The domestic worker has been the kind of worker that has been overlooked and ignored—what I refer to as an invisible worker.
—GERALDINE ROBERTS
One December evening in 1955, Dorothy Bolden was sitting in her two-story bungalow in Vine City, an all-black section of Atlanta, watching television as she sewed clothes for her children, when she learned of Rosa Parks’s ordeal in Montgomery, Alabama. Parks’s story resonated deeply with Bolden, who like many African American domestics was often mistreated on her daily bus ride, a fact that compounded the disrespect she experienced in the workplace. As Bolden later recalled in an interview, “There had been some hard days with us women riding the buses trying to get to the houses to clean them up, work. . . . Georgia Tech students, Emory students would stand over you and take their elbow and hit you in the head. You would get up and move and then, he got the seat ’cause you didn’t want him bopping your head. . . . You would just get up and move and get on farther back. You would be packed back there, but you’d squeeze in there some kinda way.”1
Like other black working-class women, domestic workers relied heavily on public transportation to get to and from their places of employment. The journey home could be made more difficult if the domestic worker carried a “tote pan” containing leftover food, which employers sometimes gave workers to supplement their meager wages. While the offering might help feed the families of domestic workers, carrying it on a crowded bus was no easy task. “If you bring a pan home sometimes, [they] would knock you down, knock the pan out of your hand with food in it.”2
Bolden was riveted as she watched the footage of Parks that night. In her mind, Parks’s act was powerfully courageous. Drawing on a wellspring of empathy, strongly identifying with the yearning for freedom that had inspired such an act, Bolden began speaking to Parks: “I was telling her to sit there. I know she couldn’t hear me, but I said ‘sit on down honey, don’t move. You tired, I know you is.’”3 Ultimately, Parks’s protest and arrest galvanized civil rights activists and sparked the yearlong Montgomery bus boycott. A turning point in civil rights history, Parks’s act and the resilience of the mostly working-class participants of the Montgomery boycott would have a lasting impact on Bolden.
Inspired by Rosa Parks, Bolden became involved in civil rights activism in Atlanta, going on to form the Atlanta-based National Domestic Workers Union of America (NDWUA), which was part of a larger movement for domestic workers’ rights. NDWUA would become one of the largest and most active local domestic workers’ rights groups. It pioneered strategies of organizing in public spaces, worked to enhance the individual and collective power of household workers, and sought to remake the public image of domestic workers.
Bolden wasn’t alone—the civil rights movement nurtured, trained, and inspired a generation of African American women domestic workers who mobilized to reform household labor. Civil rights discourse tended to focus on voting and educational access, but poverty and job discrimination were widespread. For domestic-worker activists, civil and economic rights were inextricably linked. Many believed that economic security was the foundation upon which black freedom should be built. In advocating for domestic workers, activists and reformers would address both racial inequality and poverty.
The domestic workers’ rights movement brought a new dimension to black working-class struggles. This was not a struggle for equal opportunity or individual access to previously closed occupations, but a broader campaign for economic rights for African American domestic workers and for a new definition of labor. Poor black women who worked as domestics were often considered outside the boundaries of “labor.” Excluded from most labor law protections, such as minimum wage and the right to organize and bargain collectively, domestic work was, in some ways, not considered “real work,” because of its location in the home, the low status of women of color, and the job’s association with women’s unpaid household labor. Because of this history, domestic workers were considered by some to be “unorganizable.”4 The occupation had few ties to unions or mainstream labor. Consequently, when domestic workers began to mobilize, they found their most reliable allies among civil rights, black power, and women’s organizations. They developed an alternative class and gender model for civil rights leadership by highlighting the voices and experiences of poor black women. Domestic workers in the 1960s and 1970s brought attention to undervalued household and reproductive labor, claimed their rights as workers, and in the process redefined the very meaning of work.5
Dorothy Bolden was born in 1920 in Atlanta to Raymond Bolden and Georgia Mae Patterson.6 Her family lived in Vine City, where her father worked as a chauffeur and her mother as a maid and washerwoman.7 As a child, Dorothy and her older brother helped their mother by picking up other households’ dirty laundry in a wagon and returning it clean and pressed after her mother washed it. Dorothy was very close to her grandparents, who often brought canned goods, bacon, eggs, and ham to the family when food was scarce. Despite her parents’ straitened circumstances, she had fond memories of childhood, and recalled a community filled with love and support, and a collective spirit—especially around child rearing and food. “They looked out for each other and looked out for the children. You didn’t have no problem with people taking care of your children. . . . Everybody looked after everybody’s child. When they feed one child, they feed all.”8
An accident when she was three years old left Dorothy with poor eyesight that would plague her throughout her life. Despite her impaired vision, Dorothy began working as a domestic at the age of nine to help support her family. After attending a split-day session at school that ended at noon, she babysat, washed diapers, and did light cleaning for a Jewish family. Dorothy dropped out of Booker T. Washington High School in the eleventh grade and worked for another family from 8:00 a.m. until after dinner, earning three dollars a week.9
Like many African Americans who came of age during the Great Migration of the 1930s and 1940s, Bolden was curious about the world and eager to escape the South.10 The relentless violence, limited economic opportunities, and unforgiving day-to-day life under Jim Crow, combined with restrictions on European immigration and the wartime expansion of the economy, prompted six million African Americans and many poor whites to travel North.11 Intrigued by stories of personal freedom and economic advancement, Bolden, too, wanted to see the so-called promised land. Through her job as a domestic, she met white northerners who were visiting the South and, impressed with her work, agreed to pay her fare and a higher salary to come work for them.12 For Bolden, the offer was an opportunity to travel and explore the country. She remembered her first journey, riding a train to Chicago at the age of seventeen. “They can tell when you are from the South ’cause you are scared to get on the train, you know, you are waiting for your turn. When somebody is being polite to you, you are kinda scared to accept it ’cause from being down South. . . . Southern people don’t treat you that way.”13
As a young adult, both in Atlanta and elsewhere, Dorothy held various jobs but always returned to domestic work. For a few years she attended a school for dress designers in Chicago, but was forced to drop out because of her poor eyesight.14 During the war, she worked in the Sears, Roebuck mailroom and for four years at National Linen Service. Bolden recalled the struggle for unionization at the latter company: “I felt very good after we heard the presentations they made to us about how much we could be getting and how it could go up and up, and it did go up and up.”15 It’s not clear if Bolden was directly involved in the unionization effort, but it’s safe to assume that what she witnessed firsthand demonstrated to her the power of collective organizing. After traveling to Illinois, North Carolina, New York, Virginia, Michigan, and Alabama, she returned to Atlanta and started working at the railway. It was there that she met Abraham Thompson, a fellow railroad employee. They married in 1944, settled in Atlanta, and together had nine children, three of whom died. Shortly after she married, she began doing household work again as a live-in, earning eighteen dollars a week. Bolden stayed home when her children were young, but returned to work when they got older.16
Atlanta was a center of civil rights activity in the postwar period. Just as the city served as the air and rail transportation hub for the Southeast region, it also provided the connective tissue for the civil rights movement, linking together activists throughout the South. Atlanta’s historically black colleges and universities and substantial black middle-class population produced a group of civil rights leaders with both a vested interest in toppling segregation and the skills and resources that poorer, less educated black southerners did not have. The city was the base of operations for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr. King, who, in 1960, moved back to Atlanta to co-pastor with his father at Ebenezer Baptist Church. Ella Baker, longtime civil rights activist and intellectual mentor for students in SNCC, also moved to Atlanta in 1958 to serve as the first executive director of SCLC.17
During the 1960s, former mayor William Hartsfield deemed Atlanta “the city too busy to hate”—helping to foster an image of a progressive metropolis distinct from other southern cities. In some ways, Atlanta seemed worlds apart from places like Birmingham, Alabama, where notorious police chief Bull Connor turned water hoses on schoolchildren, or Albany, Georgia, where civil rights demonstrators were arrested en masse. Atlanta initiated gradual and peaceful desegregation of public schools, and city leaders, at least publicly, expressed support for equal accommodations, even if behind the scenes they attempted to stymie the efforts of more militant civil rights activists. Despite the veneer of civility, Atlanta saw its share of civil rights showdowns and urban unrest. In the spring of 1960, black students in Atlanta, like thousands of other students throughout the South that year, initiated sit-ins at segregated lunch counters. Their direct-action tactics sparked a new, more militant phase in the black freedom movement, as young activists, unwilling to wait for legal decisions or institutional sanction for their demands, insisted on an immediate end to racial segregation, a goal for which they were willing to get arrested. Although a compromise between the city and black leaders was worked out without the students’ consent, the sit-ins led to complete desegregation of lunch counters by the fall of 1961. But students in Atlanta had an expansive notion of what their struggle was about, and eradicating Jim Crow was only part of their agenda. Broadly framing their struggle as one of “human rights,” they incorporated the goals of ending poverty and empowering the community, and in this they had many allies in the city.18 Throughout the 1970s, Atlanta had a vibrant cadre of black power and neighborhood activists who addressed issues from voting rights to public education to welfare rights.19 Domestic-worker organizing was one component of this range of political mobilization.
Bolden’s early attempts to organize workers wasn’t unprecedented, and in fact was informed by a long history of domestic-worker organizing in Atlanta. In July 1881, twenty African American laundresses formed a “Washing Society” and wrote an open letter to the mayor demanding higher wages. Eventually three thousand women went on strike for better wages and more autonomy. They garnered citywide support from black churches, mutual aid societies, and fraternal organizations. The strike illustrates the ways in which laundresses, although employed individually, were able to utilize collective workspaces to form an association and organize a citywide demonstration. Although short-lived and presumably unsuccessful, the 1881 strike is a powerful example of black women household workers organizing to claim their rights.20 During World War II there was renewed interest in the plight of domestic workers. Ruby Blackburn, a former domestic, organized the Negro Cultural League in Atlanta to train domestic workers and help them find employment. The league took as its motto “A fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.” Under the leadership of Blackburn, domestic workers in Atlanta participated in the voter-registration drive in 1946.21
Bolden would build on this history of organizing black household workers in the context of the civil rights activity swirling around her both in Atlanta and across the United States. “Civil rights was a plate of food to us,” she recalled. “It fed our soul. It strengthened our bodies. Built our minds. It was everything to us.”22 This sentiment was echoed by one of the cofounders of the NDWUA, Louise Bradley, who observed that the movement “gave these people the motivation to speak out.”23 Bolden’s close contact with civil rights leaders fueled her political activism. Martin Luther King Jr. lived in Bolden’s Vine City neighborhood, and she had periodic encounters with him. “I marched with Dr. King every time he came to town,” she stated. “I went to rallies, I was the most vocal person there.”24
A longtime community leader, Bolden was recognized and respected as someone who knew every inch of her working-class neighborhood. Vine City produced some of Atlanta’s most important politicians, including Maynard Jackson, who would become the first black mayor of Atlanta in 1974. Jackson, in fact, attended several early meetings of NDWUA and credited the support of maids in Vine City with his electoral success.25 Bolden worked most closely with the SNCC, which espoused a philosophy of long-term organizing rather than short-term mobilizing and aimed to establish sustained relationships with community members, build institutions, and empower the poor.26 SNCC had reached out to community leaders such as Dorothy Bolden.27 “Dr. King sent SNCC and all the rest of them: ‘Look Ms. Bolden up down there, she’ll help you.’”28 Julian Bond, a founding member of SNCC who subsequently served multiple terms in the Georgia legislature, described Bolden as a neighborhood activist with “good connections” and sought her help in his 1965 campaign for the state House of Representatives.29 His campaign employed a “new kind of politics” that called attention to grassroots political engagement and housing, sanitation, welfare, and medical care for the poor, as well as a minimum wage for domestic workers. In February 1966 SNCC formally launched its short-lived Atlanta Project to emphasize grassroots urban organizing. Although SNCC’s shift to black power later that year diminished its attention to local organizing, the group nevertheless had a lasting impact locally and nationally. Bolden truly appreciated the community organizing that SNCC engaged in: “I don’t think anybody really knew what [SNCC] meant to low-income people.”30
Bolden’s earliest civil rights activism was a campaign to ensure equal educational access for black children. Although Atlanta had formally desegregated public schools in 1961, inequality persisted. In 1964, as one of her daughters was about to begin eighth grade at Booker T. Washington High School, the district, because of overcrowding, decided to transfer seventh- and eighth-grade students to Central Junior High School, where they would be assigned to a condemned building. Along with other community members and SNCC students, Bolden opposed overcrowded conditions and inadequate facilities, and fought the plan to bus children downtown, demanding that the city build another neighborhood school. According to Bolden, participation of the SNCC students “was excellent. They helped me boycott the school board. We stayed up all night some nights. I would go home so sleepy, then go on to work.”31 As a result of their efforts and Bolden’s tenacity, six years later, John F. Kennedy Middle School opened in Vine City.32
Although equal access to education was important to her, Bolden’s overwhelming passion was for organizing domestic workers. Bolden had worked for several different white families in Atlanta, earning between fifty and sixty dollars a week, and had her share of run-ins with employers. In one case, in early 1940, she was working for a woman in the Peachtree area of Atlanta. After her day’s work was done and she was ready to leave, her employer ordered her to wash the dishes. Bolden refused and walked out. When she was several blocks from the house, the police picked her up and took her to the county jail “because I had talked back to a white woman.”33 By the time she formed NDWUA she had worked her way up to what she called a “home manager,” supervising other employees for ninety dollars a week.34
“There used to be so many hardships, being a maid. Children disrespecting you, mother disrespecting you. You were nursing the children and they were being taught the maid wasn’t as good as you and she’s not your mother so you don’t have to do so-and-so, and they would call you nigger. And we had to take all that stuff. That was the time, you know, blacks were humble, didn’t have anything to say. Now they have more pride in themselves.”35
Despite toiling for years as a domestic, Bolden deeply valued her work. “I love this work. I really love this work,” she stated in one interview.36 “You were doing the cooking, the cleaning, staying after the babies and the children. . . . You were playing the role of a mother as well as the cook as well as the laundry lady as well as the housekeeper as well as guiding the children.”37 But she did believe that how she was treated as a domestic mattered greatly. There were employers who were decent and fair. And there were those who were not.
Without decent working conditions, respect, and fair pay, she argued, many of the goals of the civil rights movement—especially that of legal integration—meant very little. She had come to believe that poverty and economic deprivation were critically important and that you couldn’t integrate schools if children didn’t have shoes to wear. She resolved to organize household workers as a way to improve the economic status of the poorest African Americans. In seeking assistance, she first spoke to Dr. King. “I had talked with him several months before then that I wanted him to help me organize. . . . He told me ‘You do it, and don’t let nobody take it.’. . . I did.”38
Bolden heeded King’s advice, although he never lived to see the results. Ironically, King’s death in 1968 and the ensuing social upheaval fostered a climate that encouraged a shift in political strategy away from a narrow focus on legal integration. After King’s assassination, impoverished black communities in dozens of cities around the country, including Washington, DC, Chicago, and Baltimore, were hotbeds of racial strife, revealing deep-seated tensions around housing, education, and poverty. Although many black activists had addressed economic issues for years, even while simultaneously working to tear down Jim Crow, the widespread urban unrest in the mid- to late-1960s in regions of the country where overt segregation laws were no longer on the books made the goal of “equality as a fact” imperative.
Bolden launched her initiative at a moment that seemed ripe for change. Public transportation, where domestic workers mingled on their way to work, was an important location for organizing. Most cities were racially segregated and the typical pattern was for domestics to board buses in black neighborhoods early in the morning to make the journey to white areas. Domestic-worker organizers handed out flyers at bus stops and initiated conversations with other workers while riding the buses to work.39 There was, according to Julian Bond, a “network of maids” created by the transportation routes. Maids from around the city boarded buses going downtown, where they transferred to get to their places of employment. This transfer point became a meeting ground, a hub of organizing, and “Dorothy Bolden was in the center of it.”40
To galvanize support, Bolden rode every city bus line and spoke to hundreds of maids.41 “I would go around in the bus and ask maids how they would feel about joining if we could organize, and they would say ‘I’m for that.’”42 City buses became impromptu mobile meeting grounds. These “freedom buses” were comparable to the rural freedom schools of the 1960s, sites for political education and organizing as well as consciousness-raising. They were venues where poor women could share grievances and concerns, trade stories of abuse, exchange information about wages and workload, and learn about their rights. In this way, individual domestic workers, engaged in labor that was private in nature, became part of a very public effort.
Shortly after King’s assassination in 1968, domestic workers in Atlanta met to talk about reforming paid household work. Bolden’s group was not the only one in Atlanta that convened, however. Charles Stinson of the Atlanta Urban League had also brought together a group of domestic workers. The two groups soon merged their efforts, and named Bolden president of the organization.43 This cadre of seventy women, with aid from the National Urban League and the Georgia Council on Human Relations, met weekly, and continued promoting their efforts to build membership.44 They ushered in what Bolden called a “new birth” of social activism among this sector of black women workers.45 That summer they formed the National Domestic Workers Union of America (NDWUA)—a misnomer on two counts, since it was neither national nor a union. Bolden along with Martha Parker, Theresa Ragland, Louise Scott, and a handful of other women formed a charter, established several offices, and opened an employment and training center with set wages. Each member paid dues of one dollar and they met every Thursday at Wheat Street Baptist Church, just two blocks away from Ebenezer.46
Bolden led the NDWUA for the next twenty-eight years, maintaining an unswerving commitment to improving working conditions for domestic workers, despite ongoing harassment from hostile whites. Once she received a phone call from a Ku Klux Klan member who threatened to “whip her ass,” to which she responded fearlessly. “I told them any time they wanted to, come on over and grab it. You’ve got a chubby ass to whip.”47 Bolden’s husband helped with raising their six children, enabling her to devote herself to the cause. “I had to have somebody that I could trust with my children,” she stated. “I trusted my husband.”48 Deeply religious, she had a strong moral sensibility that permeated both her personal and professional life. “I wasn’t a money lover. I am that way now, I don’t love money, never have.”49 She was also fiercely independent: “I have never been a person who had to take orders from any man.”50 Her respect for King notwithstanding, she was keenly aware that the civil rights movement relied on the participation of women. “Dr. King would always stand out in my mind, he’s the strongest one of them. [But] he had help, he had women like me,” along with such leaders as Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer: “Strong women that didn’t back down.”51 Bolden and her allies were not the first domestics to organize, nor the first activists to try to reform domestic service, but they did succeed in reaching thousands of Atlanta women—both employers and employees—whom they educated about the rights and responsibilities of domestic work.
Around the time Dorothy Bolden was pondering how to bring together domestic workers in Atlanta, Geraldine Roberts had already done so in Cleveland, forming the Domestic Workers of America (DWA) in 1965. Roberts started the first documented domestic workers’ rights group in the postwar period, built strong alliances with civil rights and black power organizations, and mobilized household workers in Cleveland to fight for job training and higher wages. She overcame the obstacles of limited formal education and single motherhood to become one of the most well-respected leaders in Cleveland, even testifying before the US Commission on Civil Rights in 1967. Through DWA she established a name for herself in local civil rights circles, as well as in national women’s rights activism and labor policy debates.
Roberts was born in 1924 in Pawhuska, Oklahoma; her paternal grandmother was reportedly Choctaw Indian and periodically left the reservation to visit Geraldine as a child. Geraldine’s father didn’t have steady employment, and her mother worked six days a week as a domestic for white families. After a few years of marriage, Geraldine’s mother left her father. The family was extremely poor, living on her mother’s meager income in a house so small and with such inadequate furnishings that Geraldine slept under a table.
When Geraldine was around five, her mother and father died a few months apart. She and her younger sister Elizabeth were separated from their five brothers and sisters from their mother’s previous marriage and went to live with Ella, their maternal grandmother, in Ola, Arkansas. Ella was a well-off landowner and somewhat independent from Ola’s largely white community. She was a strong woman, a head of household who took in needy relatives like Geraldine and Elizabeth and one of their cousins. Her economic success was due in part to her multiple entrepreneurial ventures, including running a boardinghouse, washing clothes, catering, and farming. Ella taught—and expected—her children, and those she took in, to work hard. Geraldine started picking cotton when she was six or seven, assisted other sharecropping families harvesting their crops, and catered meals for white families with her grandmother. By the time she was eight she had her first experience as a domestic worker.
Despite the expectation that she work, getting an education had long been a priority for Geraldine. Her step-grandfather, a schoolmaster, encouraged her dream of someday attending Fisk University to become a teacher or a principal. Ola, however, had few educational opportunities for black children. Beginning school at age seven, Geraldine attended a segregated one-room schoolhouse—an unpainted building with no windows and a snake-infested outhouse—that was open only three months a year. The teacher split her time between older and younger children. When in the mid-1930s the town declared it had no money to support the black school, the teacher, a member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, tutored the children in their homes for nearly two years without pay.
Even when the school was in session, Ella’s reliance on her labor made it difficult for Geraldine to attend full-time. After helping her grandmother with the laundry and other chores, most of the school day was over.52 She longed for a time when she would be able to pursue her education. Her limited opportunity became evident to her when she befriended a white girl named Frances, whom she met through her grandmother’s laundry business. The two were the same age and shared a birthday, and they developed a close bond. When Geraldine saw Frances’s beautiful whites-only school, she was dismayed by the obvious racial inequities for African Americans.
As Geraldine faced the dawning reality of constraints imposed on her in the Jim Crow South, she began, like Dorothy Bolden, to consider leaving the region altogether. Ironically, her grandmother’s relative financial success made migration more complicated. Unlike sharecroppers, who had few economic investments and could easily pick up and move on, “We weren’t able to do that then, myself and my sister Elizabeth, [because] . . . my grandparents were property owners. It wasn’t that easy to leave at all if you owned property.”53
At twelve, Geraldine ran away from home to join a traveling colored minstrel show, a bold move for a young African American girl in 1936. Although her initial impetus was to seek educational opportunity, she ended up doing service work for the show—preparing food for the employees, setting the table, and washing dishes. Eventually one of the performers taught her to dance and she began earning three dollars a week as a performer. When the show was on the road in Iowa, Geraldine met James Roberts, a musician. They married, eventually settled in Cleveland, and had three children.
After moving to Cleveland in 1944, Geraldine Roberts tried once more to achieve her lifelong dream of attending school. She saw her lack of a formal education as a handicap that hindered her ability to help her children with their homework, limited her job opportunities, and made her self-conscious at social gatherings. She tried repeatedly, but with little success, to look for well-paying work. “I was told after fillin’ out the application I couldn’t do very well, that I would, could be hired as a domestic worker.”54 She enrolled in adult reading classes at the Woodland branch of the Cleveland Public Library and East Technical High School. Although an eager learner, as a mother of young children she found night school taxing. Her husband couldn’t manage taking care of the kids in her absence, so she stopped attending. But she never lost her passion and desire for education. “There was always this fear that someone would know that I couldn’t read and I lived with that through the period of my children growin’ up.”55 Several years later, when her children were older and after her eleven-year marriage ended, she would once again go back to school.
After separating from her husband, Roberts was a single mother of three in her twenties living in the Carver Park Housing Projects. She went on welfare for a short time, “then I was told to get a job as a domestic worker.”56 Welfare recipients were frequently pushed into the paid labor force, even when the only jobs available were poorly paid and lacked benefits. Initially, Roberts did day work, cleaning for five dollars a day.57 But the work was unpredictable. She then got a job as a hotel maid working seven days a week for nineteen dollars. Despite full-time employment, she and her children were desperately poor. She spent the next several years working, raising her children, and trying to make ends meet. After illness forced her to leave her hotel job, she spent some time on welfare before returning to domestic labor.
In the early 1960s, she heard radio broadcasts of civil rights protests and speeches by Martin Luther King and found that the issues, especially school segregation, “seemed to be a part of my life.” Roberts, like Bolden, was deeply moved and inspired by civil rights organizing. She saw parallels between her own life and African Americans living in the Jim Crow South. For Roberts, the campaign for racial equality resonated with her experiences as a black woman of the South and as a domestic worker. “The civil rights reminded me of all the terrible things I learned about in the South, why I couldn’t go to school . . . why I wasn’t able to attend the all-white school that Frances went to.”58
Roberts worked in several different white homes and had experiences that shaped her thinking about racial equality and opportunity. Seeing her limited job opportunities as a result of a segregated southern educational system, and her employment as a domestic worker as a product of a similar racial order in the North, Roberts recognized herself as among the disempowered. “The domestic worker has been the kind of worker that has been overlooked and ignored—what I refer to as an invisible worker,” she explained. “No one really sees that worker in the labor market and whatever benefits other workers are thinking of or attemptin’ to get or are gettin’ the domestic worker has not been included.”59 They were routinely treated as inferior to their employers. Although domestic workers occupied the most intimate spaces of the family home, and were entrusted with preparing meals and bathing children, employers often designated separate eating and bathroom facilities for them. “There was a back room that was the bathroom, that would be the bathroom for myself and . . . other household employees . . . all black, and we were all told to use that bathroom, and to never use the family bathroom.”60 As Roberts explained, this separation enabled employers to maintain a racial hierarchy.
She was equally disturbed by the quality and quantity of food she was served because it seemed to signify employers’ disregard and disrespect for workers. She remembered working for one “very nice lady” in Cleveland. Every morning when she arrived at work, breakfast and a small glass of milk would be sitting on the table for her. One day, noticing that someone had drunk from the glass that had been set out for her, she learned that it had first been offered to the woman’s child, who had taken only a few sips.
“I got real sick over that . . . it was something I never forgot. . . . I began to realize something . . . that hey, I wasn’t very much of anything, drinkin’ left over milk, piece of steak that my husband had last night and he couldn’t eat all, he saved it for you. Don’ worry, we cut off the part where he was eatin’. He could never eat it all, and it had been sliced off and warmed over from the supper before and the very idea to tell me that meat was on her husband’s plate made me sick. I began to think he could have coughed on it and all sorts of things went through, but I didn’t dare tell her because she could tell me not to come back any more and I needed the money.”61
In addition to these strained day-to-day interactions with employers, Roberts began to notice that her experience was not an isolated one; hundreds, perhaps thousands, of African American women in Cleveland seemed to be living similar lives. Her daily bus ride to and from work served as the most visible manifestation of this collective experience. If domestic work took place behind closed doors, the bus route fully exposed the racialized nature of the work. “There was something that I felt that was terribly wrong and very unfair and I began to look at the buses which taken the women into the Heights and what I seen.” During her morning commute, Roberts took note that all the buses going east early in the morning were filled with black women carrying bags and ready for work wearing their “flat heeled shoes,” while “all the buses headed west” carried “painted up dressed up women with white skin.”62
While these on-the-job experiences formed the basis of a critical perspective for Roberts, growing black activism in Cleveland enabled her to move from critique to action. Local black leaders, especially Ruth Turner of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and Lewis G. Robinson of the Freedom Fighters proved to be instrumental in Roberts’s politicization and subsequent campaign to organize household workers. Turner was a public school teacher who quit her job to become executive secretary of Cleveland CORE in the early 1960s.63 Robinson, a city housing inspector and well-known community activist, founded the Freedom Fighters in 1960 and two years later joined the United Freedom Movement (UFM), an umbrella organization that brought together civil rights groups in Cleveland. A context of heightened racial tension that advocated greater community empowerment was the backdrop for Roberts’s call for household workers to organize themselves.
During the postwar period, the African American community in Cleveland, like elsewhere around the country, began to transgress the boundaries of race and power that defined the black urban experience.64 Cleveland was a primary destination for many who took part in the Great Migration, both black and white. They flooded the booming city hoping to secure jobs in the expanding auto, war production, and steel industries. Unlike their white counterparts, black migrants like Roberts experienced rampant discrimination in both employment and housing. Cleveland’s black population grew dramatically from 85,000 in 1940 to 250,000 in 1960, leading to a chronic shortage of housing, poor living conditions, and overcrowded schools in the predominantly black East Side. White Cleveland residents blocked, sometimes violently, racial integration of neighborhoods, and those areas where African Americans did eventually make inroads, such as East Cleveland and Hough, saw rapid white flight.65 In response, black activists and their white supporters organized boycotts, pickets, sit-ins, marches, and community meetings to break the patterns of de facto segregation and racial inequality in Cleveland. They targeted schools, lunch counters, public facilities, segregated neighborhoods, and businesses that refused to hire African Americans.66
By the early 1960s the battle lines in Cleveland were clearly drawn around school segregation. On April 7, 1964, several dozen members of CORE and UFM were at the construction site of Stephen E. Howe Elementary School in Glenville, a largely black area. The school was being built to assuage black demands for equal access to education. With rapid demographic change, Cleveland schools were both segregated and inequitable: white schools had vacant seats, while black schools were overcrowded and children were forced to attend split-day sessions. The school board, unwilling to counter white residents’ vehement refusal to integrate schools, settled on building more black schools in largely black areas. Civil rights activists opposed this plan, believing it reinforced racial segregation. They therefore came out to prevent the building of Howe Elementary. As protesters formed human barricades to block construction vehicles, twenty-seven-year-old Reverend Bruce Klunder, a white member of Cleveland CORE and father of two, was accidentally crushed to death by a bulldozer as it backed up. A few weeks later, in response to Klunder’s tragic death, as well as the school board’s inability to enact meaningful reform, black activists launched a reportedly successful one-day school boycott with students attending freedom schools that taught black history and black culture.67
The Klunder death proved pivotal. Activists seized on it as evidence of the failure of city leadership. The incident, along with a lack of response from city officials, who refused to even meet with civil rights activists, led many to feel disaffected. In 1964, Robinson, a longtime advocate of self-defense, formed the Medgar Evers Rifle Club with the intention of protecting civil rights activists when the police failed to do so.68 He was especially critical of the double standard applied by police, who arrested peaceful black protesters while ignoring violent white agitators. CORE leader Ruth Turner, who had witnessed Klunder’s death, found herself increasingly skeptical of nonviolence as an effective political strategy.69 To Turner and Robinson, community empowerment seemed the most obvious solution, and they proved to be two of Roberts’s most ardent supporters. Roberts’s commitment to organizing poor black women dovetailed with this desire to empower black inner-city residents.70
Roberts was drawn into the movement, attending demonstrations and picketing. “And there I was with a picket sign for the first time,” she said, “and not really knowin’ that meanin’ of even carrying a picket sign”—nor could she read their slogans, “Down with Segregation” and “Discrimination in Employment,” though she fully embraced their message. Acutely aware of the risks associated with activism, Roberts believed the danger was outweighed by the obstacles and limited opportunities she had long confronted. “And if it meant me carryin’ a picket sign, if it also meant that I could get injured or die, I didn’t think it meant much difference because I had already mentally, or I was dead. I couldn’t read; I was sort of trapped in society; the best I could do was to help someone else.”71
Like Bolden, Roberts’s involvement in the civil rights movement proved transformative as she experienced the vast gulf between the movement’s calls for human dignity and self-worth and her daily life as a domestic worker. She began to ascribe her exploitation as a household worker to the legacy of slavery. Roberts worked for six weeks for one family that seemed perfectly satisfied with her work. One day the employer asked her to clean the chandelier and the outside of the windows, tasks that she did not see as part of her job description and refused to do. The employer fired her without pay. Roberts angrily charged that she was being treated like a slave, perhaps aware that it would strike a chord in the context of racial strife in Cleveland. Her employer denied that race had anything to do with it and claimed the issue was one of obedience: “I don’t only throw out black girls. I throw out white girls, too. You’re not the first one I threw out of my house. It’s not because you’re black . . . we don’t have that racial stuff in here. If you don’t do what we tell you to do, then you get the hell out of here.”72
In 1965, when she started organizing household workers, Roberts was employed part-time as a cleaner at a penthouse in Shaker Heights for nine dollars a day, and worked alongside two full-time employees—a cook and a maid. The work environment was meticulously managed and controlled, with separate servants’ quarters, restricted telephone usage, and an intercom system that the employer used to monitor employees and prohibit them from speaking to one another, even during lunch.73 “I got kind of an opinion that she was like a white mistress or something over black workers,” Roberts said.74 “I felt as if I was probably the size of an ant or something. An ant, say, talking to a person who’s standing in the door of a fifty or a hundred thousand dollar home and I had absolutely nothing, and to tell this person something was pretty hard to do.”75 At this job it dawned on Roberts how employers viewed household workers: “I wasn’t aware that persons looked upon household employment as dumb people or people who didn’t get an education, that there was something wrong with us. . . . I realized more and more, that there was something wrong with me, what was I? Why was I treated like this?”76
That particularly difficult work environment served as an entry point for Roberts’s commitment to organizing domestic workers. “I felt it was an unusual and terrible place to work. . . . Maybe it’s good that I had the experience because I think out of that very home grew the idea, a very strong idea to do something about workin’ conditions for household employees. I think it inspired the whole idea out of that particular penthouse.”77 Roberts mustered her courage and began to speak up and assert her rights. She had conversations with her two coworkers, telling them they deserved better and that it was time to organize and form a union.78 One of them agreed wholeheartedly: “Well, Gerry, we need to get a union or somethin’. You need to do something about it,” she said, and handed her a dollar. The other maid also donated a dollar.
With her two-dollar donation in hand, Roberts began to consider how to establish an organization to rally other domestic workers. Ruth Turner encouraged Roberts to take the lead, and helped plan and publicize an initial meeting. Roberts and her cofounders passed out five hundred leaflets announcing the new organization. Twenty-one people showed up to the first meeting in September 1965 at St. James AME Church and testified about their working conditions.79 Bolden recalled of that historic day, “The women came wide eyed and proud that such a meeting had been called. They were so ready and couldn’t believe. Different ones said it was long overdue. They were so glad that somebody decided to do something about this.”80 Subsequent meetings had much higher attendance rates, sometimes with over two hundred people.81 The organization they founded, Domestic Workers of America, sought to expose and reform the unfair working conditions of private household workers. As Roberts put it: “If we get sick or lose a job, our only recourse is welfare. We have no hospitalization, no transportation, no real hope for a better life.”82
DWA opened an office on 5120 Woodland Avenue at the Bruce Klunder Freedom House, named after the martyred clergyman. Members were interested in raising wages to fourteen dollars a day, improving job standards, and gaining respect for workers. As Lula Primas, secretary of DWA explained, “Many times [employers] don’t know your name or where you live, and don’t care.”83 DWA opened a placement office to help workers obtain jobs and launched a clothing drive for needy schoolchildren.84 Roberts worked in the DWA office part-time, while still engaging in domestic work. She believed her work with DWA filled an important gap in labor organizing by focusing on a neglected sector of the workforce. She wanted to illuminate how domestic workers had been “completely overlooked” by labor unions.85 Despite its agenda of organizing workers, DWA received little financial support from donors, foundations, or mainstream unions. At its peak, about six hundred women of different racial backgrounds were involved in DWA in Cleveland.86
Shortly after she began to organize, Roberts was fired from her job in Shaker Heights.87 Because of her notoriety, it was difficult to find employment, and she faced various forms of harassment. “Some said they wouldn’t hire colored ones anyway and are there any white domestic workers in the Greater Cleveland area.”88 Others retorted with common stereotypes that African American household workers were lazy, prone to theft, and didn’t bathe.89 Once, at two o’clock in the morning, she received a threatening call: “Hey, nigger, why don’t you get out of town. We don’t need your kind around here.”90 According to Roberts, “They were opposed to activities and I was tryin’ to build a union.”91 In spite of these demoralizing setbacks, others showed their support. A woman engaged in organizing nurses offered her a job. Notably, she asked Roberts to name her salary.
Roberts’s leadership role placed her in the national spotlight, which in turn heightened her anxiety about her lack of education and class background. She worried that her illiteracy would prevent her from being an effective leader. “I had a fear after I got into it. I seemed like I wanted to run from the whole thing. I felt how could I do all this when I couldn’t even read very well.”92 She began attending evening classes at East Technical High School to improve her reading, and ultimately, her confidence grew as she earned a reputation as an advocate for poor women. Her organizing efforts were in addition to her responsibilities at her job and taking care of her own household. She found herself “stayin’ up late in the middle of the night ironing and gettin’ necessary things” completed. But she had no regrets.
In 1966, Roberts joined a contingent of the Cleveland NAACP to participate in the Meredith March in Jackson, Mississippi. James Meredith, the first African American admitted into the University of Mississippi, had organized a “March Against Fear” from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, to encourage African Americans to vote. During the course of the march, Meredith was shot by Klansmen. In response to the shooting, thousands of civil rights activists from around the country pledged to go to Mississippi to continue the march. It became a milestone in civil rights history, where Stokely Carmichael popularized the phrase “black power” and signaled a shift in the strategy and goals of many civil rights activists. Roberts was filled with anxiety, but also optimism, as she embarked on her first major civil rights protest outside Cleveland. “I considered [it] one of the most exciting points in my life in that particular demonstration with Dr. King and the thousands upon thousands of demonstrators and the planes overhead and the fear [that] hung over that area as if no one knew what would happen.”93 “I had felt,” she continued, “that I was leaving Ohio, going into the state of Mississippi to give my life as something that I felt was right, that every man, every woman, every child on earth had a right to freedom and pursuit of happiness.”
The emerging black power movement provoked wider concern among policymakers and government officials about how to empower the poor. The War on Poverty included as part of its goals community-action programs that mandated maximum feasible participation of the poor, providing resources and intellectual support for the underprivileged. DWA’s agenda overlapped with these broader concerns, but put its energies specifically into mobilizing poor black women.
Although she had been deeply involved in the black power movement, and the politics of race profoundly shaped her understanding of domestic work, Roberts and DWA made a commitment to including white women in the organization. Roberts understood that poverty and a lack of education pushed women into domestic service and kept them there. Although only a small number of white domestics joined DWA, it remained committed to interracial organizing. “We did accept white domestic workers on the far West Side. They accepted us when they read about us. Her being poor realizing that even though her skin was white it didn’t make any difference. She was a poor woman in the United States and so it didn’t make any difference.”94
Through their participation in DWA, domestic workers experienced a newfound level of respect both on and off the job. Their collective efforts led to a greater understanding that their labor was essential to the running of the household and that they deserved recognition. “You begin to build an inward pride that you never had before. Poor people can say something; women can say something; a poor woman can say something and it will be meaningful and the lady who has everything, we learned for the first time, that they really needed us.” DWA members worked to cultivate and nurture relationships with the women who hired them. They saw employers as an important constituency: “We need the cooperation of the employers. We need the good will of the housewives who hire us.”95 Roberts believed that because of this effort many employers changed their “hard tough looks,” were amenable to domestic-worker requests and willing to discuss wages, working conditions, and responsibilities.96 The building of alliances with employers would continue to shape the struggle for household rights over the life of the movement.
Bolden and Roberts were in many ways ordinary working-class African American women. They were not a part of the African American elite—or the “talented tenth,” to use the phrase popularized by W. E. B. Du Bois—nor were they self-appointed leaders of the black community. They had little formal education and spoke in a southern black vernacular, which was distinct from the polished, well-schooled oratory of Martin Luther King. Their political sensibility was crafted in the black neighborhoods where they encountered civil rights activists, on the public transportation system where they mingled with other domestic workers, and in the white homes where employers treated them as servants. They had dreams, and sometimes followed those dreams far from the towns where they were born. But they were also hindered by disability, illiteracy, and limited opportunities, and struggled with the push and pull of everyday life. Most domestic workers who became local leaders were longtime community activists involved in a range of issues, from housing to education to economic justice. Thus their activism was often neighborhood-based rather than occupation-based.
Black domestic workers had for generations engaged in covert day-to-day resistance—what James Scott calls the “hidden transcript”—as a way to maintain their dignity in an occupation that aimed to degrade and disempower.97 The emergence of an organized, visible, and vocal campaign marks a shift in how domestic workers asserted their rights. The passion for social change exhibited by women like Dorothy Bolden and Geraldine Roberts and their deep desire to improve the lot of other women like themselves grew out of the civil rights movement, which inspired them with its example of courage and tenacity and also created a network of support.98 They learned, perhaps most importantly, that there was strength in numbers.
The struggle for domestic workers’ rights brings a new angle and greater nuance to the meaning of black freedom and labor organizing. Household workers advocated racial equality, women’s rights, and raising occupational standards. Their concern for economic autonomy echoed the goals of liberal antipoverty warriors, civil rights activists, and black power advocates. But DWA’s focus on working-class black women also distinguished it from many other efforts. And while they might be “labor feminists,” as Sue Cobble identifies them, they had little tangible connection to other women’s labor activists or union leaders.99 Much of their organizing was outside the union movement. They modeled a grassroots working-class leadership and an approach to organizing that relied on community building. Theirs was a class-based struggle that centered on an analysis of race and gender. They recognized the labor of social reproduction as racialized work that had often been considered outside the boundaries of legitimate employment. They reached out to domestic workers of all racial backgrounds, as well as middle-class women, to support them in their campaigns. Motivated by the civil rights movement, they came to believe that black freedom could best be achieved by mobilizing domestic workers to press for improvements in their occupation. And that resolve led them down a path that would result in the formation of the first national organization of domestic workers, the Household Technicians of America, which would push for reform of this age-old occupation.
Black domestic workers such as Dorothy Bolden and Geraldine Roberts, who were rooted in this black working-class culture, embraced their status as domestic workers. Rather than reject or deny this identity, they claimed it and sought to bring recognition and respect to the work they did. Their organizing, and the organizing of other women like them, was part of a process of crafting a new identity for domestic workers.