When journalists Marvel Cooke and Ella Baker caught wind of a disgusting “slave” market involving Black women in 1930s New York City, they knew they had to do something.
So they went undercover!
This “slave market” occurred during the Great Depression. Before the stock market crashed, Black women were readily employed at decent wages. But the Depression took its toll, and white women who previously rejected domestic work became competition!
The lack of jobs birthed The Bronx Slave Market, where Black women would stand on a street corner waiting to be bought by white housewives offering “slave wages” – as low as 15 cents an hour.
They scrubbed floors, cooked, and cleaned, just to be paid pennies. And sometimes whites refused to pay them anything! Many women were also sexually assaulted, which Cooke herself experienced while undercover.
Cooke and Baker’s investigation exposed what little protection domestic workers had, and they urged for unionization. Today, Black women are still shortchanged and underpaid in the U.S. job market – they’re paid 36% less than white men and 20% less than white women.
White supremacy has always tried to exploit us. But like Marvel Cooke and Ella Baker, we must be willing to risk everything to speak truth to power about the sneaky ways of white supremacy as we pursue Black liberation.