Some charged the worker for a thin lunch, and some simply sent her away at the end of the day with nothing at all, knowing she had no contract, no witness, and no court that would take her seriously. There was another danger on those corners. Men came to them, too. Sometimes making open propositions, sometimes claiming to be hiring on behalf of a wife waiting at home.
Behind the closed door of a private apartment, a day worker had no protection whatsoever. The women answered with what they had. On particular corners, they agreed among themselves on a floor price and refused to go below it. Many flatly refused window work, and some began wearing a wristwatch hidden under a sleeve so that when the clock on the wall moved backward, they would know.
On the afternoon of March 19, 1935, everything those women had been absorbing quietly came out into the street about 90 blocks south in Harlem. It started at the Kress 5 and 10 store at 256 West 125th Street, where a 16-year-old was caught taking a penknife worth 10 cents. The store declined to press charges and released him out a side door, but the crowd outside was never told. An ambulance came for a bitten employee and left empty.
A hearse parked nearby by coincidence. Word went down the block that a boy had been beaten to death in the basement. By nightfall, thousands of people were in the streets. Three Black men were killed.
More than 200 people were injured, and property damage reached about $2 million, nearly all of it to white-owned businesses. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia appointed a commission to explain how a 10-cent knife had done that. Its hearings ran for a year, closely followed by the Black press, and the answer it produced was about work. The commission's employment committee found that Harlem's Black residents were concentrated in a handful of occupations, and that the single largest category was domestic and personal service.
Out of seven industries surveyed, only three had a workforce that was more than 10% Black. The committee documented that most unemployed Harlem residents were being classified as unskilled, despite having training, education, and professional experience. It documented exclusion from municipal jobs and from the public utilities. In its conclusion, it stated that the outburst of March 19 expressed the long accumulated resentment of Black workers at being shut out of everything except the most menial jobs.
The housing findings ran alongside them. Landlords placed Black families in deteriorating buildings and charged them higher rents than the white families paid for comparable space. In 1934, Harlem held more than 56,000 family groups and most of those living in tenements were receiving some form of relief.
The final report was delivered to the mayor on March 19, 1936, exactly 1 year after the riot. It named discrimination in employment, police aggression, and racial segregation as the causes. La Guardia shelved it. The report was never officially released by the city.
The only reason its contents became public at all is that the New York Amsterdam News, a Black-owned newspaper, published it in serial form. So, the connection was now documented by the city's own investigators. The corners in the Bronx existed because Harlem women were barred from nearly every other kind of work in New York.
What made the corners legally untouchable was decided that same year in Washington. On August 14, 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act. It was the largest expansion of economic protection in American history and it excluded roughly half the workers in the country. Among the excluded categories were agricultural laborers and domestic servants.
Approximately 65% of Black workers in the United States held jobs in exactly those two categories. Charles Hamilton Houston testified against the exclusion on behalf of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, warning Congress that the bill would leave out the people at the very bottom of the economic ladder. The act passed with the exemptions intact. Historians continue to argue over the motive, and researchers at the Social Security Administration have concluded that the exclusion came from the difficulty of collecting payroll taxes from scattered private employers rather than from racial intent, noting that 27% of white workers were left out as well.
The effect, however, is not in dispute. Those categories were not brought into the system until the 1950s. The second law landed the same year. The National Labor Relations Act, passed in 1935 to guarantee private sector workers the right to organize and bargain collectively, also excluded domestic and agricultural workers.
Put those two exclusions together, and the situation on Jerome Avenue becomes clear. A woman hired off that corner had no minimum wage, no maximum hours, no overtime, no unemployment insurance, no old age pension, no workers' compensation if she fell from a window ledge, and no federally protected right to join a union and demand any of it. She was not working outside the law. She was working in a space the law had deliberately left empty.