The Bronx Slave Market (1950)

VIEWPOINT MAGAZINE

Marvel Cooke October 31, 2015

Woolworth’s, E 170th St. between Walton Ave. and Jerome Ave., The Bronx
Introduction

Marvel Cooke, a seasoned African American labor activist and member of the Communist Party, wrote this set of investigative reports for the New York-based radical newspaper The Daily Compass in January 1950. For Cooke, it was a return to a familiar setting: she and Ella Baker, the famous civil rights leader, had co-written a groundbreaking exposé on an earlier iteration of the Bronx Slave Market in 1935 for the NAACP’s journal, The Crisis. Cooke’s analysis here is worth revisiting for several reasons. Not only does this represent an important attempt at conducting a form of workers’ inquiryamong black domestic workers, at that time still a mostly unorganized sector of the working class; she also picks up a line of argument that resonates with other currents of black radicalism (including Claudia Jones, W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, and others), tracing the survivals of slavery within the industrializing northern ghetto, where recent black migrants encountered new forms of extra-economic coercion and superexploitation.1 Over the course of four articles, Cooke demonstrates how the set-up of these “slave markets” across New York City, where women stood on sidewalks near department stores seeking offers for a day’s work, engendered isolation (their actual workplaces were always changing, from the Upper East Side to Long Island) and depressed wages through competition (they had practically no bargaining power). In her personal experience as part of the “paper bag brigade,” Cooke details the the grueling nature of the work and the overt racism often encountered, as well as how the informal wage agreement made procuring daily necessities ‒ transportation, food, etc. ‒ a strenuous task. She ends by emphasizing unionization and struggle as the principal means for abolishing these markets once and for all. Even though the Woolworth’s on E 170th St in the Bronx has long been shuttered, Cooke’s reports remain essential material as we continue to think through the connections between migration, racialization, and domestic labor today.

***
“I Was Part of the Bronx Slave Market”
The Daily Compass, January 8th, 1950, pages 1, 15.

I was a slave.

I was part of the “paper bag brigade,” waiting patiently in front of Woolworth’s on 170th St., between Jerome and Walton Aves., for someone to “buy” me for an hour or two, or, if I were lucky, for a day.

That is the Bronx Slave Market, where Negro women wait, in rain or shine, in bitter cold or under broiling sun, to be hired by local housewives looking for bargains in human labor. It has its counterparts in Brighton Beach, Brownsville and other areas of the city.

Born in the last depression, the Slave Markets are products of poverty and desperation. They grow as employment falls. Today they are growing.

They arose after the 1939 crash when thousands of Negro women, who before then had a “corner” on household jobs because they were discriminated against in other employment, found themselves among the army of the unemployed. Either the employer was forced to do her own household chores or she fired the Negro worker to make way for a white worker who had been let out of less menial employment.

The Negro domestic had no place to turn. She took to the streets in search of employment – and the Slave Markets were born.

Their growth was checked slightly in 1941 when Mayor LaGuardia ordered an investigation of charges that Negro women were being exploited by housewives. He opened free hiring halls in The Bronx and other areas where Slave Markets had mushroomed. They were not entirely erased, however, until World War II diverted labor, skilled and unskilled, to the factories.

Today, Slave Markets are starting up again in far-flung sections of the city. As yet, they are pallid replicas of the depression mode: but as unemployment increases, as more and more Negro Women are thrown out of work and there is less and less money earmarked for full-time household workers, the markets threaten to spread as they did in the middle ‘30s, when it was estimated there were 20 to 30 in The Bronx alone.

The housewife in search of cheap labor can easily identify the women of the Slave Market. She can identify them by the dejected droop of their shoulders, or by their work-worn hands, or by the look of bitter resentment on their faces, or because they stand quietly leaning against storefronts or lamp posts waiting for anything – or for nothing at all.

These unprotected workers are easily identified, however, by the paper bag in which they invariably carry their work clothes. It is a sort of badge of their profession. It proclaims their membership in the “paper bag brigade” – these women who can be bought by the hour or by the day at depressed wages. The way the Slave Market operates is a primitive and direct and simple – as simple as selling a pig or a cow in a public market.

The housewife goes to the spot where she knows women in search of domestic work congregate and looks over the prospects. She almost undresses them with her eyes as she measures their strength, to judge how much work they can stand.

If one of them pleases her, the housewife asks what her price is by the hour. Then she beats that price down as low as the worker will permit. Although the workers usually starts out demanding $6 a day and carfare, or $1 an hour and carfare, the price finally agreed upon is pretty low – lower than the wage demanded by public and private agencies, lower than the wage the women of the Slave Market have agreed upon among themselves.
Few Changes

I know because I moved among these women and made friends with them during the late 1930s. I moved among them again several days ago, some ten years later. And I worked on jobs myself to obtain first-hand information.

There is no basic change in the miserable character of the Slave Markets. The change is merely in the rate of pay. Ten years ago, women worked for as little as 25 cents an hour. In 1941, before they left the streets to work in the factories, it was 35 cents. Now it is 75 cents.

This may seem like an improvement. But considering how the prices of milk and bread and meat and coffee have jumped during the past decade, these higher wages means almost no gain at all.

And all of the other evils are still there.

The women of the “paper bag brigade” still stand around in all sorts of weather in order to get a chance to work. They are still forced to do an unspecified amount of work under unspecified conditions, with no guarantee that, at the end of the day, they will receive even the pittance they agreed upon.

They are still humiliated, day after day, by men who frequent the market area and make immoral advanced. Pointing to this shameful fact, civic and social agencies have warned that Slave Market areas could easily degenerate into centers of prostitution.

So they could, were it not for the fact that the women themselves resent and reject these advances. They are looking for an honest day’s work to keep body and soul together.
“Where Men Prowl and Women Prey on Needy Job-Seekers”
The Daily Compass, January 9th, 1950, pages 4, 7.

I was part of the Bronx Slave Market long enough to experience all the viciousness and indignity of a system which forces women to the streets in search of work.

Twice I was hired by the hour at less than the wage asked by the women of the market. Both times I went home mad – mad for all the Negro women down through the ages who have been lashed by the stinging whip of economic oppression.

Once I was approached by a predatory male who made unseemly and unmistakable advances. And I was mad all over again.

My first job netted me absolutely nothing. My employer on the occasion was a slave boss and I quit cold soon after I started.

My second job netted me $3.40 for a full day of the hardest kind of domestic work. My “madam” – that is how the “slaves” describe those who hire them – on this occasion was a gentle Mrs. Simon Legree, who fed me three crackers, a sliver of cream cheese, jelly, and a glass of coffee while she ate a savory stew.

The brush with the man was degrading and unspeakable.

These are the everyday experiences in the Bronx Slave Market and in the markets elsewhere in the city.

***

The Birthmark of Damnation: Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Black Body

R.L. Stephens May 17, 2017
From Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated), Kara Walker.

Liza Bramlett was a slave. She lived on a cotton plantation in the Mississippi Delta, during the 19th century. White men raped her repeatedly throughout her life. They traded her body amongst themselves in exchange for calves and piglets. In the end, Liza gave birth to 23 children, 20 of whom were conceived by rape. One of Liza’s daughters, Ella Townsend, was born after emancipation, but remained in the bondage of sharecropping in rural Mississippi. As an adult, she carried a pistol with her in the fields, determined to protect herself and the surrounding children. One day, a white man on horseback rode into the fields. He had come to abduct a young Black girl. Ella, carrying her pistol in a lunch pail, intervened. “You don’t have no Black children and you’re not going to beat no Black children,” she told the intruder. “If you step down off that horse, I’ll go to Hell and back with you before Hell can scorch a feather.”

“I do not believe that we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves,” Ta-Nehisi Coates says of white racists in the final paragraph of his bestseller, Between the World and Me, written as an open letter to his son. Coates describes racism as galactic, a physical law of the universe, “a tenacious gravity” and a “cosmic injustice.” When a cop kills a Black man, the police officer is “a force of nature, the helpless agent of our world’s physical laws.” Society is equally helpless against the natural order. “The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed,” says Coates.

In a widely replicated gesture, Coates locates the experience of racism in the body, in a racism that “dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth.” In the slim volume, fewer than 300 pages, the word “body” or “bodies” appears more than 300 times. “In America,” he writes, “it is traditional to destroy the black body.” Another brooding passage dwells on the inevitability of this violence.


It had to be blood. It had to be nails driven through a tongue and ears pruned away. It had to be the thrashing of a kitchen maid for the crime of churning the butter at a leisurely clip. It could only be the employment of carriage whips, tongs, iron pokers, handsaws, stones, paperweights or whatever might be handy to break the black body.

Yet Coates’s descriptive language and haunting narrative are not mere metaphors. They act as an ontological pivot, mystifying racism even as it is anchored in its physical effects.

Metaphor has long been used to capture racism’s almost unimaginable brutality. Lynching became “strange fruit” in Abel Meerpool’s song, made famous by Billie Holiday. In a wry, tragic innuendo, rape was referred to in Black communities as “nighttime integration.” The use of metaphor is not in itself an obfuscation. But Coates wields metaphor to obscure rather than illuminate the reality of racism. What we find all too often in Coates’s narrative universe are bodies without life and a racism without people. To imbue race with an ontological meaning, to make it a reality all its own, is to drain it of its place in history and its indelible roots in discrete human action. To deny the role of life and people — of politics — is to also foreclose the possibility of liberation.

Kunstwerke auf dem Kopf

Das Beisammensein der Frauen, um sich gegenseitig zu frisieren, ist wie hier in Mali ein wichtiger Teil des Soziallebens in Afrika. (Bild: Lily Franey / GAMMA-RAPHO / laif)

NZZ, von David Signer, Dakar 26.7.2017
Weltweit ist der Afrolook unter schwarzen Frauen wieder auf dem Vormarsch. In Afrika selbst hält man nichts von Natürlichkeit. Frisuren gelten dort seit Jahrhunderten als Teil der Kultur.

Im subsaharischen Afrika gibt es eine jahrhundertealte Kultur der aufwendigen Frisuren. Die Haartrachten sind dort oft komplex und voller Symbolik. Im traditionellen Umfeld verweisen sie auf ethnische Zugehörigkeit, soziale Stellung, Zivilstand, Altersgruppe, Kaste, Schicht und Mythologie. Dort ist man nicht frei in der Wahl seiner Frisur. In der Grossstadt hingegen geht es um Ästhetik und individuellen Ausdruck. In beiden Fällen nimmt das Frisieren Stunden, ja Tage in Anspruch, und das Resultat ähnelt oft Kunstwerken mit einer differenzierten Zeichensprache.
Gegenwärtig bewegt in den USA und auch in Europa eine Debatte über die Frisuren der Schwarzen die Gemüter. Geglättete Haare stehen dabei, wie aufgehellte Haut, für Selbstverleugnung und Anpassung an die Weissen. Demgegenüber gilt der «natürliche» Afrolook als Bekenntnis zur eigenen, unverfälschten Identität. Dabei wird deutlich, wie sehr Haare politisch sind. Obama wäre mit Dreadlocks nicht Präsident geworden. Sogar seine Frau Michelle hätte ihm mit einem Afrolook anstelle ihrer geglätteten Haare wohl seine Karriere vermasselt.

Die Gegenüberstellung «natürlicher Afrolook» contra «unnatürliches, gestrecktes Haar» lässt sich jedoch nur bedingt auf Afrika übertragen. Dort haben Haare kunstvoll zu sein. «Unbearbeitetes» Haar hat in Afrika nichts mit Authentizität zu tun, sondern mit Einfallslosigkeit. «Sie trägt ihr Haar wie die Algen im Fluss», sagt man gelegentlich leicht verächtlich über weisse Frauen, die es offen tragen. Es gibt zwar in der Stadt auch Frauen, die mit Extensions den Haarwuchs der Weissen kopieren. Aber eine Rückkehr zur eigenen Kultur kann in Afrika nicht «Zurück zum Afrolook» heissen, sondern wenn schon zur anspruchsvollen Frisurenpraxis aus Zöpfeln, Flechten, Nähen und dem Einarbeiten von Perlen, Kaurischnecken und anderen Schmuckstücken.

Die Renaissance des Afrolooks in den USA hat viel zu tun mit einem spezifisch schwarzen Feminismus, der sich vom weissen Mainstream-Feminismus abgrenzen und emanzipieren will. Ironischerweise läuft er aber Gefahr, die Afrikanerinnen fälschlicherweise als ihresgleichen zu sehen. Dabei drückt sich deren spezifische Geschichte und Kultur doch auf eine andere Art in den Haarmoden aus als in den USA. Die verbreitete Ablehnung des Afrolooks in Afrika hat nichts zu tun mit kultureller Entfremdung, im Gegenteil. Nirgendwo sonst herrscht eine so differenzierte Coiffure-Kunst wie südlich der Sahara. Die Frisuren sind, wie Kleidung, Kosmetik und Schmuck, mit ihrer Formensprache ein Teil der Kultur und in diesem Sinne auf positive Art «unnatürlich».

Tropenliebe

http://www.gmw.ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/gess/ifg/geschichte-der-modernen-welt/documents/Publikationen/ta_20150512_0_0_8%20%282%29.pdf


Sie sind der Natur oder fremden Kulturen gewidmet, man assoziiert Gutes mit ihnen – doch ihre Geschichte hat eine blutige Komponente, die heute aus dem öffentlichen Bewusstsein entschwunden ist. Es geht um urschweizerische Institutionen wie den Nationalpark in Graubünden, das Basler Museum der Kulturen oder die Akademie der Naturwissenschaften. Wer gründlich in ihre Frühzeit zurückblickt, findet sich unversehens in einer Welt wieder, die nach landläufiger Meinung keine schweizerische ist: die Welt der europäischen Kolonialreiche in den «unterentwickelten» Erdteilen des 19. Jahrhunderts. Eine Welt, die wissenschaftliche Neugier mit Unterdrückung und Zerstörung verschwisterte.
Es war dies die Welt von Fritz und Paul Sarasin – Letzterer bekannt als Gründer des Schweizerischen Nationalparks, mit entsprechendem Ansehen bis heute. Wie eine Untersuchung des Historikers Bernhard Schär jetzt zeigt, steht das Forscherduo Sarasin beispielhaft für schweizerische Verstrickungen in den westlichen Imperialismus mit seinen mörderischen Folgen.

Im Dschungel die Liebe leben
Zugleich stehen die zwei, deren bewegtes Leben einen ansehnlichen Aben­teuer­roman hergäbe, für eine Vielzahl schillernder Ambivalenzen. Das wird schon am Titel von Schärs Dissertation deutlich. «Tropenliebe» heisst es da doppeldeutig – gemeint ist, wie der Autor erläutert, die Liebe der Sarasins für die Tropen, aber auch in den Tropen. Denn die beiden Vettern zweiten Grades aus einer der vornehmsten Basler Familien verband gemäss Schärs Forschungen mehr als blosse Blutsverwandtschaft. Als Freundes- und Liebespaar pflegten sie eine zu ihrer Zeit nicht akzeptierte Lebensform (bis zur Emanzipation homosexueller Gemeinschaften sollten noch über hundert Jahre vergehen). Die ausgiebigen Forschungsreisen verschafften den Sarasins die Möglichkeit, ihre Beziehung zu leben – weitab vom einengenden Normativ des europäischen Bürgertums, umgeben nur von Dschungel, einheimischen Helfern und der Verheissung des Unbekannten.
Denn das gab es damals noch, im ausgehenden 19. Jahrhundert: riesige Landstriche, Inseln von der Grösse halber Kontinente, die noch nie von einem Europäer betreten, geschweige denn kartografiert wurden. Die Welt hatte noch ihre Geheimnisse.
Sie hatte, zum Beispiel, die Insel Ceylon, das heutige Sri Lanka. Und sie hatte Celebes, das heute Sulawesi heisst und zu Indonesien gehört. Es waren diese Inseln, deren Geschichte sich verhängnisvoll mit dem Leben der Sarasins verknüpfen sollte – vor allem Celebes.