The Legacies of Black Working-Class Women’s Political Leadership

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keona K. Ervin
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Public Housing ◽  
Policy Reform ◽  
Mass Action ◽  
Housing Project ◽  
Grassroots Organizing ◽  
Community Organizers ◽  
Local Movement ◽  
Working Class Women

Jean King, a St. Louis transplant from Osceola, Arkansas, and Memphis, Tennessee, in the fall of 1968 spotted a young Andre Smallwood eating a piece of bread he found on the snow-covered ground outside of their Darst public-housing development located just south of downtown. King soon learned that Smallwood’s mother had a monthly welfare check that amounted to less than the newly stipulated rent increase. The contrast between King and Smallwood’s mother could not have been more striking, although both resided in the same housing project. King and her husband, employed and married with one child, had the means to avoid routine visits from caseworkers, fluctuating welfare payments, and rent schedules that continually increased. But negotiating these realities was typical for most other black women, many of whom functioned as their family’s breadwinners. Public-housing tenants had already been meeting regularly to discuss the possibility of conducting a rent strike when King attended a tenants’ meeting at the nearby Blumeyer Housing Project in midtown St. Louis. After King shared the story of her encounter with Smallwood’s mother, tenants elected her president of the Citywide Rent Strike Committee. Like many “organic intellectuals” who emerged as leaders of grassroots social movements, King came out of a local movement that was already organized when the time to strike arrived. King, along with other black women community organizers, went on to spearhead one of the nation’s largest and earliest rent strikes in the postwar era. Women’s militant mass action garnered national attention and later influenced public policy reform. Because of the long and distinguished activism of black working-class women, a groundswell of grassroots organizing on a national scale, and federal action in support of antipoverty ...

“We Strike and Win”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keona K. Ervin
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Women Workers ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Depression Era ◽  
Wage Cuts

In the Funsten Nut Strike of 1933, nut shellers shut down production to protest poor working conditions and wage cuts. A group of black working-class women positioned themselves at the center of Depression-era politics through the highly publicized, Communist-organized strike against the Funsten Nut Company. Among the most influential labor battles of its era, the strike carved out a space for black women workers in the growing and increasingly powerful radical labor movement, marking the development of that movement in St. Louis.

“Jobs and Homes … Freedom”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keona K. Ervin
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Public Housing ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Housing Authority ◽  
Women Reformers ◽  
Urban Inequality ◽  
Labor Activism ◽  
Urban Problems ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
The City

Chapter 6 uncovers the links between jobs and public housing. From the vantage point of overlooked historical actors, the chapter examines the massive urban renewal programs that razed black working-class neighborhoods and constructed massive public-housing structures throughout the city. The dignity for which black working-class women struggled pointed to a cluster of trenchant urban problems that St. Louis began encountering in the prewar period and later experienced in much more concentrated fashion. This chapter highlights the lives of public housing tenants and the labor activism of Ora Lee Malone to examine black women’s struggles against urban inequality. It also shows how black middle-class women reformers used their platforms to advance black working-class women’s causes. The work of the women featured in this chapter directly led to the 1969 rent strike, in which public-housing tenants struck against the St. Louis Housing Authority. In one of the first and largest rent stoppages in the nation, strike participants made tenant control a centerpiece of their platform.

Breaking the “Harness of Household Slavery”: Domestic Workers, the Women's Division of the St. Louis Urban League, and the Politics of Labor Reform during the Great Depression

2015 ◽  
Vol 88 ◽  
pp. 49-66
Author(s):  
Keona K. Ervin
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Working Class ◽  
White Male ◽  
Domestic Workers ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Local Chapter ◽  
Household Workers ◽  
Contractual Agreements ◽  
Everyday Resistance ◽  
Working Class Women

AbstractLargely denied membership in organized labor and access to basic labor protections, black domestic workers of St. Louis employed the local chapter of the Urban League's Women's Division to carve out a space for themselves in a growing, predominantly white, male labor movement and in the multiple coalitions that configured the New Deal. Domestics used household employment reform codes to lay the groundwork for dignity to manifest itself in their labor and contractual agreements. From the Household Workers Mass Meeting of 1933 to the close of the St. Louis Urban League's first phase in the late 1940s, black working-class women joined forces with progressive black women who led the Urban League's Women's Division to reform domestic employment through negotiation, enforcement, collective action, and everyday resistance. A border city with a large and settled black working class located within its core, St. Louis had acute class, gender, and racial divisions that shaped the terms of black women's economic activism. The Gateway City's mix of urban Midwestern-, northern-, and southern-style geopolitics propelled domestics’ mobilization, offering space for dissident women to call for changes to the social, political, and economic order.

“Beneath Our Dignity”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keona K. Ervin
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Women Workers ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Shop Floor ◽  
Theater Program ◽  
Racial Liberalism ◽  
Fair Wages ◽  
Working Class Women

Chapter 5 analyzes the initial rocky years of black working-class women’s entry into the needle trades, boot and shoe, and laundry factories and their unions during the early to mid-1940s. Black working-class women exposed the fault lines of the American racial liberalism espoused by civil rights and union progressives who worked to establish “interracial good-will” in unionism and the industrial workforce. Women’s resistance on the shop floor and in the union hall, demanding respect and fairness, challenged and altered community leaders’ programs. Black working-class women were less interested in breaking the color barrier than in earning fair wages, establishing fair standards, organizing work hours around other commitments, and working and organizing in a hospitable climate. Focusing on black women’s work with the ILGWU, this chapter examines their work and union experiences in the union’s worker theater program to consider why conflicts over historical memory; black women workers’ long demands for dignity, autonomy, and respect; and social reformers’ interracial experiments produced intense battles.

Maneuvering for the Movement

2018 ◽  
pp. 12-36
Author(s):  
Rebecca Tuuri
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Women's Organizations ◽  
National Council ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Black Sororities ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Women’S Organizations

This chapter explores the first three decades of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). In 1935, educator, clubwoman, and politician Mary McLeod Bethune founded the NCNW as an organization of black women's organizations to create a united lobbying voice. By utilizing a strategy of broker politics, the NCNW opened up professional opportunities for black women and lobbied for civil rights legislation. NCNW women also enforced strict standards of respectability as they sought such power. While the NCNW claimed to speak on behalf of all black women, a majority of its membership came from black sororities. This college-based membership, as well as the council's focus on black professionalization, meant that many working class women viewed the organization as elitist and uninterested in their concerns. However, beginning in the mid 1950s and continuing through the 1960s, the NCNW became more significantly involved in civil rights and the needs of the poor.

Neither Here nor There: Of the Female in American Legal Education

1996 ◽  
Vol 21 (02) ◽  
pp. 355-432 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Amede Obiora
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
White Women ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Law School ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Educational Processes ◽  
Working Class Women

In this Critical Review Essay, Professor Obiora brings together work from many traditions to address the issue of how differences among students beyond gender–and, in particular, differences in terms of race–might affect legal education. After situating the question in terms of the literature on legal education generally (including standard critiques), she delves into work on gender–in law generally, in kgal education, in moral development and learning, in language use, and in education generally–to elucidate hypothesized differences between men and women that might affect differential experience in law school. She then moves on to make the picture more complex by drawing on work that indicates cross-cultural and class-based variation around conceptions of gender. Using research by sociolinguists on educational processes and work by historians and feminists of color on the intersection of gender, race, and class, Professor Obiora suggests specific ways in which women of color and working-class women might diverge from middle-class white women in their approach to kgal education. In particular, she notes: (1) different speech patterns and linguistic socialization lend different meaning to “voice,”“silence,” and “interruption” in classroom interactions; (2) the historical distinction between public and private spheres has been much more sharply drawn for upper-middle-class white women than it has been for black and working-class women; (3) the exclusion of black women from male “chivalry” and feminine idealization necessitated the development of agency; black women could not afford to be passive. Given these points of divergence, but also given convergences among the experiences of women, Obiora suggests a complex and contextually sensitive approach to the issue of gender in legal education, one that takes seriously the differences that exist among women. Because of the richness of the literature reviewed here, we include a Bibliography at the end of the article.

Romantic (In)Justice: Criminal-Legal System-Impacted Black Women’s Romantic Relationship Status and Quality

2021 ◽  
pp. 155708512110194
Author(s):  
Allison E. Monterrosa
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Romantic Relationship ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Relationship Status ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Psychological Strain ◽  
System Data ◽  
Criminal Legal System

This study of working class, heterosexual, criminal-legal system-impacted Black women described the women’s romantic histories and current romantic relationship statuses in terms of commitment, exclusivity, and perceived quality. Using intersectional research methods, qualitative interviews were conducted with 31 Black women between the ages of 18 and 65 years who were working class, resided in Southern California, and were impacted by the criminal-legal system. Data were analyzed using an intersectional Black feminist criminological framework and findings revealed six types of relationship statuses. These relationship statuses did not live up to the women’s aspirations and yielded disparate levels of emotional and psychological strain across relationship statuses.

‘Excavating’ Pruitt-Igoe using space syntax

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-68
Author(s):  
Mark David Major
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Housing ◽  
Social Housing ◽  
Space Syntax ◽  
Modern Architecture ◽  
Housing Authority ◽  
Housing Project ◽  
Housing Projects ◽  
Charles Jencks

Pruitt-Igoe, in St Louis, Missouri, United States, was one of the most notorious social housing projects of the twentieth century. Charles Jencks argued opening his book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, ‘Modern Architecture died in St Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3.32 pm (or thereabouts) when the infamous Pruitt-Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grâce by dynamite.’ However, the magazine Architectural Forum had heralded the project as ‘the best high apartment’ of the year in 1951. Indeed, one of its first residents in 1957 described Pruitt-Igoe as ‘like an oasis in a desert, all of this newness’. But a later resident derided the housing project as ‘Hell on Earth’ in 1967. Only eighteen years after opening, the St Louis Public Housing Authority (PHA) began demolishing Pruitt-Igoe in 1972 [1]. It remains commonly cited for the failures of modernist design and planning.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document