Jenny Carson. A Matter of Moral Justice: Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice.

Abstract

In A Matter of Moral Justice: Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice, Jenny Carson puts Black women laundry workers and union organizers at the center of US history. Both hand and “power” laundries saw their heydays in the United States from the 1910s to the 1950s, in the years before household washing machines became the norm. “Mini-hells,” power laundries were massive factories where women sorted through disgusting dirty laundry; lifted heavy, wet piles of clothing; ironed sheets, drapery, bedding, and other hard-to-handle items; then sorted it for delivery—all in hot, humid conditions for ten or more hours per day. Although the work was extremely difficult, Black women preferred it to domestic work. The anonymity provided by the factory setting—becoming “proletarianized,” in Joe Trotter’s terminology—was better than working under white women’s microscopes. Carson tells us that the 1930s proved the pinnacle of what was a cross-race union movement. Building on the grassroots efforts of the communist Trade Union Unity League (TUUL), the National Negro Congress under A. Philip Randolph’s leadership, and a burgeoning Left-leaning, Black-oriented labor network, Charlotte Adelmond, Dollie Robinson, Jessie Taft Smith, Beatrice Shapiro Lumpkin, and Noah Walter, among others, pushed the larger labor movement to recognize the connections between race and economic exploitation and to organize purposefully to combat them. In doing so, Carson corrects the narrative that the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) was “the driving force behind the unionization of New York City’s laundry workers” (6). This alone is an important contribution to the literature, but Carson’s detailed study explains how Black women worked with white men at the local and national levels; how they “pursued a civil rights agenda that included equal pay for equal work”; and how, despite its shortcomings, industrial unionism proved a better model than craft unionism for organizing laundry workers (7). By the end of the 1940s, the white men who led the ACWA opted for labor “stability,” as historians have argued about other Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions. Carson claims that that choice privileged white working-class men over the more radical organizing drives that were crucial to building cross-race alliances, bringing Black workers into the labor movement, and keeping the focus on the economic component of racism. By 1950, the very architects of those more radical, left-wing, race-focused drives, including Adelmond and other Black activists, were ousted from the ACWA.