Guest Editors’ Note

Scholars who came of age after the 1997 publication of Tera Hunter’s To ’Joy My Freedom, entered a field of black women’s labor scholarship forever changed. Hunter’s study of black women’s agency and desires as laborers in post-emancipation Atlanta made visible working-class black women’s experiences and subjectivity within a historical record that long obscured it. In doing so To ’Joy My Freedom fundamentally reimagined the fields of U.S., labor, and women’s history and inspired a new wave of scholarship. Challenging traditional understandings of working-class narratives of economic politics and activism, this recovered history repositions black women’s roles in the quest for freedom and capitalist industrialization in the United States. Such pathbreaking work is part of a broader and longer intellectual tradition. Black feminist thinkers and activists have interrogated capitalism’s reliance on ideologies of race and gender as well as the bodies of black women. The critical writings of Ella Baker, Marvel Cooke, Vicki Garvin, Claudia Jones, and Gwendolyn Brooks (among many others) from the 1930s through the 1950s, Angela Y. Davis’s (1972) “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” Johnnie Tillmon’s (1972) “Welfare is a Woman’s Issue,” and the Combahee River Collective’s (1977) statement name only a few of the works by black feminists activists and intellectuals that have raised and answered urgent questions about the development of economies structured by the nexus of race and gender, excavating their ideological and infrastructural moorings in the exploitation of black female bodies.¹

Current scholarship on black women’s labor is deeply informed by this work, tackling topics such as property, domesticity, sexual economy, reproduction, indebted obligation, collective organizing, individual contestation, pain, and violence to produce new understandings of the relationship between black women and economic transition across broad terrains and temporalities. Articles in this issue offer deep historical research on black women’s exploitation under capitalism, arguing for the centrality of black women as economic actors and architects of alternative futures, whether through social justice movements or entrepreneurial institutions. Occupying the place “where white supremacy and economic domination meet,” black women’s bodies are revealed in this work as ideological and financial material that often elicited “moral panic” in industrializing contexts.² They make visible the institutional, cultural, and political connections between race, gender, and capitalist appropriation that have been theorized through the language of crossroads, intersection, and meeting ground. In these literatures black women, previously cast aside as economic actors, become central to contests over capitalist enclosure. Their activist and intellectual labors represent some of the most significant challenges to expropriation and exploitation, urging the “obsolescence” of drudgery, forming watershed movements that would alter relations of power by guaranteeing income, and leaving industrializing cities in the balance as they demanded greater autonomy and better working conditions.³

Another key intervention that studies of black women’s labor has produced is a greater attention to the ways labor issues reach beyond a singular focus on the workplace or even economic concerns. In part, centering an analysis of black women’s experiences in labor studies makes explicit the ways labor is shaped by dominant imaginings and representations of racialized, sexualized, and gendered bodies and the lived experiences of these embodiments. This theme emerges as a core concern of the special issue as a number of the contributors give voice to black women’s subjectivities, the ways their interior lives inform and are informed by their laboring experiences whether as activists, knowledge producers, or wage workers. While we hope this special issue will encourage more scholarship that directly engages the relationship between labor and black women’s sexual subjectivities,⁴ the articles in this issue provide insight about the personal value and cost of labor not only in its productive and reproductive context but also the multiple types of work performed. Across the articles in this special issue we come to see labor as an embodied and intimate practice that produced both pleasure and pain; labor operated as a site of oppression and resistance, and provided opportunities for joy and personal expression, even as it also reinforced limiting representations of black women’s bodies and economic value.

Examining black women’s working lives in this way forces a more expansive view, revealing the centrality and often fraught conceptions of community. Leaders of even the most successful movements wrestle with expectations of those whom they seek to represent. The process of black women creating communities to advocate for racial and economic justice is, in many ways, embedded into the fabric of African American history. From 19th-century challenges to the restriction of women in public debates to 20th-century contests over who could and should lead racial struggles, black women have argued through words and deeds for their place in movements and a reimaging of black communities and collective alliances. As Anna Julia Cooper famously wrote, “only the black woman can say ‘when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.’”⁵ Despite consistent challenges to their role in leadership, black women shaped and reframed conversations and movements to reflect their visions as individual actors in the improvement of the lives of members in their communities.

Building community is often as fraught with internal tensions as it is with external pressures. The reconsideration of black women’s roles in civil rights and black power communities represents a major turn in the history of black women’s labor. This new archival excavation reveals masculinist and traditional institutional narratives of organizations and struggles as obscuring black women’s stories and political interventions. In addition, by acknowledging civil rights activism as “work” and the long struggle for freedom as integral to working-class black women’s labor struggles, scholars bring to our consciousness gender and contemporary women as actors in ways that consciously re-write U.S., and more specifically, African American history. Women’s activism and labor, historically considered as at best isolated and unique and at worst, marginal, is now revealed as central to the making of African Americans as a people in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The broad range of articles in this collection reflect the importance of archival recovery in critically reimagining and reconfiguring definitions of work, security, and community, as well as the salience of the black women’s continuing struggle in the United States. From the violence of slavery and economic exploitation to the ways in which they carved out new spaces to secure justice, black women, albeit often marginalized in the scholarship of the past, stand up and create better lives, for themselves, their families, and the larger community. While some historical figures in this issue like Coretta Scott King possessed national recognition, others such as Mary Moultrie, Naomi White, and the black women union activists in St. Louis operated on the local level and challenged the rigid racial and gender hierarchies that all too often relegated black women to the economic margins producing an underpaid and underemployed workforce. These articles also explore the roles and challenges faced by black women’s “laboring” in the context of creating communities and collective alliances whether it be in organized labor on the local level or building a national coalition in the fight for structural economic changes. We honor their activism and their legacy in this special issue.

Nicole Ivy’s article, “Bodies of Work: A Meditation on Medical Imaginaries and Enslaved Women,” illuminates the medical knowledge produced through the economic, racial, and gendered relations of slavery. In 1913 Rosa Luxemburg argued that slavery was a system “in which reproduction is enforced and regulated in all details by personal relations of domination.”⁶ Ivy details the role of knowledge commodities produced through domination in slavery’s afterlife. This analysis of the continued accumulation of social and economic capital through material produced under enslavement raises questions about how we define and understand economic systems and actors. Ivy examines Nathan Bozeman, an understudied “father” of modern gynecology, revealing that he mobilized enslaved black women as resources for the establishment of his medical expertise; she insists on making visible this form of “symbolic work” and the suffering endured as slave women were forced to labor for science.

In addition to his own personal wealth and status, the black women upon whom Bozeman experimented contributed to medical modernity and a gilded medical establishment. If slavery fueled industrial capitalism, Ivy’s article about the work that black women performed in producing Bozeman’s career and a broader medical knowledge economy raises critical concerns about what counts as profit and, by extension, various terms of economic order including competition, commodity, value, accumulation, reproduction, circulation, and surplus.

While “Bodies of Work” considers the 19th century, the other articles in this issue move the focus to the 20th. Keona K. Ervin, Jewell C. Debnam, and David P. Stein provide portraits of black women’s activism that enhance prevailing historiographies of labor feminism and civil rights, respectively. Ervin’s essay, “We Rebel: Black Women, Worker Theater, and Critical Unionism in Wartime St. Louis,” provides a gendered framework for understandings of black union activism and politics. Ervin’s article argues for the centrality of the racial and gendered cultural dimensions of labor movement politics, excavating a critique of union priorities and organizing culture that prefigures later black feminist critiques. In unveiling the earlier roots of black women’s intersectional politics and practices among rank and file union members, “We Rebel” provides new insight into popular front politics, labor feminism, and wartime union mobilization.

In thinking popular front politics through black women’s subjectivity, the article asserts black women’s participation in St. Louis’s workers’ theater during the 1940s as a site for articulating “their own visions of industrial unionism … and their particular economic experiences” as well as their own creative expression. By illuminating black women’s critical practice, Ervin exposes both the “gender and racial fault lines” of shop floor unionism and excavates a powerful imaginary of gender and racial justice; this history of black women’s “critical unionism” alters previous accounts of the widely studied International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. As 1940s St. Louis was an important location for capitalists in search of cheap labor, the emergence of this intersectional analysis of the meaning of economic justice proves particularly historically significant.

Jewell C. Debnam also takes rank and file activism as her subject in “Mary Moultrie, Naomi White, and the Women of the Charleston Hospital Workers’ Strike of 1969,” illuminating the experiences of black women in the 1969 Charleston, South Carolina hospital strike. Centering black women’s subjectivity, Debnam narrates the historic strike and union struggle through the experiences black women activists. She demonstrates the important role black women workers played in the continued pursuit for black freedom in the years following the Voting Rights Act of 1965, showing that they were central agents in the movement’s increasing emphasis on economic justice. In this account, black militancy moves from North to South through an account of union leader Mary Moultrie’s return to her hometown of Charleston, South Carolina, where she led the strike’s organizing. As Debnam reveals, an important catalyst for the action was the hospital’s gendered and racial management hierarchy: organizing for gender, racial, and economic justice. She also highlights the challenges of community building though her discussion of both the difficulties of organizing workers and the hostility and backlash directed at those who served as leaders in these endeavors.

The Charleston strike encourages further scholarship that centers gender in an analysis of the strategies, demands, and historical significance of civil rights unionism. During her visit to Charleston to support the strike, Coretta Scott King reputedly announced, “I have another interest for being here and that is many of the hospital workers throughout our nation are women, black women. … I feel that the black woman in our nation, the black working woman is perhaps the most discriminated against of all of the working women.”⁷

In this moment Coretta Scott King’s most significant work was her leadership in the fight for full employment in the 1970s. This is the subject of David P. Stein’s essay, “‘This Nation Has Never Honestly Dealt with the Question of a Peacetime Economy’: Coretta Scott King and the Struggle for a Nonviolent Economy in the 1970s.” Stein counters the widespread historical memory of Scott King as bit player in a civil rights drama dominated by charismatic men, repositioning her as one of the foremost voices in the fight for economic justice for black and working-class women in the 1970s and 1980s. Rather than retreating in the aftermath of her husband’s assassination, King took up the mantle for racial, gender, and economic justice. As such this article contributes to the critical historiographic turn that centers women and gender in the black freedom movement.

Stein reveals that Scott King was an important strategist and analyst, working to push economic justice as the unfinished work of civil rights and to develop both policy and grassroots efforts to reform Keynesianism. At the helm of the movement for full employment, Scott King’s work sits alongside the welfare rights movement as expansive, ambitious challenges to capitalist violence. She worked toward a nonviolent economy, placing her in movement dialogue with other black women activists, such as Ruby Duncan in the Nevada welfare rights movement, although her prioritization of employment over welfare rights was not without criticism. Stein’s article transforms our understanding of Scott King, from a woman who seemed to spend much of her married life standing behind her husband, to a change agent who not only influenced the thinking of Martin Luther King, Jr., but in the wake of his murder, carried his legacy of moral authority and political consciousness in an attempt to improve the lives of working-class Americans.

While Coretta Scott King viewed employment as a fundamental right, Saint Charles Lockett, the subject of Crystal M. Moten’s article, “‘Fighting Their Own Economic Battles’: Saint Charles Lockett, Ethnic Enterprizes, and the Challenges of Black Capitalism in 1970s Milwaukee,” conceptualized the job as a prize. Moten resurrects the story of this understudied black woman who challenged the manufacturing hierarchy in 1970s Milwaukee to create a space for black women workers. Utilizing an array of archival sources, Moten unearths the story of Lockett, a feminist whose desire to create a manufacturing company that responded to the needs of mothers as workers in her community led to the founding of Ethnic Enterprizes in 1970. Lockett employed other black women, primarily mothers, crafting conditions that were designed to attend to the unique struggles they faced but ultimately replicated their workplace subordination. As a gendered institution of black capitalism, Ethnic Enterprizes prefigures future debates about the best ways to address black economic subordination, as well as neoliberal modes of incorporation.

Moten’s article raises critical questions about the complexity of black women’s economic agency, including the ramifications of their assertions of power over other black women. Lockett’s fraught employment justice entrepreneurship elucidates the range of strategies that black women devised to meet marginalization with black autonomy. Yet, her project was ultimately undone by her limited understanding of the black women her capitalist venture was intended to empower, the contradictions of creating an employment space for black women, and the realities of competing in a capitalist system.

Taken together these histories provide important evidence that black women’s lives and labors provide a critical framework for understanding the continuities and changes in productive, reproductive, and embodied labor, as well as U.S. economic and capitalist history. One of the hallmarks of these historical inquiries is the perseverance that black women have brought to the process of creating structural changes that facilitate racial and economic justice. The actual changes and the character of their leadership is the legacy of black women’s activism.

Thus, with the recent calls to #SayHerName that emerged in response to increased violence against black bodies, and black women’s bodies specifically, it is not surprising to hear echoes of the many calls to re-examine the place and status of black women in the United States. As the history recounted in the articles collected here remind us, now is not the first time the remembering, naming, and claiming has been heard. Previous generations of black women activists across class lines have stood up in even worse times to play a pivotal role in the struggle for racial injustice, both as individuals and as members of organizations. As in the past, black women in the contemporary moment are refusing to be silenced. Key to articulating the richness of voice and complexity of the agency of black women is the conscious recognition of the intersectionality of race, gender, sexuality, and class discrimination in America.

Alongside the articles, we hope to expand the conversation around black women’s labor with a “Comments from the Field” section. Introduced by Souls editor Barbara Ransby, this section includes reflections from Tera W. Hunter, Saidiya Hartman, Premilla Nadasen, and Jessica Millward on the ways that their research and the research of others recover, interrogate, and give voice to black women’s economic significance, experiences of racial, gendered and capitalist violence and struggles for alternative futures. These scholars highlight the urgency of the continuing project to reposition black women’s experiences in both historical analyses and the contemporary moment. The remaining essays in the issue include two pieces that draw our attention to the contemporary marginalization of black labor. Linda Burnham’s “Gender and the Black Jobs Crisis” offers a sobering statistical analysis on the economic realities faced by black women. Reflecting on the life’s work of former Souls editor Cheryll Y. Greene, Alexis Pauline Gumbs offers a tribute to her mentor’s lifetime of intellectual labor as archivist, activist, bridge-builder, and scholar. Finally, we are thrilled to publish “poem for alma,” for the first time in its entirety. An excerpt of “poem for alma” begins Cheryl I. Harris’s paradigm-shifting 1993 article, “Whiteness As Property.” We hope this special issue offers a timely intervention as it provides some insight into the various ways, in the past and the present day, that black women have confronted and resisted systemic inequalities and sought better options for themselves and their communities in a struggle for racial, economic, political, and social justice.Prudence Cumberbatch Assistant Professor Department of Africana Studies Brooklyn College Dayo F. Gore Associate Professor Ethnic Studies Department and Critical Gender Studies University of California, San Diego Sarah Haley Assistant ProfessorDepartments of Gender Studies and African American Studies University of California, Los Angeles

About the Guest Editors

Prudence Cumberbatch received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. She is the author of “What ‘the Cause’ Needs Is A ‘Brainy and Energetic Woman’: A Study of Female Charismatic Leadership in Baltimore,” which appeared in the edited volume Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle (NYU Press, 2009). She has also published in Radical History Review.

Dayo F. Gore is the author of Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War and editor of Want to Start of Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle. Her current research projects include a book-length study of African American women’s transnational travels and activism in the long 20th century.

Sarah Haley received her Ph.D. in African American Studies and American Studies, and was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship from Princeton University’s Center for African American Studies. She is the author of No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (UNC Press, 2016). She has also published in Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society.

Notes

Jones is a significant figure in black international and transnational intellectual history. Here we are referring to the work she produced in the United States, such as her (1949) “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” While the articles in this issue focus on African American history, we understand questions of black female labor, exploitation, bodily appropriation and violence, community and social movement formation in a broader diasporic context.

Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106 (June 1993): 1711; on “moral panic” see Hazel V. Carby, “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context.” Critical Inquiry 18 (Summer 1992): 738–55.

On the obsolescence of drudgery see Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), particularly chapter 13, “The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework.”

The review of Mireille Miller-Young’s book in this special issues “Book Review” section as well as the Linda Burnham’s attention to LGBT employment in “By the Numbers” only scratches the surface of the range of the dynamic work currently being produced on this topic.

Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (1892; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 31.

Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (1913; reprint, New York: Routledge Classics, 2003), 5.

http://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/charleston_hospital_workers_mo/coretta_scott_king_visits_char.