, “Woman in Industry,” in Meyer ed. Woman’s Work, 308-309.

48 U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Statistics of Women at Work (1916), 166, 174; government investigator quoted in Janiewski, “From Field to Factory,” 149; U.S. Dept. of Labor, Report on the Condition of Women and Children, Vol. 18, 311-316. See also DuBois, ed., “Negro Artisan,” AUS 7, 47; Women in Industry Committee, “Conditions of Women’s Labor in Louisiana,” 32.

49 Tilley, Bright Tobacco, 319-320; Shields, “Tobacco Industry,” 419, 425; Landon, “Tobacco Manufacturing,” 47.

50 Tilley, Bright Tobacco, 321-322; Shields, “Tobacco Industry,” 425.

51 Song quoted in Shields, “Tobacco Industry,” 420; visitors quoted in Tilley, Bright Tobacco, 318. Winston, North Carolina, stemmers sang this song in 1895:

Befo’ I’d work for Simpkins, P.J.,
I’d walk all night an’ sleep all day:
Walk all night tu keep f’om sleeping,
An’ sleep all day tu keep f’om eatin’.

Quoted in Tilley, Bright Tobacco, 318. See also Campbell, White and Black, 285. French workers who visited northern factories in the late nineteenth century commented on the lack of singing in American industrial shops. Rodgers, Work Ethic in Industrial America, 161.

52 Magee quoted in Tilley, Bright Tobacco, 319.

53 Work, “The Negroes of Warsaw,” 30-33; Engs, Freedom’s First Generation, 168-171; Cooley, Homes of the Freed, 44; Kelsey, The Negro Farmer, 33; Williams, “Local Conditions Among Negroes.”

54 Engs, Freedom’s First Generation, 168-169; Work, “Negroes of Warsaw,” 36.

55 Thorn, “Negroes of Litwalton,” 1154.

56 On the black middle class in the urban South during this period, see, for example, Rabinowitz, Race Relations; Blassingame, Black New Orleans; Lamon, Black Tennesseans; Dittmer, Black Georgia.

57 Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom, 111; U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Statistics of Women at Work (1916), 166, 174, lists the following categories of black “textile workers”: dressmakers; hat and cap makers; milliners; seamstresses; shirt, collar, and cuff makers; tailoresses; and “other.” DuBois, ed., “Negro Artisan,” AUS 7, 90; Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom, 31-39.

58 On black education during slavery and the postwar period, see Woodson, Education of the Negro; Bullock, History of Negro Education. For more information on black women leaders, see White, Too Heavy a Load; Lerner, ed., Black Women; Loewenberg and Bogin, eds., Black Women; and Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters, 397-495.

59 U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Statistics of Women at Work (1916), 166, 174; DuBois, ed., “Morals and Manners Among Negro Americans,” AUS 18, 72; DuBois, ed., “The Negro Common School,” AUS 6, 15-17, 70-80; U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Negro Population, 1790-1915, 521-522.

60 Harlan, Separate and Unequal, 109, 168, 245, 257, 258, 260, 262-263. See also Christensen Jr., “The Negroes of Beaufort County,” 483; Thom, “Negroes of Litwalton,” 1119; DuBois, “Negro in the Black Belt,” 407.

61 Rabinowitz, Race Relations, 152-181; Jones, Soldiers of Light and Love, 191-208. For overviews of the northern freedmen’s aid societies’ efforts in the area of black education during Reconstruction, see McPherson, The Abolitionist Legacy; Morris, Reading, ’Riting, and Reconstruction.

62 Dailey, Before Jim Crow; “none”: quoted in Fairclough, A Class of Their Own, 128 (see also p. 225).

63 Rabinowitz, Race Relations, 164-181; U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Negro Population, 1790-1915, 388.

64 U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Negro Population, 1790-1915, 414, 434; Jones, ed., Negro Education; Rabinowitz, Race Relations, 178; DuBois, ed., “The College Bred Negro,” AUS 5, and “The College-Bred Negro American,” AUS 15; Fairclough, A Class of Their Own; Williams, Self-Taught.

65 Fields and Fields, Lemon Swamp, 187, 197. See also Wells-Barnett, On Lynchings; Dunster, ed., Crusade for Justice; Neverdon-Morton, “The Black Woman’s Struggle” in Harley and Terborg-Penn, ed., Afro-American Woman, 28-42; Hamilton, “National Association of Colored Women”; Jones, “Mary Church Terrell”; Barrett, “Negro Women’s Clubs,” 33-34; Terrell, “Club Work of Colored Women”; Giddings, When and Where I Enter, 95-118; Scott, “Most Invisible of All.”

66 “a defense”: Lerner, “Community Work of Black Club Women,” in Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past, 86; Royster, Lugenia Burns Hope, 133; Walker, ed., African American Business, 602- 603; Brown, “Womanist Consciousness”; Dabney, Maggie L. Walker.

67 “that”: Burroughs quoted in Harvey, Freedom’s Coming, 70-71; Higginbotham, Righteous Discontents, 135; Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow.

68 Rabinowitz, Race Relations, 329-339. On the scope and means of black disfranchisement, see Kousser, Shaping of Southern Politics; Perman, Struggle for Mastery. On black protest and race riots, see Meier and Rudwick, “The Boycott Movement”; Crowe, “Racial Violence” and “Racial Massacre.”

69 Rabinowitz, Race Relations, 70; Kann, “Knights of Labor”; Worthman and Green, “Black Workers in the New South,” in Huggins, Kilson, and Fox, eds., Key Issues, 47-69; Meier and Elliott, “Attitudes of Negro Leaders,” and Marshall, “The Negro in Southern Unions,” in Jacobson, ed., The Negro and the American Labor Movement; Foner, Organized Labor, 66, 89, 90; Rachleff, Black Labor ; Fink, Workingmen’s Democracy; Jones, American Work, 303, 326-327, 338, 358-359.

70 Foner, Organized Labor, 89.

71 Stokes, “Black and White Labor,” 206-208; Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement: From Colonial Times, 247; DuBois, ed., “Negro Artisan,” AUS 7, 173, 175; Tilley, Bright Tobacco, 625.

72 Atlanta Constitution and washerwomen quoted in Rabinowitz, Race Relations, 74, 75. See also Sterling, We Are Your Sisters, 355-358. For accounts of other labor organizations involving southern black women workers, see Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement, 188; Tilley, Bright Tobacco , 320; Tindall, South Carolina Negroes, 137; Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom.

73 Quoted in Clowes, Black America, 93. See also Meier and Rudwick, “Boycott Movement”; Barnes, Journey from Jim Crow, 1-19.

74 Smith, Killers of the Dream, 173. See, for example, Dollard, Caste and Class, 314-362.

75 Cooley, Homes of the Freed, 109; Negro Nurse, “More Slavery,” 197-198; Washington-Williams, Dear Senator. See also Hobson and Hopkins, “Concerning the Colored Women,” 6-7, 91.

76 DuBois, “Negroes of Farmville,” 34; paper quoted in Clowes, Black America, 98; Rabinowitz, Race Relations, 329-339.

CHAPTER 5

1 Letter to “My Dear Pastor and Wife,” Scott, comp., “Documents.”

2 Harrison, ed., Black Exodus; Goodwin, Black Migration; Trotter, ed., Great Migration; Marks, Farewell; Henri, Black Migration, 64; Spear, Black Chicago, 137. See, for example, the following contemporary accounts based on interviews with migrants: Woofter Jr., Negro Migration, 117-121; U.S. Dept. of Labor, Negro Migration in 1916-1917; Scott, Negro Migration During the War. See also Higgs, “Boll Weevil”; Tuttle, Race Riot; Johnson, “How Much is the Migration a Flight,” 272-274.

3 Lieberson, A Piece of the Pie. See also Work, “The Negro Migration”; Collins, “When the Tide Turned.”

4 Jones, The Dispossessed; Gregory, Southern Diaspora.

5 For a case study, see Bodnar, Simon, and Weber, Lives of their Own. The debate over the respective histories of migrant blacks and immigrant whites is represented by the divergent positions of Sowell and Lieberson. In Ethnic America, Sowell suggests that the lack of a traditional work ethic in African American culture inhibited black occupational mobility during the twentieth century. In Piece of the Pie, Lieberson presents the much more convincing case that systemic discrimination was the chief obstacle to black economic success. (The analysis of black women’s work in the urban North presented in this chapter confirms most of Lieberson’s major points.) See also Themstrom, The Other Bostonians; like Lieberson, Thernstrom disputes the “blacks-as-the-last-of-the-immigrants” theory as an explanation for their lack of black mobility, and cites prejudice as the chief factor. Engerman sums up the main issues in this debate in “Three Recent Studies of Ethnicity.” All of the major studies in this area fail to consider in any depth the economic significance of black women’s work within ghetto communities. See also Greenwald, Women, War, and Work, 13-27.

6 Chicago Commission, The Negro in Chicago, 387; Tentler, Wage-Earning Women; Kennedy, If All We Did Was to Weep at Home, 91-156; Sharpless and Rury, “Political Economy of Women’s Work”; Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, 142-214.

7 Greenberg, “Neighborhood Change.” Lieberson, Piece of the Pie, 200-252.

8 Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out; Bunch-Lyons, Contested Terrain; White, “Women in the Great Migration.”

9 Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land, 8.

10 Scott, comp., “Letters of Negro Migrants,” 458.

11 Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 262.

12 “fired herself”: Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out, 83; Bunch-Lyons, Contested Terrain, 3.

13 Lieberson, Piece of the Pie, 219-220; Johnson and Campbell, Black Migration in America, 56- 70; Hill, “Recent Northward Migration”; Kiser, Sea Island to City, 99-100; Keller, “Assisted Emigration from the South,” 11-14; Kruse, “Negro Women and Domestic Service”; Matthews, “Dangers Confronting Southern Girls.”

14 Miller, “Surplus Negro Women”; Gutman, Black Family, 450, 521-530; Helen A. Tucker, “The Negroes of Pittsburgh,” Charities and the Commons 21 (January 2, 1909): 599; Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape, 39-40.

15 Hickel, “’Justice and the Highest Kind of Equality”; “Woman’s Domestic”: Arnesen, Black Protest, 140; “any woman”: ibid., 141-143.

16 Johnson and Campbell, Black Migration, 71-89; Hill, “Recent Northward Migration,” 100- 105; Johnston, “The Migration and the Census.” Between 1910 and 1920, the black population of Detroit increased by 611 percent, of Cleveland, by 308 percent, and of Chicago, by 150 percent.

17 See, for example, accounts of the migration provided by U.S. Dept. of Labor, Negro Migration (1919 and 1935); Scott, Negro Migration During the War; Baker, “The Negro Goes North”; Edens, “When Labor Is Cheap,” 511; Epstein, The Negro Migrant, 7, 27.

18 Chicago Commission, Negro in Chicago, 386; Scott, comp., “Letters of Negro Migrants,” 291, 296, 314, 412-413.

19 “When you,” “go to”: Kiser, Sea Island to City, 131, 133; “such a”: Scott, comp., “Letters from Negro Migrants,” 291, 296, 314, 412-413.

20 “for an unwise . . . live”: Arnesen, ed., Black Protest, 125; Bunch-Lyons, Contested Terrain, 37, n. 20, 36-37; Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out, 29; Harrison, Black Exodus, 26-27.

21 Hine, “Black Migration to the Urban Midwest,” in Trotter, ed., Great Migration, 127-146.

22 Gottlieb, Making Their Own Way, 27.

23 Ibid.; Hine, “Black Migration to the Urban Midwest,” 131.

24 Gottlieb, Making Their Own Way, 12-38; Blocker, A Little More Freedom; Haynes, Negro New-Comers , 12; Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape, 159-191; Chicago Commission, Negro in Chicago, 180.

25 Grant, “The Negro Comes to the City,” 96-97; Scott, comp., “Letters of Negro Migrants,” 456; Gottlieb, Making Their Own Way; Scott, Negro Migration During the War, 36.

26 Scott, Negro Migration During the War, 24, 48. On migration during the 1920s, see Kornweibel Jr., “An Economic Profile,” 308; Kennedy, The Negro Peasant Turns Cityward, 35; Johnson, “The American Migrant”; Work, “The Negro Migration,” 202-212.

27 On black employment patterns in nineteenth-century northern cities, see Pleck, Black Migration and Poverty, 23, 125; Katzrnan, Before the Ghetto, 217-222; Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape, 20; Scheiner, Negro Mecca, 45-54; Harley, “Northern Black Female Workers,” in Harley and Terborg-Penn, eds., The Afro-American Woman, 5-16.

28 Greene and Woodson, The Negro Wage-Earner, 228, 250; Wright Jr., “Economic Condition of Negroes” and “The Negro’s Quest for Work,” in Foner and Lewis, eds., The Black Worker, 38- 39, 46-54. See also Warner, New Haven Negroes, 233-234; Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape, 75.

29 Johnson, “American Migrant,” 557; Herbst, Negro in the Slaughtering and Meatpacking Industry , xviii, xxii; Kornweibel, “Economic Profile of Black Life,” 311; Harris, The Harder We Run, 51- 76; Clark, “The Migrant in Pittsburgh,” 305; Dutcher, Negro in Modern Industrial Society, 70-71, 95-98. U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Negroes in the United States, 1920-1932, 290; U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Negro Population in the United States, 1790-1915, 526. See also Bodnar, “The Impact of the ‘New Immigration’”; Hershberg et al., “A Tale of Three Cities,” in Hershberg, ed., Philadelphia, 473-476; Themstrom, Other Bostonians, 176-219.

30 “Negroes at Work in the United States,” 216; U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Negroes in the United States, 1920-1932, 298-299; Hill, Women in Gainful Occupations, 275; Klaczynska, “Why Women Work.”

31 Ovington, Half a Man, 138-140. See also Pleck, “A Mother’s Wages” in Cott and Pleck, eds., A Heritage of Her Own, 367-392; Lieberson, Piece of the Pie, 177-179, 195; Engerman, “Black Fertility.”

32 Ovington, Half a Man, 140-141.

33 Ibid., 142-143.

34 U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Negroes in the United States, 1920-1932, 273-274, 297; U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Statistics of Women at Work (1907), 133. See also Mossell, “Standard of Living.”

35 Hill, Women in Gainful Occupations, 115; Kennedy, Negro Peasant, 90; Lieberson, Piece of the Pie, 320-322.

36 “had kicked”: Chicago Commission, Negro in Chicago, 371. See Haynes, “Two Million Negro Women at Work”; Katzman, Seven Days A Week, 184-222.

37 On employers’ preference for white servants, see Greene and Woodson, Negro Wage-Earner, 228; Berry, “The Negro in Cincinnati Industries,” 363; Haynes, “Two Million Negro Women,” 64. See also Strasser, Never Done, 1-144; Sutherland, Americans and Their Servants, 182-199.

38 Strasser, Never Done, 180-224; Haynes, “Negroes in Domestic Service”; “There Goes the China!” 571; Simpson, “A Note on Negro Industrial Problems,”182-183; Greene and Woodson, Negro Wage-Earner, 231.

39 “Employment of Colored Women,” 24-25; Robinson, “Domestic Workers,” 69-70; Katzman, Seven Days a Week, 198-199; Buckner, “Problems of Women Workers,” 81.

40 U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Statistics of Women at Work (1907), 158; U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Negroes in the United States, 1920-1932, 290, 328-334.

41 Jones, American Work, 320; Arnesen, ed., Black Protest, 146.

42 U.S. Dept. of Labor, “Negro Women in Industry”; Haynes, “The Negro at Work”; U.S. Dept. of Labor, “Colored Women in Industry,” 1046-1048; Irvin, “Conditions in Industry.”

43 Woman quoted in Greenwald, Women, War, and Work, 27; Clark and McDougald, “A New Day for the Colored Woman.”

44 Hill, Women in Gainful Occupations, 117; John P. Frey, “From Kitchen to Factory,” World Outlook 5 (October 1919): 29; Kiser, Sea Island to City, 138.

45 “Complete Survey of Race Women,” 1, 7; U.S. Dept. of Labor, “Colored Women in Industry,” 1046; U.S. Dept. of Labor, “Negro Women in Industry,” 34-35; U.S. Dept. of Labor, “Negro Women in Industry in Fifteen States.”

46 “You are”: quoted in Hine, “Black Migration to the Urban Midwest,” 141; Klaczynska, “Why Women Work,” 86; Chicago Commission, Negro in Chicago, 392-393; Greenwald, Women, War, and Work, 26-27; Haynes, Negro New-Comers in Detroit, 18; Johnson, “The Negro Population of Waterbury, Connecticut,” 302-303. See also Henry, Women and the Labor Movement, 202-211.

47 Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement, 267-268, 313, 339-340; Chicago Commission, Negro in Chicago, 392-393; Greenwald, Women, War, and Work, 40-44; Harris, The Harder We Run, 77-94.

48 Herbst, Negro in the Slaughtering and Meatpacking Industry, 74, 76, 79-80.

49 Ibid., 70-71, 72-73, 75, 89.

50 Ibid., 73, 75; Best and Erickson, “A Survey of Laundries,” 88; Hill, Women in Gainful Occupations , 113; Chicago Commission, Negro in Chicago, 385.

51 Best and Erickson, “Survey of Laundries,” 56, 63-65, 77.

52 In American Work, I discuss “The Rise and Decline of the Racialized Machine,” 301-394.

53 Mary Ryan, Womanhood in America, 15-182.

54 Hunter, “A Colored Working Girl,” 32-34. See also “Employment of Colored Women in Chicago,” 24-25.

55 Chicago Commission, Negro in Chicago, 381, 384.

56 Spear, Black Chicago, 154; U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Negroes in the United States, 1920-1932, 305-308; Osofsky, Harlem, 147-148; Berry and Blassingame, Long Memory, 351-352; Woofter, Negro Problems in Cities, 198.

57 Harmon, Lindsay, and Woodson, The Negro as a Business Man, 15; Spear, Black Chicago, 181-200.

58 Osofsky, Harlem, 137; Boyd, “The Great Migration to the North”; Walker, ed., African American Business, 581-585; Harmon, Lindsay, and Woodson, Negro as a Business Man, 29-34; Frazier, “Occupational Classes Among Negroes,” 724; Davis, ed., Contributions of Black Women to America, 1: 339-344.

59 Chicago Commission, Negro in Chicago, 202-3; Frazier, “Chicago: A Cross-Section of Negro Life,” 72; Haynes, Negro New-Comers in Detroit, 21; Scheiner, Negro Mecca, 114-115; Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape, 48-49; Osofsky, Harlem, 151, 185.

60 Waterman, Prostitution and Its Repression, 51, 128. See also “Migration of Colored Girls from Virginia,” 75-79; Chicago Commission, Negro in Chicago, 343. Secondary accounts of prostitution during this period include Connelly, Response to Prostitution; Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood.

61 Tentler, Wage-Earning Women, 8.

62 Comer, Maggie’s American Dream, 142, 149, 150, 151.

63 Haynes, “Conditions Among Negroes in Cities,” 108-109. Lieberson describes the process of increasing segregation among blacks in Piece of the Pie, 253-291. On the riots during the World War I era, see Tuttle, Race Riot; Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis; Grimshaw, ed., Racial Violence , 60-115.

64 Hine, “Black Migration to the Urban Midwest,” 133; White, “Women in the Great Migration,” 435.

65 Kiser, Sea Island to City, 176; Kennedy, Negro Peasant, 139; Gutman, Black Family, 453; Reed, Negro Illegitimacy, 93.

66 Frazier, “Family Disorganization Among Negroes,” 206; Chicago Commission, Negro in Chicago, 170-71. See also Newman, “The Housing of Negro Immigrants,” 46-48; Jones, “The Negro in Community Life,” 390-391, 394.

67 Epstein, Negro Migrant, 16, 65. See also Mossell, “Standard of Living,” 197, 194; Woofter and Priest, “Negro Housing in Philadelphia,” 12.

68 Ovington, “The Negro Home in New York,” 26-27; Tentler, Wage-Earning Women, 169; Strasser, Never Done, 111-113; Martin, Our Negro Population, 117-118.

69 Phillips, “‘But It Is a Fine Place to Make Money,’” 399; “I did,” “Now the father”: Clark-Lewis, Living, In Living Out, 79-80, 81.

70 Ovington, Half a Man, 56-59; Osofsky, Harlem, 147-148; Woofter, Negro Problems in Cities, 199; Tucker, “The Negroes of Pittsburgh,” 607.

71 Washington woman quoted in Jones, Recreation and Amusement, 184; Chicago woman quoted in Chicago Commission, Negro in Chicago, 172.

72 Scott, comp., “Letters of Negro Migrants,” 460; Frazier, “A Negro Industrial Group,” 209, 211, 217-218, 230; Kennedy, Negro Peasant, 198-199; Kiser, Sea Island to City, 187; Epstein, Negro Migrant in Pittsburgh, 17; Chicago Commission, Negro in Chicago, 261.

73 Grant, “The Negro Comes to the City,” 98.

74 Kusmer has compiled statistics from the Fifteenth Census (1930) related to “the percentage of families headed by women, by racial and ethnic group, for urban and rural areas” (Table 20) in A Ghetto Takes Shape, 226. See also Gutman, Black Family, 461-475, 521-530. The selective nature of the northward migration process probably helps to explain the relatively high percentage of widowed and divorced black women in the urban North during the first two or three decades of the twentieth century. See Lieberson’s data in Piece of the Pie, 175.

75 Clark, “The Migrant in Pittsburgh,” 306. See also Tucker, “Negroes of Pittsburgh,” 608; Work, “Problems of Negro Urban Welfare.”

76 Mosell, “Standard of Living,” 173-218. See also Woofter, Negro Problems in Cities, 122-124; Kennedy, Negro Peasant, 161; R. R. Wright, “The Economic Condition of Negroes in the North: Tendencies Downward,” Southern Workman 40 (December 1911): 707; Kiser, Sea Island to City, 32.

77 Kiser, Sea Island to City, 124; Wright, “Economic Condition,” 707; Helen B. Pendleton, “Cotton Pickers in Northern Cities.” The Survey 37 (February 17, 1917): 569.

78 Mary White Ovington, “The Negro Home in New York.” Charities 15 (October 7, 1905): 25-28; Tucker, “Negroes of Pittsburgh,” 601.

79 Graham, “Negro Family,” 50.

80 Engerman, “Black Fertility,” 125-131; Woofter, Negro Problems in Cities, 34; Osofsky, Harlem, 137-138; Gutman, Black Family, 454. In Chicago in 1920, 70 percent of all black households contained a nuclear family plus either roomers, relatives, or another family; Graham, “Negro Family,” 50.

81 U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Negroes in the United States, 1920-1932, 285; Modell and Hareven, “Urbanization and the Malleable Household” in Martin, ed., The American Family, 51-68; Bodnar, Weber, and Simon, “Migration, Kinship, and Urban Adjustment,” 553-559, 562-563, 565. For discussions of the lodging system in specific cities, see Scheiner, Negro Mecca, 28; Clark, “Migrant in Pittsburgh,” 303; Haynes, Negro New-Comers in Detroit, 22; Kennedy, Negro Peasant, 164-165.

82 Strasser, Never Done, 152-154; Klaczynska, “Why Women Work,” 82; Chicago Commission, Negro in Chicago, 164.

83 White, Too Heavy a Load; Osofsky, Harlem, 66; Lerner, “Community Work of Black Club Women,” in Lerner, The Majority, 83-93; Haynes, Negro New-Comers in Detroit, 18-19. See also Gottlieb, Making Their Own Way; Chicago Commission, Negro in Chicago, 193; Clark, “Migrant in Pittsburgh,” 304-306; U.S. Dept. of Labor, Negro Migration in 1916-1917, 23; Strickland, Chicago Urban League, 25-103.

84 “The tinsel show”: Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out, 91.

85 “My talking”: ibid., 93; “Crowded”: ibid., 75.

86 Scott, comp., “Letters of Negro Migrants,” 457; Frazier, “Chicago,” 73. See also Kiser, Sea Island to City, 51, 55, 206-207; Frazier, “A Negro Industrial Group,” 227-230; Woofter, Negro Problems in Cities, 101-102; Chicago Commission, Negro in Chicago, 391.

87 Jones, Recreation and Amusement Among Negroes, 91; Thomas, “From Peasant to Proletarian,” 56; Woofter, Negro Problems in Cities, 272-273. See also Kiser, Sea Island to City, 46, 51; Epstein, Negro Migrant in Pittsburgh, 46; Haynes, Negro New-Comers in Detroit, 24-25, 35; Mossell, “Standard of Living,” 177; Kennedy, Negro Peasant, 188; Frazier, “A Negro Industrial Group,” 227; Scheiner, Negro Mecca, 58.

88 Chicago Commission, Negro in Chicago, 387.

89 “We were living”: Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out, 73; Nielson, Black Ethos, 190-191; Frazier, “A Negro Industrial Group,” 215; Chicago Commission, Negro in Chicago, 172; Grant, “The Negro Comes to the City,” 361. On the noninvolvement of churches in community welfare activities during this period, see Sampson, “The Diary of a Child Placing Agent,” 10-11; George E. Haynes, “Negro Migration,” 304.

90 Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out, 69, 73, 85-90.

91 Osofsky, Harlem, 144. See, for example, “The Star Centre and Its Co-Operative Coal Club,” and Fannie Barrier Williams, “Social Bonds in the ‘Black Belt’ of Chicago,” Charities 15 (October 7, 1905): 6, 40-44. The lack of professional medical services available to blacks in ghettos was all the more significant in light of their high rates of mortality and illness compared to immigrant and native-born groups. The black population suffered from tuberculosis to a much greater degree than did whites in general. For example, in New York, mortality rates attributed to TB among blacks were two and one-half times higher than the overall city rate. Moreover, between 1923 and 1927, twice as many Harlem mothers died in childbirth and almost twice as many black infants died relative to the same populations in the city’s other neighborhoods. Osofsky, Harlem, 141-143.

92 White, Too Heavy a Load, 110-141; Seraile, “Henrietta Vinton Davis,” 7-24. For an overview of Garvey and his career, see Martin, Race First.

93 U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Negroes in the Untied States, 1920-1932, 286. The percentages of black households that had radio sets in the largest northern and southern cities (in 1930) include: New York, 40.1; Chicago, 42.6; Philadelphia, 23.3; Detroit, 29.6; Cleveland, 22.8; New Orleans, 21.0; Atlanta, 26.0.

94 U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Negroes in the United States, 1920-1932, 210, 213, 233, 236; Lieberson, Piece of the Pie, 220-233; Baxter and Lansing, Women and Politics, 78.

95 White, Too Heavy a Load; Terborg-Penn, “Discrimination Against Afro-American Women” in Harley and Terborg-Penn, eds., Afro-American Woman; Terborg-Penn, “Discontented Black Feminists,” in Scharf and Jensen, eds., Decades of Discontent.

96 Baker, “The Negro Goes North,” 319.

CHAPTER 6

1 “No . . . business”: Walker, Style and Status, 59; “As long”: Smith, ed., Encyclopedia of African American Business, 2:821. See also Blackwelder, Styling Jim Crow.

2 Erickson, “Employment Conditions”; Jeffries, “The Decay of the Beauty Parlor,” 49-52, 60; Gill, Beauty Shop Politics.

3 “We learned . . . said”: Walker, Style and Status, 61-62; Gill, Beauty Shop Politics.

4 Sterner, The Negro’s Share. This monograph is part of the Carnegie Study of the Negro in America, and includes a wealth of valuable statistical data, some of it from unpublished U.S. Census sources. See also Giddings, When and Where 1 Enter, 197-215, 220-230; “We have been”: quoted in Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln, 143-144. See also Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks. On the role of Bethune in FDR’s administration and in the larger black community, see Hanson, Mary McLeod Bethune; Ware, Beyond Suffrage, 12-13, 138; Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln, 137-148, 201, 255. For general overviews of the decade, see McElvaine, The Great Depression; Kirby, Black Americans in the Roosevelt Era; Harris, The Harder We Run, 95-113. Much useful information on blacks in the 1930s is provided by Myrdal in An American Dilemma.

5 Burroughs quoted in Hunter, “‘Don’t Buy From Where You Can’t Work,’” 62; U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Sixteenth Census, vol. 3, The Labor Force pt. 1, U.S. Summary (1940), 25.

6 “The job is”: Letter from W. H. Hyatt, Natchez, Mississippi, April 17, 1935, Box 119-1, “Urban Complaints,” Works Progress Administration File (hereafter WPA File, Howard University). See Howard University for Note; “First things”: quoted in McElvaine, Great Depression, 188-189; Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln. Long accustomed to the practices of exploitative white landowners and to falling cotton prices, rural black southerners only gradually realized that a nationwide depression had “seeped into [their] area slowly, like a thief with misgivings,” in the words of Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 41.

7 Wright, 12 Million Black Voices, 144.

8 “You don’t”: Winegarten, “I am Annie Mae,” 19; “I don’t”: quoted in Pidgeon, “The Employment of Women in Slaughtering and Meat Packing,” 126. See also Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis , 517-518.

9 “The devil”: Nate Shaw (Ned Cobb), in Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers, 282; Brehon, “Looking Back,” in Cade, ed., Black Woman, 227.

10 Scharf, To Work and To Wed, 107-108; Sterner, Negro’s Share, 360-361; U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Negroes in the United States, 1920-1932, 297; Ware, Holding Their Own, 21-54; “the breath”: Cuthbert, “Problems Facing Negro Young Women.” See also U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Sixteenth Census, vol. 3, The Labor Force, pt. 1, U.S. Summary (1940), 90; Pidgeon, “Employed Women Under N.R.A. Codes”; U.S. Dept. of Labor, “Women at Work”; Scharf, To Work and To Wed, 128; Sterner, Negro’s Share, 214; Poole, Segregated Origins of Social Security, 75.

11 Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, 250-272; Milkman, “Women’s Work and Economic Crisis”; Wandersee, Women’s Work and Family Values, 84-102; U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Sixteenth Census, The Labor Force, pt. 1, U.S. Summary (1940), 90.

12 Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, 254. See also Oppenheimer, Female Labor Force in the United States, 44, 53; Scharf, To Work and To Wed, 43-65.

13 Johnson, Shadow of the Plantation, 41.

14 Holley, The Second Great Emancipation, 55-74; U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Sixteenth Census, The Labor Force, pt. 1, U.S. Summary (1940), 97. On the demise of the sharecropping system, see, for example, Kirby, “The Transformation of Southern Plantations”; Sterner, Negro’s Share, 75; Johnson, Embree, and Alexander, Collapse of Cotton Tenancy; Raper, Tenants of the Almighty; Woofter, Landlord and Tenant.

15 Hoffsommer, “Landlord-Tenant Relations and Relief in Alabama,” 7-10, 11 in Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), Works Progress Administration Collection, Record Group 69 (hereafter WPA Collection, RG 69, National Archives). On the impact of AAA policies on black sharecroppers, see Wolters, Negroes and the Great Depression, 3-79; Conrad, The Forgotten Farmers.

16 Woman quoted in Brown, “The Negro Woman Worker,” 7. For plantation owners’ attitudes toward their black tenants, see, for example, “Landlord-Tenant Relations and Relief in Alabama,” Federal Emergency Relief Administration Confidential Research Bulletin #2738 (July 10, 1934), 1, and A. R. Mangus, “The Rural Negro on Relief, February, 1935,” Federal Emergency Relief Administration Research Bulletin #6950 (October 17, 1935), 3; WPA Collection, vols. 4-6, RG 69, National Archives.

17 Dollard, Caste and Class, 100. For descriptions of women field workers, see Janiewski, “From Field to Factory, 48; “No Stick-Leg,” in Terrill and Hirsch, eds., Such As Us, 29-37; Ellis, “Women of the Cotton Fields,” 333, 342; Virginia Federal Writers Project, The Negro in Virginia, 328; Jensen, ed., With These Hands, 248-277.

18 “she usually”: Brown, “Negro Woman Worker,” 7; Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States, 112; “no return”: Allen, The Labor of Women, 200-201. In 1935 Mosel Brinson, a widow with seven children living in Millen, Georgia, wrote to officials at the Department of Agriculture and told how “these poor white people that lives around me wants the colored people to work for them for nothing.” See letter in Lerner, ed., Black Women, 399-400.

19 Webb and Brown, “Migrant Families,” Works Progress Administration Division of Social Research, Monograph 18(1938), 101; Brown, “Negro Woman Worker,” 7-8; Sutherland, “The Migratory Labor Problem in Delaware,” 15; Jones, Dispossessed, 167-204.

20 Conrad, Forgotten Farmers. For examples of FSA photographs, see Evans, Walker Evans; Dorothea Lange, Dorothea Lange; O’Neal and others, A Vision Shared; Caldwell, You Have Seen Their Faces; Stryker and Wood, In This Proud Land.

21 Grubbs, Cry From the Cotton; Harris, Harder We Run, 97-104; Kester, Revolt Among the Sharecroppers , ed. Lichtenstein; Conrad, Forgotten Farmers; Auerbach, “Southern Tenant Farmers”; Dyson, Red Harvest, 150-167. The work of Estelle Milner is described by Ellis in “Women of the Cotton Fields,” 342. The quote is from Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers, 315.

22 Interview with Stith and Williams in Wise and Thrasher, “The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union” in Miller, ed., Working Lives, 132, 125; Cantor, “Prologue to the Protest Movement.” On the plight of “Bootheel” sharecroppers, see White and others, Rich Land, Poor People.

23 Grade Turner, “Tore Up and A-Movin’,” in These Are Our Lives, Federal Writers’ Project. 20, 25.

24 Gray, Black Female Domestics.

25 Baker and Cooke, “The Bronx Slave Market,” 330, 340; Vivian Morris, “Bronx Slave Market,” December 6, 1938, Federal Writers Project, Negro Folklore Division (New York), 1, Archive of Folk Song, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (hereafter FWP, Negro Folklore Division, Archive of Folk Song, LC, with the name of the author, date, and state). For other examples, see also Seeley, “Our Feudal Housewives”; Haley, “To Do Good and Do Well,” 58; Rice, “It Takes A While to Realize,” in Lerner, ed., Black Women, 275-276.

26 Byrne and Hillyer, “Unattached Women”; Carter, “The Negro Household Employee,” 351; McElvaine, Great Depression, 187. See also Hansen, “‘Try Being a Black Woman,’” in Taylor and Moore, eds., African American Women Confront the West, 207-227.

27 Dollard, Caste and Class, 107-108; Brown, “Negro Woman Worker,” 3-4; Haley, “To Do Good and Do Well,” 59. For other examples, see Anderson, “The Plight of Negro Domestic Labor”; Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 88; Janiewski, “From Field to Factory,” 197; Winegarten, “I am Annie Mae,” 18; Powdermaker, After Freedom, 118-119.

28 “L-H-P”: Gray, Black Female Domestics, 39; “as soon . . . situation”: White, Too Heavy a Load, 144; Lett, “Work”; “Women Workers in Indianapolis”; Rawick, ed., American Slave, Series 1, South Carolina Narratives, pt. 4, 3:146; Powdermaker, After Freedom, 117-118.

29 “The Domestic Worker of Today,” Radio Talk by Miss Mary Anderson, September 21, 1932, Station WJAY, sponsored by Cleveland Parent Teachers Association, Speeches no. 112 (Box 71), Women’s Bureau Collection, Department of Labor Archives, Record Group 96, National Archives, Washington, D.C.; Dora Jones quoted in “The Domestic Workers’ Union,” in Lerner, ed., Black Women, 231-234. On the New York union, see Seeley, “Our Feudal Housewives,” 614; on Baltimore, see article reprinted from Baltimore Afro-American, October 1936, in Foner and Lewis, eds., The Black Worker, 6:184-185; Ryon, “An Ambiguous Legacy,” 29. For evidence of the Urban League’s efforts in this area, see Program of Mass Meeting of General House Work Employees, September 21, 1933 (St. Louis) in Correspondence-Household (Domestic) File, General Correspondence Prior to 1934 (Box 926), Women’s Bureau Collection, RG 86, National Archives.

30 Rawick, ed., American Slave, Series 1, Alabama Narratives, 6:251.

31 U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Negroes in the United States, 1920-1932, 328-331, and Sixteenth Census (1940), vol. 3, The Labor Force, pt. 1, U.S. Summary (1940), 90. For two excellent case studies of labor force segmentation within the female population, see the articles by Blackwelder, “Quiet Suffering” and “Women in the Work Force.”

32 Wallace, Black Women in the Labor Force, 59; Sullivan and Blair, “Women in Texas Industries,” 14; “Women in Florida Industries”; Manning, “Hours and Earnings,” 11.

33 Janiewski, “From Field to Factory,” 160, 236.

34 Interview with Evelyn Macon in Banks, ed., First-Person America, 126; Sullivan and Blair, “Women in Texas Industries,” 69; Brown, “Negro Woman Worker,” 10; Pidgeon, “Women in Slaughtering and Meatpacking,” 20-21.

35 Janiewski, “From Field to Factory,” 120-124, 159, 237, 277; Porter, “Negro Women.”

36 Pidgeon, “Employed Women Under N.R.A. Codes”; U.S. Dept. of Labor, “Women at Work”; Scharf, To Work and To Wed, 128; Sterner, Negro’s Share, 214; Manning, “Hours and Earnings in Tobacco Stemmeries,” 1; Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, 262-263; Brown, “Negro Woman Worker,” 4, 14.

37 Scharf, To Work and To Wed, 116; Pidgeon, “Employed Women Under N.R.A. Codes,” 83; Wolters, Negroes and the Great Depression, 213-214; Janiewski, “From Field to Factory,” 160.

38 For an overview, see Green, The World of the Worker, 133-209.

39 Janiewski, “From Field to Factory,” 239-265.

40 Rosen, “The CIO Era, 1935-55,” in Jacobson, ed., The Negro and the American Labor Movement , 188-208; Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement, 319-338; Foner, Organized Labor, 215-237.

41 Interview with Mary Sweet in Banks, ed., First-Person America, 133-135; “Negro Women in Industry,” Opportunity 13 (September 1935): 286; Kine, “The Garment Union.”

42 Interview with Evelyn Macon in Banks, ed., First-Person America, 127; Porter, “Negro Women,” 23; Benham, “The Woman Wage Earner,” 25; Brown, “Negro Woman Worker,” 15; Martinez, “A Black Union Organizer,” in Lerner, ed., Black Women, 263.

43 For evidence of black community support for CIO unions, see Martin, “Labor Relations in Transition”; Ryon, “An Ambiguous Legacy”; Meier and Rudwick, “Communist Unions”; Painter, The Narrative of Hosea Hudson. On women’s auxiliaries, see Lewis, “Women of the Steel Towns,” in Lemer, ed., Black Women, 261-262; Cayton and Mitchell, Black Workers, 188. The nutpickers’ strike is recounted in Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement, 312.

44 Meier and Rudwick, “Communist Unions”; Naison, Communists in Harlem, 237, 262-263, 267-270; Cohen, Making a New Deal. Ryon uses the term “aracist” in “Ambiguous Legacy,” 20. See also Jones, American Work, 337-368.

45 White, Too Heavy a Load, 152-157, 160-173; “We asked”: quoted in Weisenfeld, African American Women and Christian Activism, 177.

46 Ottley and Weatherby, “The Depression in Harlem,” in Stemsher, ed., Hitting Home, 113; Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 2:478, 481, 493, 509; “The Negro in Retail Trade,” U.S. Dept. of Labor. See also Frazier, The Negro Family in Chicago, 103.

47 Johnson, Shadow of the Plantation, 199; interview with Izzelly Haines in Banks, ed., First-Person America, 169. On the costs of a midwife’s services, see Dollard, Caste and Class, 105; Allen, Labor of Women in the Production of Cotton, 178; interview with Susie W. Walker in Gordon, “Document: A Brief Look at Blacks in Depression Mississippi,” 379.

48 Vivian Harris, “God Was Happy—Mother Horn” (November 23, 1938), FWP interview, Negro Folklore Division (New York), Archive of Folk Song, LC; Smith quoted in Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 643-644.

49 Hine, Black Women in White, 153-154; Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do.

50 Hunter, “‘Don’t Buy From Where You Can’t Work,’” 284, 299.

51 Official quoted in Naison, Communists in Harlem, 281; Helen Cade Brehon, “Looking Back,” in Bambara, ed., Black Woman, 227. Black women and men controlled the Party in the South to a much greater extent than in the North. See Hudson, Black Worker in the Deep South, 69, 72; Painter, The Narrative of Hosea Hudson. Ware includes a discussion of “Women on the Left” in Holding Their Own, 117-140.

52 Haley, “To Do Good and Do Well,” 64; McElvaine, Great Depression, 193.

53 For general accounts of black participation in New Deal public works programs, see Wolters, Negroes and the Great Depression, 196-209; Kirby, Black Americans, 22-23, 32, 34, 127.

54 Alfred Edgar Smith, “1935 Summary: Negro Clients of Federal Unemployment Relief,” 3-4, WPA Collection, RG 69, National Archives; Scharf, To Work and To Wed, 122-124; Wolters, Negroes and the Great Depression, 206; Mangus, “Rural Negro on Relief,” 4, FERA Research Report (September 17, 1934), WPA Collection, RG 69, National Archives; Sterner, Negro’s Share, 245.

55 Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, 251-252; Forrester B. Washington, “Accomplishment Report” (February 1, 1934-July 31, 1934), WPA Collection, RG 69, National Archives; Alfred Edgar Smith, “An Annual Report on Work Relief Matters Affecting Negro Project Workers Peculiarly For the Year 1938” (January 1939), WPA Collection, RG 69, National Archives; Letter from Roy Wilkins to FERA, New York, New York. January 31, 1935, Box 119-1, “Rural Rehabilitation,” WPA File, Howard University.

56 Scharf, To Work and To Wed, 124; Smith, “Negro Project Workers . . . For the Year 1938,” 16, 33; Smith, “An Annual Report on Work Relief Matters Affecting Negro Project Workers Peculiarly For the Year 1937,” 11, WPA Collection, RG 69, National Archives; “Women at Work,” 64.

57 Dollard, Caste and Class, 125; Smith, “Negro Project Workers . . . For the Year 1938,” 26, WPA Collection, RG 69, National Archives. See also Smith, “1935 Report-Summary: Negro Clients,” WPA Collection, RG 69, National Archives; Sterner, Negro’s Share, 245.

58 Smith, “Negro Project Workers . . . For the Year 1938,” 25, 34; Smith, “Negro Project Workers . . . For the Year 1937,” 50, WPA Collection, RG 69, National Archives; Letters from R. J. Wilson, M.D., Florence, S.C., February 26, 1936, and Thurgood Marshall, New York, New York, January 11, 1938, Box 119-2, “Women’s Work,” WPA File, Howard University; unsigned letter “To the Presandent” in Baxandall, Gordon, and Reverby, eds., America’s Working Women, 249-250. See also Wolters, Negroes and the Great Depression, 208.

59 Letter from Mary Albright, Raleigh, North Carolina, October 12, 1937, Box 119-2, “Women’s Work,” WPA File, Howard University. Smith, “Negro Project Workers . . . For the Year 1937,” 11; Smith, “Negro Project Workers . . . For the Year 1938,” 24, 28; Pinkie Pelcher to President Roosevelt, in Lerner, ed., Black Women, 401.

60 Sitkoff, New Deal for Blacks, 71. See also Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln, 168-174, 285- 286.

61 Wright, 12 Million Black Voices, 128. Bessie Smith, “Washwoman’s Blues,” from Empty Bed Blues, Columbia Records, No. G30450. For revealing autobiographies of black female singers during the 1930s, see Waters, His Eye is on the Sparrow; Holiday and Duffy, Lady Sings the Blues; Anderson, My Lord, What A Morning; Jackson and Whylie, Movin’ On Up. See also Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 190-297; Cripps, Slow Fade to Black; Arsenault, Sounds of Freedom.

62 Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 2:609; Wright, 12 Million Black Voices, 61. For discussions of white women who struggled to keep their families intact during the 1930s, see Westin, Making Do; Ware, Holding Their Own, 1-20; Wandersee, Women’s Work and Family Values; Milkman, “Woman’s Work and Economic Crisis”; Bird, Invisible Scar. By far the best treatment of both black and white women’s survival strategies is Helmbold, “Making Choices, Making Do.” See also the letters written to FDR by desperate women of both races in McElvaine, ed., Down and Out in the Great Depression, 156-172.

63 Engerman, “Black Fertility”; Cutright and Shorter, “Effects of Health”; Myrdal, American Dilemma, 1:157-181; Janiewski, “From Field to Factory,” 37, 178; U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Sixteenth Census (1940), vol. 3, Population: Differential Fertility 1940 and 1910; Women By Number of Children Ever Born (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1945), 209-11.

64 Powdermaker, After Freedom, 367; Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 2:666; interview with Jim Jeffcoat in Terill and Hirsch, eds., Such as Us, 61. For a discussion of the ways domestic servants viewed their work in the context of improving the lives of their own children, see Dill, Across the Barriers of Race and Class.

65 Strasser, Never Done, 105; Mebane, Mary, 12, 88; Allen, Labor of Women in the Production of Cotton, 179; Janiewski, “From Field to Factory,” 174, 192; Reverby, “From Aide to Organizer,” in Berkin and Norton, eds., Women of America, 293; Walker, “Home Extension Work.” Hagood provides an excellent description of the white tenant farm woman’s resources for cooking and cleaning in Mothers of the South, 92-107.

66 Eason, “Attitudes of Negro Families on Relief,” 367, 369; letters from Sarah Young and Pinkie Pelcher in Lemer, ed., Black Women, 401-403; Lett, “Work”; Bontemps and Conroy, They Seek A City, 183. For relief statistics, see Sterner, Negro’s Share, 214; Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis , 2:576, 578, 582; “Restriction in Employment,” 361. FERA officials quoted: A. R. Mangus, “The Rural Negro on Relief,” 4, and Harold C. Hoffsommer, “Rural Problem Areas Survey Report no. 2: Cotton Growing Region of the Old South, Dallas County, Alabama,” FERA Research Report (September 17, 1934), 2, WPA Collection, RG 69, National Archives.

67 Byrne and Hillyer, “Unattached Women.”

68 Sterner, Negro’s Share, 282-285.

69 Frazier, “Some Effects of the Depression”; Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 2:571. For the study, see Bryan, “Birth Rates and Death Rates.”

70 Lett, “Work,” 81. For another example, see Helmbold, “Making Choices,” 160.

71 Sterner, Negro’s Share, 50; Engerman, “Black Fertility,” 117-138; Frazier, Negro Family in the United States, 103; U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Sixteenth Census (1940), vol. 4, U.S. Summary: Characteristics by Age, pt. 1, 29.

72 Eason, “Attitudes of Negro Families on Relief,” 367, 369. See also Reid, “The Negro Woman Worker.”

73 Raper, Preface to Peasantry, 74; Ellis, “Women of the Cotton Fields,” 333, 342; Borchert, Alley Life in Washington, 89-93.

74 Harold C. Hoffsomer, “Landlord-Tenant Relations and Relief in Alabama,” FERA Confidential Research Bulletin #2738 (July 10, 1934), WPA Collection, RG 69, National Archives; Allen, Labor of Women in the Production of Cotton, 240; Sterner, Negro’s Share, 135. See also Helmbold, “Making Choices,” 144, 147.

75 Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 42, 144; Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers, 258. See also Gordon, “Document: A Brief Look at Blacks in Depression Mississippi,” 379; Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 2:513, 579; Frazier, “Some Effects,” 494; Sterner, Negro’s Share, 93-115, 379; Helmbold, “Making Choices,” 25; Mebane, Mary, 7, 11-12, 16, 18, 47; Woofter, Black Yeomanry, 128; Johnson, Shadow of the Plantation, 101.

76 Social worker quoted in Borchert, Alley Life in Washington, 69-70.

77 Reverby, “From Aide to Organizer,” in Berkin and Norton, eds., Women of America, 292; Johnson, Shadow of the Plantation, 61. See also Janiewski, “From Field to Factory,” 38, 40, 172; Allen, Labor of Women in the Production of Cotton, 206.

78 Edward J. Webster, “Survey of Cases Removed from Relief Rolls in Macon, Georgia, for Administrative Reasons in May, 1935,” FERA Confidential Research Bulletin #6648 (September 24, 1935), 1, WPA Collection, RG 69, National Archives; Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 146; Rawick, ed., American Slave, Series 1, Georgia Narratives, pt. 1, 12:250. See also Johnson, Shadow of the Plantation, 37; Frazier, Negro Family in the United States, 96; Allen, Labor of Women in the Production of Cotton, 186, 189. See Sterner, Negro’s Share, 393, for survey data that indicate that in selected areas, higher percentages of blacks at the lowest income levels (compared to similarly situated whites) reported they had contributed to the financial support of relatives from 1935 to 1936.

79 Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 2:572; Reverby, “Aide to Organizer,” in Berkin and Norton, eds., Women of America, 295. On neighborhoods and mobility see, for example, Borchert, Alley Life in Washington, 123-127; Bodnar, Simon, and Weber, Lives of Their Own, 217; Johnson, Shadow of the Plantation, 25. See also Mebane, Mary, 11-12, 18, 47; interview with Robin Langston in Terkel, Hard Times, 113; Helmbold, “Making Choices,” 64-84.

80 Reverby, “From Aide to Organizer,” in Berkin and Norton, eds., Women of America, 294; Westin, Making Do, 26; Frazier, “Some Effects of the Depression,” 497; Dollard, Caste and Class, 72; Benham, “Woman Wage Earner,” 21; Borchert, Alley Life in Washington, 131-132; Helmbold, “Making Choices,” 180.

81 Mebane, Mary, 83; Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 40, 116.

82 Mebane, Mary, 90; Marshall, “From the Poets in the Kitchen.”

CHAPTER 7

1 “Members”: Gilmore, Defying Dixie, 899; “guerilla-like”: ibid., 348. See also ibid., 346-399.

2 “Your picture”: ibid., 399; “a quieting”: ibid., 400; “the rights”: ibid., 441.

3 See Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty; Rupp, “The Survival of American Feminism,” and Chafe, “The Civil Rights Revolution,” both in Brember and Reichard, eds., Reshaping America, 33-66, 67- 100.

4 “not aloud”: quoted in Lerner, ed., Black Women, 405; Weaver, Negro Labor; Sitkoff, “Racial Militancy”; Meier and Rudwick, CORE; Marjorie McKenzie, “Against the Lean Years,” Aframerican Woman’s Journal 3 (Summer 1943): 7; Johnson, To Stem This Tide, 34; “you can never tell”: Carolyn Chase in Gwaltney, Drylongso, 57; Chafe, “Civil Rights Revolution”; Sitkoff, “Racial Militancy”; Meier and Rudwick, CORE; Dalfiume, “The Forgotten Negro Revolution.”

5 Newman and others, Protest, Politics, and Prosperity; “No one does”: Margaret Wright quoted in Frank, Ziebarth, and Field, The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, 51; “We ought”: woman quoted in Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks, 314; Herman, The Politics of Civil Rights; Alexander, Holding the Line; “thus we lived”: Angelou, Gather Together in My Name, 5.

6 “do the job”: propaganda poster quoted in Frank, Ziebarth, and Field, Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, 100; Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, 273-299; Anderson, Wartime Women, 23-74; Tobias and Anderson, “What Really Happened to Rosie the Riveter?” in Kerber and DeHart, eds., Women’s America, 354-373; Quick, “Rosie the Riveter.”

7 Bedell, “Employment and Income of Negro Workers”; Blood, “Negro Women War Workers.”

8 “the problem”: Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 11; “crammed on top”: Petry, The Street, 130.

9 Ruth Shays in Gwaltney, Drylongso, 30.

10 “We brown”: quoted in Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, 80; Weaver, Negro Labor; Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home; Glaberman, Wartime Strikes.

11 Williams, Politics of Public Housing; Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, 67-68, 154-155; Johnson and Campbell, Black Migration in America, 101-113; Sitkoff, “Racial Militancy”; Reddick, ed., “Race Relations on the Pacific Coast”; Taylor, “The Great Migration”; Capeci, The Harlem Riot of 1943. On the status of black servicemen in the war, see Bell Jr., “The Negro Warrior’s Home Front”; Berry and Blassingame, Long Memory, 320-329 and the book’s bibliography.

12 Joyce Kornbluh, Oral History Interview with Lillian Hatcher, “The Twentieth Century Trade Union Woman: Vehicle For Social Change Oral History Project” (Ann Arbor, MI: Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations), 19 (hereafter Lillian Hatcher Interview); “wasn’t going”: Williams, Politics of Public Housing, 56; “utopia”: Rice, “It Takes a While to Realize,” in Lerner, ed., Black Women, 276.

13 Blood, “Negro Women War Workers,” 1-19.

14 Rupp, Mobilizing Women for War; Honey, “Working-Class Woman and Recruitment”; “We think”: Blood, “Negro Women War Workers,” 8.

15 Pidgeon, “Women Workers and Recent Economic Change”; Frank, Ziebarth, and Field, Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, 14; Hobbs, “The Whip Changes Hands”; Weaver, Negro Labor, 17, 38; Johnson, To Stem This Tide, 29; sociologist quoted in Charles Johnson, “The Present Status of Race Relations in the South,” Social Forces 23 (October 1944): 29; Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, 66.

16 Blood, “Negro Women War Workers,” 20-22; Anderson, “Last Hired, First Fired”; Webster, “Employers, Unions, and Negro Workers”; Weaver, Negro Labor, 85; U.S. Dept. of Labor, “Women Workers in Some Expanding Wartime Industries.”

17 Weaver, Negro Labor, 41-60, 114; personnel manager quoted in letter from Donna Rolland, August 24, 1943, Box 29, Local Union 50 folder, UAW War Policy Division Collection, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI (hereafter ALUA); DeMar, “Negro Women are American Workers, Too,” 42; Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement, 348-349.

18 Anderson, “Last Hired, First Fired,” 92-93; President’s Committee on Civil Rights, To Secure These Rights; Straub, “United States Government Policy Toward Civilian Women”; Weaver, Negro Labor, 145-146. On efforts of local black workers to pressure the FEPC, see Harris, “Federal Intervention in Union Discrimination”; Walter, “Frank R. Crosswaith and Labor Unionization,”; Taylor, “Great Migration,” 119-120.

19 Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 224-229; Harris, The Harder We Run, 113-122.

20 Gabin, Feminism in the Labor Movement, 47-110; Clive, “Women Workers in World War II”; Anderson, “Last Hired, First Fired,” 85; statistics compiled from Mary Ann Loeser, UAW Research Department, to Victor Reuther, Codirector of UAW War Policy Division, October 9, 1942, Box 6, Negro and Defense Industry, 1941-1942, and Oscar Noble to Victor Reuther, January 1943, Box 6, Negro and Defense Industry, 1943, UAW War Policy Division Collection, ALUA. The quote is from Boggs, “The Making of the Black Revolt in the USA,” 15.

21 Meier and Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW, 136-156; clipping from Detroit News, October 26, 1942 (“Women Seek Factory Jobs: Negro Rally Demands Share in War Work”) in Box 14, Women Folder, UAW Public Relations Department—Frank Winn Collection, ALUA; UAW Research Department Memo, September 13, 1943, UAW Research Department Collection, Box 10, Folder 19, ALUA; Jones, Dispossessed, 233-265.

22 Milkman, “Redefining ‘Women’s Work’”; Denby, Indignant Heart, 88-93; Blood, “Negro Women War Workers,” 5; Frank, Ziebarth, and Field, Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, 63, 80; Anderson, “Last Hired, First Fired,” 88; DeMar, “Negro Women are American Workers, Too,” 77; Lillian Hatcher Interview, 17.

23 Foner, Organized Labor, 238-268; Weaver, Negro Labor, 28-40; Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement, 339-396; Green, The World of the Worker, 174-209; Taylor, “Great Migration,” 111, 119.

24 Interview with Maida Springer Kemp, 18, Black Women Oral History Project, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, MA (hereafter BWOHP), in cooperation with the 20th Century Trade Union Woman Project, Program on Women and Work, Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI; steward quoted in Lillian Hatcher Interview, 22. See also Meier and Rudwick, Black Detroit, 162; Gabin, Feminism in the Labor Movement, 11-87.

25 Lillian Hatcher Interview, 18, 45.

26 “Off guard,” “Mr. Whitaker,” “the black women”: quoted in Korstad, “Those Who Were Not Afraid,” in Miller, ed., Working Lives, 189, 195; “I want”: Jones quoted in Korstad and Lichtenstein, “Opportunities Found and Lost,” in Arnesen, ed., The Black Worker, 26. Korstad (in “Those Who Were Not Afraid”) writes, “The little steel formula was a labor/management/government agreement that allowed for moderate wage increases to offset wartime inflation” (p. 189). See also Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement, 385.

27 Quotes from Maida Springer Kemp, BWOHP, and Woods, “You Have to Fight for Freedom” in Lynd and Lynd, eds., Rank and File, 125-126. See also interview with Massie Eberhardt, BWOHP; Lillian Hatcher Interview, 21.

28 Green, Race on the Line, 202-208.

29 Anderson, “Last Hired, First Fired,” 86, 89; Weaver, Negro Labor, 70, 128, 186-187; Oscar Noble Report attached to Victor Reuther to Lloyd Jones, President UAW Local 2, March 15, 1943, Box 29, Local Union 2 Folder, UAW Policy Division Collection, ALUA; Oscar Nobel, UAW International Representative, War Policy Division, to Montague Clark, District Director, WMC Detroit, February-March 1953, UAW War Policy Division Collection, ALUA; Winchester employer quoted in Schuster, “Negroes Working in Defense Industry.”

30 Webb Anderson quoted in Jones and others, Created Equal (Third Edition), 738-739. Blood, “Negro Women War Workers,” 1-2; Washington, “An Essay on Alice Walker,” in Bell, Parker, and Guy-Sheftall, eds., Sturdy Black Bridges, 143; Anderson, “Negro Women on the Production Front”; Staupers, “The Negro Nurse,” 333; Banner, “New York,”; Banner, “War and Post-War Trends,” l- 3; Anderson, “Last Hired, First Fired,” 89; Henderson, “Negroes in Government Employment,” 118-121. On black women in the armed services, see Hampton, “Negro Women and the WAAC,” 54-55, 93; Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond, 40-45; Johnson, Black Women in the Armed Forces, 1; Macy, “Negro Women in the WAC,” 14; Turner, “Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority’s Wartime Program,” 22-23; Riddle and Nelson, “The Negro Nurse Looks Toward Tomorrow,” 627-630.

31 Gates, Colored People, 85.

32 Drake, “The Negro in the North During Wartime,” 266; Gregory Jr., “Wartime Guidance,” 70-71, 90-91; Mebane, Mary, 119-120; Malcolm X, Autobiography of Malcolm X, 74. See also Angelou, 1 Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 215. On the rise of female-headed households during the war, see U.S. Dept. of Labor, “Handbook of Facts on Women Workers,” 24.

33 “It was”: quoted in White, “‘Eight Dollars a Day and Working in the Shade’” in Taylor and Moore, eds., African American Women Confront the West, 279; Faulkner and others, When I Was Comin’ Up, 109; Mack, man, and wife quoted in Frank, Ziebarth, and Field, Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, 55-56, 66, 68; Reagon, “World War II Reflected in Black Music,” 181, 183.

34 “We the people . . . mixing”: quoted in Williams, The Politics of Public Housing, 61.

35 “We do not”: quoted in Cohen, Consumer’s Republic, 92 (see also pp. 83-86); Lemke-Santangelo, Abiding Courage.

36 Hartmann, Home Front and Beyond, 84-85; Clive, “Women Workers in World War II,” 58- 66; Chafe, The American Woman, 159-172; Allen quoted in Frank, Ziebarth, and Field, Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, 68. The Hackshaw essay is entitled “What My Job Means to Me,” 52-53. See also interview with Massie Eberhardt, BWOHP, 2, 31.

37 Bullock, “An Analysis of Cases of Negro Working Mothers.”

38 Interview with Frankie V. Adams, BWOHP, 11-12; Hartmann, “Women’s Organizations During World War II” in Kelley, ed., Woman’s Being, Woman’s Place, 313-333; Neely, “Women of Philadelphia and Their Activities,” 150-152; White, Too Heavy a Load, 56-60.

39 Baker, “Developing Community Leadership,” in Lerner, ed., Black Women, 346.

40 Quotes from Marjorie McKenzie, “Against the Lean Years,” Aframerican Woman’s Journal 3 (Summer 1943):7, and Frank, Ziebarth, and Field, Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, 95. See also Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, 295-299; Tobias and Anderson, “What Really Happened to Rosie the Riveter?”; Anderson, “Last Hired, First Fired,” 91, 95; U.S. Dept. of Labor, “Changes in Women’s Occupations, 1940-1950”; Pidgeon, “Women Workers and Recent Economic Change.”

41 “I like”: Denby, Indignant Heart, 142-144; Shockley, “We, Too, Are Americans,” 149. See also ibid., 137-169.

42 Testimony of Josephine McCloudy, UAW Fair Practices Department Appeal, January 31, 1947, Box 11, Folder 9, and William Oliver, Director UAW Fair Practices Department to Ralph Urban, President Local 190, February 6, 1947, Box 11, Folder 9, Emil Mazey Collection, ALUA; Nancy Gabin to the author, January 24, 1983. For the government researcher’s report, see Bedell, “Employment and Income of Negro Workers,” 596. See also Harris, Harder We Run, 125, 130; Newman and others, Protest, Politics, and Prosperity, 32-70, 259; Johnson and Valien, “The Status of Negro Labor,” in Wame and others, eds., Labor in Postwar America, 553-571; Shockley, “We, Too, Are Americans ,” 149.

43 “I could”: quoted in “Only 1 in 73 Former Maids Returning to New York Kitchens,” Christian Science Monitor, Oct. 8, 1946; Goldstein, “The Changing Occupational Structure”; “I have always . . . alternative”: Post clipping in Household Employment, Domestic Service—Postwar U.S.—1945, Box 1719, Women’s Bureau Collection, Record Group 86, National Archives, Washington, D.C. (hereafter WB Collection).

44 U.S. Dept. of Labor, “1954 Handbook on Women Workers.” The number of women in domestic service decreased by one-third from 1940 to 1950; see U.S. Dept. of Labor, “Changes in Women’s Occupations, 1940-1950,” 61.

45 Ackies quoted in Jacobson, “Ex-Domestics Prefer New Factory Jobs,” typescript dated September 9, 1945, in Correspondence, Household (Domestic File), 1945, Box 923; Weaver, “Former Domestics Slow to Return to Kitchen Work,” Baltimore Afro-American, September 8, 1945; “Domestic Service, Too, Has Its Labor Problem,” Buffalo Courier-Express, October 14, 1945 in Correspondence, Household (Domestic File), 1945, Box 923; “New York Domestic Workers Average $35 Weekly in ’46,” Chicago Defender in Household Employment—Domestic Workers Folder: Household Employment Clippings, 1947, Box 1717, WB Collection.

46 Mary V. Robinson to Frieda S. Miller, December 23, 1944, WB Collection.

47 Household Employment Report, December 22, 1946, typescript, 5, 10, in Correspondence, Household (Domestic File) Folder: Correspondence 1947, Box 923, WB Collection. The Family Circle article is in Household Employment—Domestic Workers Folder: Domestic Service Postwar U.S. Magazine article, Box 1717. See other articles in this file, including “It’s Getting to be a Maid’s World!” New York Daily News (March 16, 1946).

48 “Better Trained Domestics Aim of 200 Negroes,” AP story, December 26, 1945, in Household Employment Domestic Service Postwar U.S. 1945, Box 1719; U.S. Dept. of Labor, “Community Household Employment Programs.”

49 Bea Rivers, Helen Satterwhite, Oneida Harris, and Jewell Prieleau quoted in Dill, “Across the Barriers of Race and Class,” 69, 96, 104, 106, 149, 163. These are not the real names of the interviewees. See also the interviews of black domestics in Hamburger, A Stranger in the House.

50 Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis; Cohen, Consumer’s Republic, 158; Shockley, “We, Too, Are Americans,” 137-169; Williams, Politics of Public Housing; Jones, American Work, 355-360.

51 “I got”: White, “‘Eight Dollars a Day and Working in the Shade,’” in Taylor and Moore, eds., African American Women Confront the West, 281.

52 Johnson and Campbell, Black Migration, 114-151; White, “‘Eight Dollars a Day and Working in the Shade,’” in Taylor and Moore, eds., African American Women Confront the West, 277.

53 Kirby, “The Transformation of Southern Plantations”; Melman, “An Industrial Revolution in the Cotton South”; U.S. Dept. of Labor, “1954 Handbook on Women Workers,” 19.

54 “Going to Live Like My Father Lived,” in Faulkner and others, When I Was Camin’ Up, 135. See also Kirby, “Transformation of Southern Plantations,” 272; Shofner, “The Legacy of Racial Slavery”; Daniel, The Shadow of Slavery, 170-192.

55 Price, Changing Characteristics of the Negro Population, 113. See also U.S. Dept. of Labor, “Handbook of Facts on Women Workers” (1948), 22. In 1946 the average year’s earnings for white men amounted to $2,223; nonwhite men, $1,367; white women, $1,142; and nonwhite women, $497.

56 Berman, Politics of Civil Rights, 24-28, 32-37; Sitkoff, “Harry Truman and the Election of 1948.” On the segmentation of workers by sex and race during the postwar period, see Gordon, Edwards, and Reich, Segmented Work, Divided Workers, 204-210.

57 Lieberson, A Piece of the Pie, 239-252; Wallace, Black Women in the Labor Force, 44; Oppenheimer, The Female Labor Force, 78-79.

58 Knupfer, Chicago Renaissance, 119; Women quoted in Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 24-25.

59 Farley, Growth of the Black Population, 76-100; Cutright, “Components of Change in the Number of Female Family Heads.”

60 Kunzel, “White Neurosis, Black Pathology,” in Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver, 304-306; Mittelstadt, From Welfare to Workfare, 172; Patterson, “Poverty and Welfare in America,” in Bremner and Reichard, eds., Reshaping America, 193-221; Bell, Aid to Dependent Children; Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, 147-180, 189-198.

61 Caute, The Great Fear; Levenstein, Communism, Anticommunism, and the CIO.

62 Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home; Foner, Organized Labor, 275-292; Marshall, Labor in the South, 246-269.

63 Flowers, “Why I Need a Pay Raise” (article in FTA News, January 15, 1947), and “Tobacco Workers Honor Fighting Union Leader” (article in Union Voice, June 3, 1951), in Lerner, ed., Black Women, 267, 273; Foner, Organized Labor, 282; Korstad and Lichtenstein, “Opportunities Found and Lost,” in Arnesen, ed., The Black Worker.

64 Cooper, “A Rank and File Unionist Speaks” (article in National Guardian, September 26, 1949), in Lerner, ed., Black Women, 268. Foner, Organized Labor, 281-282.

65 Smith, “Black Workers and Unions” (from “Final Proceedings of the 9th Constitutional Convention of the CIO,” October 15, 1947), in Lerner, ed., Black Women, 269-271.

66 Rice, “It Takes a While,” in Lerner, ed., Black Women, 277, 279, 280, 281.

67 Ibid., 281; Svend Godfredsen, “Young Chicago Girl a CIO Union Leader,” 104-105, 120.

68 “leftist”: quoted in Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, 109. This account is taken from Foner, Organized Labor, which contains the only published history of the NNLC (pp. 293-311). See also Hill, “The AFL-CIO and the Black Worker.”

69 Chafe, “Civil Rights Revolution,” 68, 72; Aptheker, “The Matriarchal Image” in Woman’s Legacy, 148-149; Meier and Rudwick, CORE, 33-40.

70 Dittmer, Local People; Chafe, “Civil Rights Revolution,” 96-97.

71 Dougherty, “‘That’s When We Were Marching for Jobs,’” 128; Carolyn Reed in Hamburger, Stranger in the House, 154.

72 Friedan, Feminine Mystique, 28, 45, 58.

73 Ibid., 60; Rupp, “Survival of American Feminism,” in Bremner and Reichard, eds., Reshaping America. For a collection of documents related to antifeminist ideology during this period, see Lynn, ed., Women’s Liberation in the Twentieth Century, 55-82. On the growing number of white wives and mothers in the labor force in the postwar era, see Matthaei, An Economic History of Women in America , 235-255; Kennedy, If All We Did Was to Weep, 183-219; Harris, Out to Work, 300-315.

74 Cain, Married Women in the Labor Force; Ostlund, “Occupational Choice Patterns of Negro College Women.”

75 Daniel, Black Journals, 159-183; Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century, 65-66. Quoted articles from Ebony: “The NAACP,” August 1946, 35; “Two Years after Roosevelt,” April 1947, 36; “The Rise and Fall of Uncle Tom,” December 1946, 34.

76 Quoted articles from Ebony: April 1946, 19; October 1946, 26; December 1953, 49; June 1947, 4.

77 For representative covers, see Ebony, July and November 1951. The article on women leaders is in July 1949, 17, 23.

78 Ebony, March 1947, 36.

79 Ebony, May 1953, 78. See, for example, “Lady Lifeguard,” July 1948, 19; “Television Makeup Lady,” February 1949, 27; “Lady Boxer,” March 1949, 30; “Lady Cops,” September 1954, 26; “Lady Lawyers,” August 1947, 19; “Lady Cobbler,” March 1953, 5; “Harlem’s Lady Wholesaler,” January 1955, 53. The last story, on Louise Varona, who managed a food distribution business that grossed $200,000 annually, noted that she had encountered several prospective white buyers but rejected their offers: “‘I am of Harlem,’ she says, ‘and intend to stay here. . . . Negroes need to own their own businesses, and I for one intend to keep mine.’” See also “Labor Leaders,” February 1947, 15, for mention of Louise Armstrong, an officer in her local of the United Steelworkers of America (CIO) in Chicago; the thirty-four-year-old mother had recently led a successful strike which won a union shop contract and a wage increase.

80 Ebony, January 1951, 71, 74; January 1954, 68-69. See also “Husband and Wife Teams: Couples Following Same Professions Find Happiness, Success,” Ebony, January 1954, 68.

81 Ebony, November 1949, 52; April 1952, 64. One of the other maids featured was Margaret W. Ware, “Nursemaid to the [Fultz] Quadruplets,” June 1948, 36.

82 “The Powells,” Ebony, May 1946, 36; “At Home with Marian Anderson,” February 1954, 52; “Lena Horne Begins a New Movie,” March 1946, 20. According to Friedan, “When you wrote about an actress for a [white] woman’s magazine, you wrote about her as a housewife. You never showed her doing or enjoying her work as an actress, unless she eventually paid for it by losing her husband or her child or otherwise admitting failure as a woman.” Feminine Mystique, 47.

83 Ebony, March 1946, 20. See, for example, “Ruby Hill,” May 1946, 15; “Ebony’s Girls: Editors Pick Pinup Favorites from Issues of the Past Five Years,” November 1950, 23; “New Beauties Versus Old,” March 1954, 54 (“Lena Horne has become the criterion by which modem Negro beauties are judged”).

84 “Mildred Pierce,” Ebony, January 1946, 30; “Movie Maids,” August 1948, 56; “The Member of the Wedding,” December 1952, 35; “Hollywood Debut for Pearl Bailey,” April 1947, 38; “Movie Maids: Eight New Hollywood Films . . . ,” August 1948, 56; “Juanita Hall,” July 1950, 29; “Joyce Bryant,” March 1951, 61; “Josephine Baker Comes Home Again: She Finally Achieves Stardom That Long Eluded Her in Native Land,” May 1951, 74. See also “Cass Timberlane: Movies Call Negro Maid ‘Mrs.’ For First Time,” November 1947, 23.

85 “Is Jazz Going Highbrow?: Hot Pianist Dorothy Donegan is Newest Convert to the Classics,” Ebony, July 1946, 19.

86 Bethune, “My Secret Talks With FDR,” Ebony, April 1949, 43, and “My Last Will and Testament: Mary McLeod Bethune Dictated Legacy to Her People,” August 1955, 69; “Women Leaders,” July 1949, 21; “Edith Sampson Goes to Austria,” October 1951, 82. On her visit to Austria, Sampson told her hosts “that one of the bitter things about a lot of discrimination in America is that it often comes from the children of Europeans who immigrated to America to find the democracy and freedom which they in turn want to deny to others.”

87 Hersh, The Slavery of Sex; Chafe, Women and Equality.

CHAPTER 8

1 Reagon, “My Black Mothers and Sisters.”

2 Piven and Cloward, Poor People’s Movements, 181-263; Oberschall, Social Conflict and Social Movements, 205-230; Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality; “a very simple”: Canterow and O’Malley, “Ella Baker: Organizing for Civil Rights,” in Canterow, ed., Moving the Mountain, 82-83. For overviews, see Crawford, Rouse, and Woods., eds. Women in the Civil Rights Movement; Robnett, How Long? How Long?; Ling and Monteith, eds., Gender and the Civil Rights Movement; Collier-Thomas and Franklin, eds., Sisters in the Struggle.

3 Feldstein, “‘I Wanted the Whole World to See,” in Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver, 263- 303; Wilson, When Work Disappears; Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic, 372-383; Green, Battling the Plantation Mentality, 212.

4 Baxter and Lansing, Women and Politics, 78, 73-112. See also Prestage, “Political Behavior of American Black Women” in Rodgers-Rose, ed., The Black Woman, 233-245; Boyd, “Black Women’s Gains Present Political Puzzle,” New York Times, January 17, 1984.

5 McGuire, “‘It Was Like all of Us Had Been Raped’”; McAdoo, “Patterns of Upward Mobility in Black Families,” in McAdoo, ed., Black Families, 158; Freeman, Black Elite; Wilson, When Work Disappears; McLean, Freedom Is Not Enough.

6 These census data are conveniently summarized in Matney and Johnson, “America’s Black Population”; “supersexist”: Tillmon, “Welfare Is a Women’s Issue,” in Perrucci and Targ, eds., Marriage and the Family, 109.

7 Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement”; McLean, Freedom is Not Enough; Interviews with E. D. Nixon, Virginia Durr, and Johnny Carr conducted by Gardner; “Montgomery Bus Boycott,” and interview with Rosa Parks by Stokes Brown; Gibson Robinson, Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It.

8 See, for example, the interviews with Montgomery black leaders in Raines, My Soul Is Rested, 37-74. See also King Jr., Why We Can’t Wait, 99.

9 Hoose, Claudette Colvin. In her autobiography, Gibson Robinson recounts a similarly humiliating encounter with a white bus driver.

10 White, Too Heavy a Load, 193; Green, Battling the Plantation Mentality, 276. On SCLC, see Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound; on CORE, Meier and Rudwick, CORE; on SNCC, Carson, In Struggle , and Sellers, The River of No Return. See also Honey, Going Down Jericho Road, and Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights.

11 Green, Battling the Plantation Mentality, 210-213; Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights; Sokol, There Goes My Everything.

12 Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name, 78.

13 Charles Sherrod, quoted in Carson, In Struggle, 75.

14 Garland, “Builders of a New South”; Sutherland, ed., Letters from Mississippi, 61. See also Belfrage, Freedom Summer, 76; Sugarman, Stranger at the Gates, 54-55; Evans, Personal Politics, 51, 75, 76; Giddings, When and Where I Enter, 261-276.

15 Sugarman, Stranger at the Gates, 78; Webb and Nelson, Selma, 85. On demographic and migration patterns, see Johnson and Campbell, Black Migration in America, 101-151.

16 Belfrage, Freedom Summer, 52-53; Sugarman, Stranger at the Gates, 120; Webb and Nelson, Selma, 114, 142.

17 Sessions and Thrasher, “A New Day Begun,” interview with John Lewis; Tracy, Thrasher, and Sessions, “To Be Prophetic,” 42.

18 Reagon, “We Became Visible, Our Image Was Enlarged,” 5; Pfister, “Twenty Years and Still Marching,”; Carson, In Struggle, 56-63; Cluster, “The Borning Struggle” (interviews with John Lewis, Jean Smith, and Bernice Reagon) in They Should Have Served that Cup of Coffee, 8-30; Webb and Nelson, Selma, 55; Garland, “Builders of a New South,” 27.

19 Belfrage, Freedom Summer, 74; Wigginton and Thrasher, “To Make the World We Want,” 27; Sessions and Thrasher, “A New Day Begun,” 24; Sugarman, Stranger at the Gates, 78; interview with Rev. Joseph E. Lowery in Raines, My Soul Is Rested, 66-70. See also the introduction to Sugarman, Stranger at the Gates, by Fannie Lou Hamer.

20 Jones quoted in Mars, Witness in Philadelphia, 207; Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound.

21 Grant, “Black Women and the Church,” in Hull, Scott, and Smith, eds., All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, 141-152; “as a woman”: Baker, “Developing Community Leadership,” in Lerner, ed., Black Women, 351; “Miss Baker tempered”: Mary King quoted in Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, 97; Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement; Bohannon, Freedom Cannot Rest; Dallard, Ella Baker. See also Cotton’s discussion of “A Woman’s Place” (in SCLC) in Raines, My Soul Is Rested, 432-434; Lewis and D’Orso, Walking with the Wind.

22 Evans, Personal Politics, 76-88, 233-240; Carson, In Struggle, 147-148; Cluster, “Borning Struggle” in They Should Have Served that Cup of Coffee.

23 Clark, Echo in My Soul; Bates, Long Shadow of Little Rock; Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi ; Cluster, “Borning Struggle” in They Should Have Served that Cup of Coffee; Patton, “Insurgent Memories.”

24 Canterow and O’Malley, “Ella Baker,” in Canterow, ed., Moving the Mountain, 53, 72; Kling, “Fannie Lou Hamer” in McAllister, ed., Reweaving the Web of Life, 106-112. The interview with Hamer is in Raines, My Soul Is Rested, 249-255. See also Garland, “Builders of a New South,” 27- 36; “Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.”

25 Raines, My Soul Is Rested, 253-254.

26 Bates, Long Shadow of Little Rock, 69-76; interview with Autherine Lucy Foster in Raines, My Soul Is Rested, 325-327; “Freedom Rides”; Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, 247; Garland, “Builders of a New South,” 36-37; Carson, In Struggle, 21. See also Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights, 100-103.

27 Reagon, “My Black Mothers and Sisters,” 91; Garland, “Builders of a New South,” 5; Charity, Davis, and Kinoy, “The Danville Movement”; Sugarman, Stranger at the Gates, 58, 120-121, 188-189; Gladney, “If It Was Anything for Justice”; “Greensboro Sit-ins,” 27.

28 Garland, “Builders of a New South,” 27. See Clark, Echo in My Soul, 161-162; “Mississippi Movement,” 40; Abubakari, “The Only Thing You Can Aspire To Is Nationhood,” in Lerner, ed., Black Women, 553-558; Steele quoted in Fager, Selma, 1965, 151, 155.

29 Sutherland, ed., Letters from Mississippi, 43, 46-47, 63, 122.

30 Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi, 24; Gladney, “If It Was Anything for Justice,” 19-23; Forman, Making of Black Revolutionaries, 117-119; Garland, “Builders of a New South,” 28. See also Canterow and O’Malley, “Ella Baker,” in Canterow, ed., Moving the Mountain, 55.

31 Killens, “We Refuse to Look at Ourselves Through the Eyes of White America,” in Meier and others, eds., Black Protest Thought, 424; Sugarman, Stranger at the Gates, 184; Sutherland, ed., Letters from Mississippi, 54, 208-209; Evans, Personal Politics, 51-53.

32 King, Why We Can’t Wait, 99; interview with Yancey Martin in Raines, My Soul Is Rested, 61; “We Have No Government,” in Grant, ed., Black Protest, 505; Lester, Look Out Whitey, 141; Sellers, River of No Return, 153; Stokely Carmichael, in Barbour, ed., The Black Power Revolt, 65.

33 Sugarman, Stranger at the Gates, 115; Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi, 300; Mars, Witness in Philadelphia, 207.

34 Forman, Making of Black Revolutionaries, 126; Cobb and McLaurin, “The Economy of Ruleville, Mississippi,” in Grant, ed., Black Protest, 473-474; Clark, Echo in My Soul, 112; Baker, “Freedom Village,” 20.

35 King, Why We Can’t Wait, 17; Belfrage, Freedom Summer, 114.

36 Interview with Franklin McCain in Raines, My Soul Is Rested, 77-78; Garland, “Builders of a New South,” 1; Mississippi woman quoted in Sutherland, ed., Letters from Mississippi, 60. See also Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi, 235, 246; Pfister, “Twenty Years Later and Still Marching,” 30; Carson, In Struggle, 117.

37 Robinson quoted in Gill, Beauty Shop Politics, 111-112.

38 Interviews with Virginia Durr and Lucretia Collins, and Anne Braden, “A View from the Fringes,” 15-19, 38, 68-74; Smith, Killers of the Dream; Webb and Nelson, Selma, 71; Forman, Making of Black Revolutionaries, 123-124; Belfrage, Freedom Summer, 77-78; Mars, Witness in Philadelphia , 87-89, 92-95, 97-111; Sokol, There Goes My Everything. For other examples of hostile female registrars, see Hearings Before the United States Commission on Civil Rights held in New Orleans, 59- 62.

39 Interview with Virginia Durr, Southern Exposure 9 (Spring 1981):18; Raines, “The Birmingham Bombing,” 12-13, 22-29.

40 Interview with Franklin McCain in Raines, My Soul Is Rested, 77; Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi, 29. See also Morrison, “What the Black Woman Thinks About Women’s Lib,” 15.

41 Green, Battling the Plantation Mentality; Honey, Going Down Jericho Road; “The Charleston Hospital Strike,” in Baxandall and others, eds., America’s Working Women, 361; Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement, 416; Joan Griffin quoted in interview by Jupiter, “Without Fear,” 66; Watriss, “It’s Something Inside You,” 81.

42 Dorothy Cotton interview in Raines, My Soul Is Rested, 434.

43 Green, “Discovering Hunger in America”; Duncan Lindsey, The Welfare of Children, 246; Milkis, Great Society and the High Tide of Liberalism.

44 Niemi Jr., “The Impact of Recent Civil Rights Laws”; Freeman, Black Elite; Matney and Johnson, “America’s Black Population”; U.S. Dept. of Labor, “Perspectives on Working Women,” 74.

45 Murray quoted in MacLean, Freedom is Not Enough, 121.

46 Anderson, “Equal Opportunity and Black Employment” in Wallace, ed., Equal Employment Opportunity and the AT&T Case, 170-200. See other articles in that volume, including Wallace, “Equal Employment Opportunity,” 253-268, and Bergmann and King, “Diagnosing Discrimination,” 49-110. See also Hacker, “Sex Stratification, Technology, and Organizational Change,” in Kahn-Hut and others, eds., Women and Work, 248-266. On the relationship between education and mean income, see U.S. Dept. of Commerce “Money Income in 1976 of Families and Persons in the United States,” 196, 201. Niemi, “Impact of Recent Civil Rights Laws,” provides data on the discrepancy between black men’s economic and occupational progress relative to white men on the one hand, and black women’s progress relative to white women on the other. An analysis of racial discrimination in the South is provided by Ray Marshall, “Black Employment in the South,” in Wallace and LaMond, eds., Women, Minorities, and Employment Discrimination, 57-81.

47 Campbell, “Black Executives and Corporate Stress,” 37; Allen, “Family Roles, Occupational Status, and Achievement,” 672; Gurin and Gaylord, “Educational and Occupational Goals of Men and Women at Black Colleges”; Epstein, “Positive Effects of the Multiple Negative”; Fields, “Factors Contributing to Nontraditional Career Choices of Black Female College Graduates”; Freeman, Black Elite. On the tracking of black female vocational high school students into “the lowest paying, least desirable, and most marginal work” in New York City, see Baker, “Women in Blue Collar and Service Occupations,” in Stromberg and Harkess, eds., Women Working, 339-376.

48 Lewis quoted in MacLean, Freedom is Not Enough, 81.

49 Sledge quoted in Conway, Rise Gonna Rise, 106-113. See also the description of the mill supervisor who was “rebish”—“Hateful to black people” (p. 104).

50 Apprentice quoted in Walshok, “Occupational Values and Family Roles,” in Feinstein, ed., Working Women and Families, 79; Tucker quoted in Dill, “Across the Barriers of Race and Class,” 130. See also Feldberg and Glenn, “Technology and Work Degradation,” in Machina Ex Dea, 59- 78. For histories of black women in blue collar jobs, see Walshok, Blue Collar Women, 128-132.

51 Joan Griffin quoted in Jupiter, “Without Fear,” 64. On black women workers in the public sector, see Wallace, Black Women in the Labor Force, 53-55; Freeman, Black Elite, 151-173.

52 Educational figures: U.S. Dept. of Commerce, “The Social and Economic Status of the Black Population in the United States,” 95; supportive families: Billingsley, Black Families in White America ; McAdoo, “Patterns of Upward Mobility in Black Families” in Black Families; Anderson, “Equal Opportunity and Black Employment” in Wallace, ed., Equal Employment Opportunity and the AT&T Case, 195; Sledge quoted in Conway, Rise Gonna Rise, 109; Green, Race on the Line, 211-212.

53 Woody, Black Women in the Workplace, 71-91; Green, Race on the Line, 217; McLean, Freedom is Not Enough, 79-80; Fosu, “Occupational Mobility of Black Women”; Donahue III and Heckman, “Continuous Versus Episodic Change”; Frederickson, “Four Decades of Change,” in Green, ed., Workers’ Struggles, Past and Present, 74; Heckman and Payner, “Determining the Impact of Federal Antidiscrimination Policy on the Economic Status of Blacks”; Jones, American Work, 337-369; Minchin, Hiring the Black Worker.

54 “enough white”: Green, Race on the Line, 213; Jones, American Work, 356-373; Brown quoted in Moore, Women in the Mines, 131.

55 “a bunch of”: Mittelstadt, From Welfare to Workfare, 142; Orleck, Storming Caesars Palace; “Vegas Protest Draws 1,000,” Washington Post, March 7, 1971.

56 “Because living”: Orleck, “I Got to Dreamin’: An Interview with Ruby Duncan,” in Jetter, Orleck and Taylor, eds., The Politics of Motherhood, 124; Kotz and Kotz, A Passion for Equality.

57 Mittelstadt, From Welfare to Workfare, 69; Childers, “A Spontaneous Welfare Rights Protest by Politically Inactive Mothers,” in Jetter, Orleck, and Taylor, eds., Politics of Motherhood, 100; Childers, Welfare Brat.

58 “Perspectives on Working Women,” 66, 74; Matney and Johnson, “America’s Black Population,” 11-15; Bell, “Why Participation Rates”; Douglas, “Black Working Women.” Landry and Jendrek, “The Employment of Wives in Middle-Class Black Families.” See also Bell, “Participation Rates”; Aldridge, “Black Women in the Economic Marketplace”; Beckett, “Working Wives”; Wallace, Black Women in the Labor Force; Almquist and Wehrle-Einhorn, “The Doubly Disadvantaged,” in Stromberg and Harkess, eds., Women Working, 63-88; Carroll, “Three’s a Crowd,” in Rossi and Calderwood, eds., Academic Women On the Move, 173-185; Lewis, “Response to Inequality.”

59 On black women’s attitudes toward wage labor and household work, see Gump, “A Comparative Analysis of Black and White Women’s Sex-Role Attitudes”; Malson, “Black Women’s Sex Role Integration and Behavior.”

60 Matney and Johnson, “America’s Black Population,” 16-20; Click, “A Demographic Picture of Black Families,” in McAdoo, ed., Black Families, 106-126; McEaddy, “Women Who Head Families”; Johnson, “Women Who Head Families.” See also Nielsen and Endo, “Marital Status and Socioeconomic Status.”

61 Matney and Johnson, “America’s Black Population,” 9, 20; Niemi, “Impact of Recent Civil Rights Laws”; Bernard, Marriage and the Family Among Negroes, 21; Jackson, “But Where are the Men?”; Guttentag and Secord, “Sex Roles and Family Among Black Americans,” Too Many Women?, 199-230; Wallace, Pathways to Work.

62 “unifying . . . another”: quoted in McLean, Freedom Is Not Enough, 150; Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, 366; White, Too Heavy a Load, 232; Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, 183-348, 350-366; Levitan, “Work and Welfare in the 1970s”; West, National Welfare Rights Movement, 231; Hertz, “The Politics of the Welfare Mothers Movement”; Kotz and Kotz, A Passion for Equality.

63 West, National Welfare Rights Movement, 257; Tillmon, “Welfare Is a Women’s Issue,” in Perrucci and Targ, eds., Marriage and the Family, 109, 111, 115; U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, “Women and Poverty,” 19; Barbara Dugan quoted in Elman, The Poorhouse State, 119; Cohen, Consumer’s Republic, 378-380. See also Valentine, “Women on Welfare,” and Gilkes, “From Slavery to Social Welfare” in Swerdlow and Lessinger, eds., Class, Race, and Sex, 276-300; Carol Glassman, “Women and the Welfare System,” in Morgan, ed., Sisterhood is Powerful, 102-115.

64 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, “Women and Poverty,” 26-33; Smith and others, “WIN, Work, and Welfare”; Pearce, “Women, Work, and Welfare,” in Feinstein, ed., Working Women and Families, 103-124; Levitan, “Work and Welfare in the 1970s,” 71-97.

65 Patricia Cayo Sexton, “Women and Work,” United States Department of Labor R&D Monograph (1977), 51; Levitan, “Work and Welfare in the 1970s”; Mary Fish, “Income Inequality and Employment,” United States Department of Labor R&D Monograph (1978). See also Molt, “Racial Differences in Female Labor Force Participation,” in Feinstein, ed., Working Women and Families, 85-101.

66 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, “Women and Poverty,” 18; Elman, Poorhouse State, 18-19; Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, 285-348; Newman and others, Protest, Politics, and Prosperity , 261-262.

67 Stack, All Our Kin, 32-44. See also Stack, “The Kindred of Viola Jackson,” in Whitten and Szwed, eds., Afro-American Anthropology, 303-312; Manns, “Support Systems of Significant Others in Black Families,” in McAdoo, ed., Black Families, 238-251; Hill, The Strengths of Black Families; Franklin, “Black Family Life-Styles,” in Swerdlow and Lessinger, eds., Class, Race, and Sex, 189- 199.

68 Interview with Charleszetta Waddles, BWOHP, 3, 10.

69 Gilkes, “Holding Back the Ocean With a Broom,” in Rodgers-Rose, ed., The Black Woman, 217-232; Long and Hansen, “Trends in Return Migration to the South”; Sawers and Tabb, eds., Sunbelt/Snowbelt. According to Robert B. Hill, “These reverse migration patterns to the South strongly contradict the popular misconception that the primary reason blacks migrated to the North was to get welfare and not jobs.” Hill, “The Economic Status of Black Families,” 26; Kuttner, “The Declining Middle,” 60.

70 Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, 202, 395, 449-450, 493; “The social worker”: ibid., 394.

71 Ibid., 395; Dougherty, “‘That’s When We Were Marching for Jobs,’” 121-141.

72 Boesal and Rossi, eds., Cities Under Siege; Geschwender, “Civil Rights Protest and Riots”; National Advisory Commission, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders; Oberschall, Social Conflict and Social Movements, 212; Jackson, Soledad Brother, 167.

73 “hastily”: Current quoted in Trausch and Jordan, “The March: Assessing Gains Since ’63,” The Boston Globe, August 27, 1983; “Biologically”: Wilkins quoted in McLean, Freedom Is Not Enough, 122-123; White, Too Heavy a Load, 221.

74 Combahee River Collective, “Black Feminist Statement,” in Hull, Scott, and Smith, eds., All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, 19; Canaan, “Brownness,” in Moraga and Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back, 236; Harris, “From the Kennedy Commission to the Combahee Collective,” in Collier-Thomas and Franklin, eds., Sisters in the Struggle.

75 “with Fannie Lou Hamer”: in Breitman, ed., Malcolm X Speaks, 117, 124. See also “‘Ironies of the Saint’: Malcolm X, Black Women, and the Price of Protection,” in Collier-Thomas and Franklin, eds., Sisters in the Struggle.

76 Evans, Personal Politics, 81; Carson, In Struggle, 137, 163, 191, 198, 227; Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 26; “Black Power Program,” in Meier, Rudwick, and Broderick, eds., Black Protest Thought, 506; Brown, Die Nigger Die! 26-27, 42. See also Matthews, “‘No One Ever Asks What a Man’s Role in the Revolution Is,’” in Collier-Thomas and Franklin, eds., Sisters in the Struggle. For a concise statement defining the goals of the Black Power movement, see Carmichael and Hamilton, Black Power.