One government program did reach her, and it changed the price on the corner. Emergency relief, inadequate as it was, meant that literal starvation was no longer standing behind her while she negotiated. With a small relief check as a floor, women who had been taking 15 and 20 cents an hour could hold out for 25 and even 30. Many went to the market specifically to supplement relief payments that could not cover a Harlem rent.
That small gain would later be turned against them. Within 3 years, a New York magistrate would use it to accuse domestic workers of preferring the relief rolls to work. And a newspaper headline would say they were using public money to put on the ritz.
Before that, in November of 1935, two women went to the corners and wrote down what they saw. The magazine was The Crisis, the publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded and long edited by W.E.B. Du Bois. The issue appeared in November 1935. The authors were Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke, and the title was The Bronx Slave Market.
Cooke had come to Harlem from Minnesota in 1926 and started her career working for Du Bois at The Crisis. In 1928, she became the first woman reporter at the New York Amsterdam News, helped organize the first union at a Black-owned newspaper, and was jailed for picketing during an 11-week strike there. Ella Baker had come from North Carolina and would go on, 25 years later, to found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Their article opened by asking who the dealers were, who the victims were, what the causes were, and what forces were working against it.
Then it answered with detail no official report had bothered to gather. It described the Jerome Avenue market as the more humane of the two because there at least the women had benches. It described the Simpson Avenue Market as the same trade at its worst where labor and under economic compulsion human intimacy were both for sale. It listed the hours from 8:00 in the morning until 1:00 in the afternoon.
It listed the rates: 15, 20, 25, and, with luck, 30 cents an hour. And it identified the buyers, which answered the first question this account opened with. The crash of 1929 had created an entirely new employer class. The lower middle-class housewife who had always dreamed of having a maid suddenly found that dream within reach standing on her own street corner in the form of women driven to the wall by poverty and discrimination.
Most of the employers were working-class white women. Because the busiest markets sat in heavily Jewish sections of the Bronx, many of the jobs were in Jewish households. That fact strained relations between Black and Jewish New Yorkers for years afterward.
The article ended with the arithmetic of the swindle. Few women received the full rate promised. Often a day of labor brought a single dollar. More often the clock went back an hour.
Too often she was sent home with nothing. The piece did something no complaint had managed before. It gave the thing a name that stuck in print in a national magazine. From that November forward the city could no longer claim not to know.
What happened next was that people started organizing. On February 14, 15, and 16, 1936, about 800 delegates gathered in Chicago for the founding meeting of the National Negro Congress. They came from churches, trade unions, fraternal lodges, farm groups, youth organizations, and professional associations. Roughly one-third of them were women, an unusual proportion for a national convention in that decade.
Club women from California met trade unionists from New York. School teachers sat with domestic workers. And the Congress adopted, unanimously, a resolution on women that called for organizing women domestic workers into trade unions of the American Federation of Labor. That resolution mattered because it settled an argument.
Charity and sympathy had been the standard response to the corners for 5 years, and it had changed nothing. The Congress declared that domestic work was work, and that the answer was a union. Two months later, in the April 1st, 1936 issue of The Woman Today, Louise Thompson published an essay called Toward a Brighter Dawn that laid out the national picture. She wrote that the Bronx market stood as a monument to the exploitation of the most exploited section of the American working population.
She put the numbers on the table. About 85% of all Black women workers in the United States were domestics, and they made up two-thirds of the 2 million domestic workers in the country. Outside of domestic service, the work opened to them was mostly laundries and the tobacco factories of Virginia and the Carolinas, where conditions were dismal. The small number in the professions faced discrimination and unequal pay.