On the morning of February 26, 1941, Mayor La Guardia sent the New York City Police Department, working with the Welfare Department, to the Bronx street corners. About 100 women were collected and taken to relief centers where they were held and questioned for hours about their working conditions and about whether they were receiving home relief. The women had not been told this was coming. According to the Sunday Worker, they went to the relief centers believing they were being sent to jobs and would be paid for the day.
The New York Herald Tribune reported that they had been asked to serve as witnesses in exchange for a day's pay and a meal. La Guardia defended the operation by saying participation was voluntary and that the surprise had been necessary to get truthful answers. The condemnation was immediate and came from every direction. The American Civil Liberties Union, the National Negro Congress, and the Domestic Workers Union all denounced it.
Dora Jones called it an act of terror. What the city had done in practice was round up the victims. The conclusion was worse. The investigation announced that no exploitation had occurred at the markets on the grounds that investigators had found women being paid 35 cents an hour rather than 10.
The Sunday Worker accused the mayor of whitewashing the whole thing. When the report was finally issued weeks later, its recommendation was the same one the Committee on Street Corner Markets had made nearly a year earlier. The Bronx would get two employment agencies.
One finding from those interrogations deserves to be remembered because it settled an argument the women had been losing in public for 3 years. Almost none of the women questioned were receiving home relief at all. The magistrate's accusation from 1938 that domestics preferred public assistance to work was false, and the city's own police operation proved it.
The first of the new centers, the Simpson Day Worker Center, opened on Simpson Street in May of 1941. Some called it progress. The Militant ran a headline saying the Bronx Slave Market had simply been moved indoors, and noted that the women would now be sheltered from the weather, but not from the economics that put them there. In practice, interactions between employers and workers inside the centers were not closely monitored, and many of the same abuses continued.
By the end of September 1941, the committee reported that 6,000 domestic workers had been placed through the centers in five months. The markets did not end. They went quiet. And then a war economy arrived.
In January of 1950, a five-part series began running in a New York daily called The Daily Compass. It was written by a reporter who had gone undercover as a day worker on the Bronx corners. She had scrubbed floors. She had sat on a window ledge washing the outside of a pane. And a photograph of her doing it ran with the series.
The reporter was Marvel Cooke, the same woman who had co-written the original exposé 15 years earlier. By then, she was the first Black woman to work as a reporter at a mainstream white-owned newspaper in the United States. She wrote that standing on that corner waiting to be bought, she had lived through a century of indignity, connecting herself to a woman traded for two truck horses on a Memphis street corner in 1849. The point of the series was blunt.
Fifteen years after the name was first printed, after a union, a state committee, a mayor's investigation, and two new employment centers, the market was still operating. After 1950, the record thins out. The markets seem to have faded rather than ended, and the reason was economic change. The Second World War opened defense plants and factory floors to Black women for the first time, offering an alternative to domestic service.
But the real shift came later. The share of Black women working in domestic service stood at about 60% in 1940, and it fell to about 20% by 1970. And most of that decline came after the civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s finally opened other industries.
What those corners produced, besides suffering, is worth stating plainly. They produced a vocabulary. The phrase "triple exploitation," written by Louise Thompson in 1936 to describe Black women as workers, as women, and as Black people, entered American political language and never left it. They produced a legal principle that the domestic workers union fought for and eventually won in later decades, that a private home is a workplace and that the person cleaning it is an employee with rights.
And they produced people. Ella Baker went from documenting Jerome Avenue in 1935 to organizing the campaigns that built the movement. And in 1960, she helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which put young people in the streets across the South. The tactic those students used had been invented in miniature on a Bronx sidewalk. Women who had no union, no law, and no lawyer stood together on one corner, agreed on a price below which none of them would work, and held it.