The Washing Society: Atlanta, July 1881

In July 1881, Atlanta was polishing itself up. The International Cotton Exposition was 11 weeks away, the city's pitch to Northern capital that the South was done with its past and ready to do business. Railroads, cotton mills, Yankee investors: the "New South." The pitch depended on a story where Black labor was cheap, quiet, and nobody's problem.

Twenty Black women met at a church in Atlanta on July 19, 1881, and wrote a different story. They formally constituted themselves as the Washing Society, elected officers, and called a strike. Their demand was a uniform rate of one dollar for every 12 pounds of wash. Before the strike, a laundress in Atlanta earned somewhere between four and eight dollars a month for work that ran from before sunrise to after dark.

They went door to door. Black churches, including Wheat Street Baptist, opened their halls. Three weeks later the Atlanta Constitution, which had nothing kind to say about any of this, reported that the strikers had grown "from twenty to about 3,000 in less than three weeks." That is not a typo. Three thousand women. Atlanta's population at the time was roughly 37,000. White households across the city had no clean clothes.

The Constitution called the strikers "Washing Amazons." The Washing Society called itself a union, and its founding resolution framed the action as mutual protection, a pledge that no member would break rate and no member would be left to stand alone.

The retaliation

The city moved fast. Police arrested strikers on disorderly conduct charges. Several were fined. Sarah A. Collier was sentenced to the chain gang.

The city council went further. It proposed a licensing tax of $25 per year on every laundress in Atlanta, a sum designed to break the Society's membership in a single fee. Twenty-five dollars was several months of a washerwoman's pre-strike wage.

The counter-move

On August 3, 1881, the Washing Society wrote to Mayor James W. English. The letter offered to pay the proposed tax "as a protection so we can control the washing for the city." The strikers had read the ordinance as a weapon and proposed to pick it up by the other end. Pay us a living rate, or pay twenty-five dollars each for a license that lets us run every load of laundry in Atlanta during your Exposition.

On August 16, the city council's ordinance committee filed an adverse report on the license tax. The tax died.

What it won and what it did not

The dollar-per-dozen rate was not formally conceded across the city. Historian Tera W. Hunter, whose book To 'Joy My Freedom is the definitive scholarship on this strike, has documented that not every washerwoman saw her wages rise. That is the honest record.

The record also includes this: the license tax was defeated. The action rippled outward to cooks, maids, nurses, and hotel workers, who began threatening sympathy strikes. Three thousand Black women, 16 years out of slavery, had shown every worker in the post-Reconstruction South that organizing at scale was possible, in the city that was trying hardest to pretend otherwise.

The women who washed the New South's clothes refused to let the New South be sold over their heads.

Sources

• The Show Must Go On: Tera Hunter's Primary Source Lesson Plan for the Atlanta Washer Women Strike (1881), US History Scene
• The Atlanta Washerwomen's Strike Occurs, African American Registry
• Atlanta's Washerwomen Strike, AFL-CIO Labor History Events
• Tera W. Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Harvard University Press, 1997)