Help Wanted: The Bronx Slave Markets and the Exploitation of Black Women Domestic Workers

In 1939, a graduate student named Lois Taylor went undercover on the streets of the Bronx. The subject of Taylor’s months-long investigation was the so-called “slave markets” that had proliferated on the street corners of New York’s northernmost borough. Posing as a jobseeker, Taylor documented the markets for her Columbia University master’s thesis. At the infamous Bronx Slave Markets, Black women gathered to find domestic work in the homes of white families. On street corners, outside shops, and in empty lots, women waited for prospective employers to approach, size them up, and bargain for day labor. Rates were as low as 15 to 20 cents an hour or one dollar a day. Comparisons to antebellum America were hard to ignore. Of her own investigation, journalist Marvel Cooke wrote: “I was a slave traded for two truck horses on a Memphis street corner in 1849. I was a slave trading my brawn for a pittance on a Bronx street corner in 1949. As I stood there waiting to be bought, I lived through a century of indignity.” 

The Bronx Slave Markets date back to the early 1930s and were alternatively called street corner markets, slave marts, and the Bronx slave brigade. Though the exact origins of the name are unclear, New York Age claimed to have been the first to report and name the phenomenon. The Bronx Slave Markets comprised street corners throughout the Bronx, such as 170th Street and Jerome Avenue, and some areas of Brooklyn, such as Prospect Avenue and Fort Hamilton Parkway. The markets emerged in the wake of the Great Depression, when Black women—who had been systematically restricted to low-paying undervalued work before the 1929 stock market crash—were out of work in record numbers and competing with white women who were re-entering the workforce. Black women often faced discrimination at the fee-based employment agencies, which were known to favor white women for quality jobs. The lack of employment and the inadequacy of “home relief” or government aid, made the markets a viable option to Black women in most need of work, especially those who lacked formal training and newly-migrated Southerners. The Bronx Slave Market employers were largely working-class white women who, unable to hire domestic help before the crash, now took advantage of desperate jobseekers for cheap labor. Situated predominantly in Jewish neighborhoods in the Bronx, many slave market workers found work in white Jewish households, further straining Black-Jewish relations in New York at the time.

Black women hired through the markets performed arduous domestic labor including hand-scrubbing of floors and walls, heavy cleaning of bathrooms and kitchens, furniture polishing, loads of laundry—often work that was infrequently done by the housewife employers and which required strength and stamina. The most dreaded task was window washing, which often posed a real danger to domestic workers who had to hang out of multistoried buildings to complete the task. Reportedly, one woman was injured after falling from a sixth story window and another woman died from a fall. So dreaded was window washing, the Domestic Workers Union proposed an employer contract which banned the task. Workers complained that employers were “unreasonable and unfair” in their demands and “positively inhuman in expecting an amount of work wholly out of proportion both to the endurance of the worker and the time paid for.” For those who could get it, the labor was harsh indeed; still many jobseekers shuffled along for hours without prospects, enduring the elements. Most slave market jobseekers travelled to the Bronx by train from their homes in Harlem, carrying the signature brown paper bundle of work clothes which led Marvel Cooke to dub them the “paper bag brigade.” Those Harlemites who lacked the nickel train fare were said to have made the trek to and from by foot.

Slave market jobseekers were also vulnerable to sexual exploitation from men who visited the markets with overt propositions or under the guise of representing a wife “back at home.” Behind the closed doors of private homes awaited the potential for physical and sexual abuse. Facing the coercive pressure to provide for themselves and their families, some jobseekers did engage in sex work. This reality was heavily critiqued in Taylor’s thesis. It was more sympathetically, albeit subtly, dramatized in Elise D. Challenor’s short story “A Day’s Pay” from a 1940 edition of Opportunity. Challenor’s protagonist Jessie finds work on a Bronx side street at 30 cents an hour. After cleaning the entire home under the constant watch of the white woman employer, Jessie drops a vase while dusting a shelf. The employer threatens to call the police and angrily dismisses Jessie without pay. Ashamed of returning to her family empty-handed, Jessie decides that she would “have to take care of herself as the others did,” and walks the streets searching “into the face of each male passerby.” 

By mid-February 1936, labor activists identified unionization as the ultimate solution to the Bronx Slave Markets and the broader exploitation of domestic workers. At the National Negro Congress' inaugural conference in Chicago—of which one third of the participants were Black women—, the Congress unanimously adopted as part of its resolution on women the “[o]rganization of women domestic workers into trade unions of the American Federation of Labor.” In June, the Domestic Workers Union Local 149 (DWU) in New York announced the intention to bring all domestic workers in private homes under the union. DWU had formed in Sunnyside, Queens two years prior as part of the Building Service Union, an AFL affiliate. Among DWU’s primary demands were labor law protections—social security, worker’s compensation, minimum wage and maximum hours. The union also demanded higher wages, shorter hours, a 6-day work week, and Works Progress Administration (WPA) domestic service projects.

By 1937, under the leadership of Dora Jones and Rosa Rayside, the interracial union was between 350 to 1000 members strong, with Black women as its largest constituency. Significantly, it was the DWU’s work that helped to “recast the terms of the debate over domestic service,” whereby the home was understood as a workplace instead of a purely private domain. The union campaigned for legislative changes that would improve domestic working conditions and developed a strong labor contract. At 2561 White Plains Road, the DWU established a free employment center for all domestic workers, to facilitate union organizing efforts, and to aid in eliminating street corner activity. 

Still, DWU struggled with the Bronx Slave Market issue. In addition to lacking the funds needed to advance its unionizing efforts, the union found slave market job-seekers especially difficult to organize. Domestic service in private homes was isolated and slave market jobseekers were particularly hard to reach because of this isolation and their extreme circumstances. The markets appealed to the most vulnerable job seekers who had especially limited options due to a lack of training, experience, and other means of support. Such women claimed that their prospects were better on the corners than at the agencies, including the center on White Plains Road. Dora Jones lamented the inability to reach the slave market jobseekers, who she felt could most benefit from the union. The slave market jobseekers’ choices were subjected to the harsh respectability politics of the time and sometimes uncharitably characterized, even by domestic worker advocates. Lois Taylor cites an interview with Jones which casts the slave market jobseeker as short-sighted, “unskilled,” “unreliable,” and uninterested or “not ready” to organize themselves. 

By the time Lois Taylor began her investigation, the state agencies had already taken notice of the slave markets. In December 1939, Freida Miller, the Industrial Labor Commissioner of New York, formed the Committee on Street Corner Markets to study and eliminate the markets. The Committee comprised members of local, state, civic, and religious organizations, and labor representatives such as Dora Jones. In June 1940, the Committee issued a report of its findings, recommending the development of two free employment agencies in the Bronx as a balm to the street corner markets. 

In spite of the Committee’s report, several months later Mayor LaGuardia secretly ordered the New York City Police Department, with assistance from the Welfare Department, to round up street corner job-seekers for his own investigation. On February 26, 1941, about 100 workers were taken to relief centers and interrogated for hours, questioned about working conditions and whether they were on “home relief.” Reports on LaGuardia’s investigation were mixed. According to Sunday Worker, a Communist Party USA paper, the women were unaware of the planned interrogation and had gone to the relief centers under the pretense that they would be given jobs and a day’s pay. The Herald Tribune claimed the women had been asked to be “witnesses'' to the investigation in exchange for a day’s pay and a meal. Defending his actions, LaGuardia claimed that participation was voluntary and that the abruptness was necessary to solicit truthful information. The investigation was summarily condemned by the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Negro Congress and the Domestic Workers Union, with Dora Jones calling it an “act of terror.”

Absurdly, LaGuardia’s investigation concluded that no exploitation had occurred at the markets, since they found workers were paid 35 cents an hour instead of 10. Sunday Worker accused the Mayor of “whitewashing” the issue. The report of the investigation was issued weeks later and merely echoed the suggestion the Committee on Street Corner Markets had made nearly a year prior: the Bronx would get two new employment agencies. The United States Employment Service and the New York State Department of Labor oversaw the agencies including the Simpson Day Worker Center, the first of the centers, which opened on Simpson Street in May 1941. While some praised the new development, others saw it as an inadequate measure that would merely move the phenomena away from public view. A headline from The Militant, the newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party, read: “Bronx Slave Markets is Merely Moved Indoors.” The agencies did not eliminate the markets. In fact, much of the same abuses continued as interactions between job seekers and employers were not strictly monitored at the centers. The Militant reported that workers would be sheltered from the weather, but not “from the economic necessities of a bankrupt social system.” Nevertheless, the centers were deemed a success by the Committee on Street Corner Markets who reported that 6,000 domestic workers had received jobs five months after their opening. A decade later, Marvel Cooke’s investigation of the market, published as a five-part series in The Daily Compass, would attest to their endurance.

In addition to union organizing efforts, state and local agency actions, Bronx Slave Market workers fought back against their employers’ abuses, resisting exploitation in modest yet significant ways. For instance, women would informally band together on particular street corners and agree to demand a certain base wage. Undoubtedly, many workers refused window washing. Others stealthily wore wristwatches as it was a common practice for employers to trick workers, and gain hours of free labor, by setting their clocks back.

Some domestic workers, like Pansy Kennedy and Bessie Brown, appealed to the courts for justice. Although Kennedy and Brown were not slave market workers, their struggles brought attention to the plight of domestic workers and the street corner phenomena. In 1937, Kennedy sued her employer for unpaid wages in the amount of $10.60 (about $205 today). Astonishingly, Kennedy won, but Magistrate F. Anthony Burke, who presided over the case, critiqued domestic workers as being unwilling to work because they could fall back on home relief. In Burke’s characterization, domestics were jazzing or "ritzing" it up every night with the extra home relief money. Significantly, LaGuardia’s police interrogations revealed that almost all of the jobseekers did not collect home relief. This was contrary to allegations that relief was “enabling hired help to put on the ritz” and encouraging laziness, a precursor to the “welfare queen” narrative, popular in the 1980’s, that framed poor Black mothers as undeservedly receiving government assistance which they used to support their lavish lifestyles.

In the fall of 1939, Bessie Brown was hospitalized after being verbally and physically attacked by her employers, the Altshul’s, a wealthy white Mt. Vernon couple. The couple had levied blows and racial slurs upon Brown after she refused to leave their mansion without her wages. With the assistance of the International Labor Defense and interest from the Domestic Workers Union, Brown sued the Altshul’s for assault. Unlike Kennedy, Brown lost her case. However, the suit drew public attention, and the "not guilty" verdict was read to a packed courthouse—a victory which might have served as a deterrent to future potentially abusive employers. After painfully rehashing the ordeal, Bessie said she was “happy” to “bring to light the intolerable conditions under which domestics must work.”

The Bronx Slave Markets, described as a “graphic monument to the bitter exploitation of this most exploited section of the American working population—the Negro women,” is a brief chapter in the long history of Black women’s labor struggles in the United States. They were partially borne out of the racist and sexist limitations placed on Black women’s employment potential since emancipation; domestic service “largely defined Black women’s work for the course of a century” thereafter. Black women were systematically excluded from other sectors, even as white women made gains in various industrial and professional arenas. By 1940, when Bronx Slave Markets had been subject to public awareness and reform efforts by labor advocates, there were five times as many Black women in domestic service as white women. From their white employers’ perspectives, Black women were quintessential domestics, described as “natural born servants…obedient and respectful” and, “by reason of race, docile…”; their presence in white homes served as a status symbol which “reaffirmed the employer’s racial superiority.” 

It’s unclear when the Bronx Slave Markets ceased altogether, although little record of them was found in newspapers after 1950. They may have temporarily subsided in the onset of World War II, which offered Black women alternatives to domestic service through opportunities in wartime industries. However, any significant gains in alternative labor opportunities were not realized until the mid-1960s, "due to a fundamental challenge to the racial order," and the shift in sexual politics ushered in by the civil rights and feminist movements. As a result, the percentage of Black women in domestic work steadily declined from 60 percent in 1940 to 20 percent in 1970. Although Black women’s opportunities have expanded in the last several decades, their labor struggles are ongoing, including the fight for dignity and protections for domestic work.

If you’re curious about the Bronx Slave Markets and the history of Black women domestic workers, please consult NYPL resources to find out more.

Baker, Ella and Marvel Cooke. “Bronx Slave Market.” The Crisis. Nov. 1935. Accessed via Google Books.

Branch, Enobong Hannah. “Excellent Servants: Domestic Service as Black Women’s Work.” In Opportunity Denied: Limiting Black Women to Devalued Work, 49 -70. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011.

“Bronx Slave Market Report Handed to Mayor LaGuardia.” New York Amsterdam Star-News, Mar. 22, 1941.

“Campaign to Wipe Out ‘Bronx Slave Markets’.” New York Amsterdam News, Mar. 6 1937.

Challenor, Elise D. “A Day’s Pay: A Short Story.” Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life 18, no. 9 (1940): 136-137.

“City Questions 64 Women on ‘Slave Markets’: Mayor Says Bronx Street Job Center Investigation Reveals No Exploitation.” New York Herald Tribune, Feb. 27, 1941.

“Civilization, 1940.” New York Age, Mar. 9, 1940.

Cooke, Marvel. “‘Help Wanted for the Help: Sorry Plight of Domestics Sore Problem. Sad is the Situation of New York’s Workers in Homes of Rich.” New Amsterdam News, Oct. 7, 1939.

Cooke, Marvel. “‘Modern Slaves’: Domestic Jobs are Miserable in Hours, Pay. Union is Seeking to Relieve Their Bad Situation” New Amsterdam News, Oct. 16, 1937.

Cooke, Marvel. ''Mrs. LeGree' Hires Only on the Street, Always 'Nice Girls’.'' Daily Compass (New York, NY), Jan. 11, 1950.

“Court Finds Servants Use Relief Funds to ‘Put on the Ritz’ at Employer’s Expense.” New York Times, Jul. 14, 1938.

Dabel, Jane E. “Domestic Workers.” In Black Women in America (2 ed.). Edited by Darlene Clark Hine. Oxford University Press, 2005. Accessible via Oxford Reference Online.

Field, Murray. “Bronx Slave Market is Merely Moved Indoors.” The Militant (New York, NY) May 17, 1941.

Giddings, Paula. When and Where I Enter. The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1984.

Gore, Dayo F. “Race and Gender at Work: From the Labor Journalism of Marvel Cooke to Vicki Garvin and the National Negro Labor Council, 1935-1956.” In Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War, 100-129. New York: New York University Press, 2011.

“Hiring Hall Aimed at ‘Slave Markets’: City Officials and Welfare Agencies Back Experiment in the East Bronx.” New York Times, Apr. 27, 1941.

“Jammed Domestic Hiring Halls Shows Need for More.” Daily Worker (New York, NY), May 3, 1941.

“Job Agencies to Replace Bronx ‘Slave Markets’.” New York Times, Mar. 20 1941. 

“Magistrate Burke and the Bronx Slave Market.” Daily Worker (New York, NY), Jul. 15 1938

“Maid Loses Assault Case Against Couple: Petit Jury Acquits Wealthy White Mt. Vernon Couple of Alleged Beating of Girl.” New York Amsterdam News, Dec. 2, 1939.

May, Vanessa H. “Every Domestic Worker, a Union Worker: Middle Class African American Organizations and Domestic Workers Confront Labor Exploitation During the Depression.” In Unprotected Labor: Household Workers, Politics and Middle-Class Reform in New York, 1870-1940, 146-173. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

Rivington, Ann. Mayor’s raid on ‘Slave Market’ Arouse Anger: Round-Up of Negro Women Condemned by Harlem and City-Wide Progressive Groups; Foul Conditions Reviewed.” Sunday Worker (New York, NY), Mar. 2, 1941.

Singh, Amritjit. “Black-Jewish Relations.” In Encyclopedia of African American History 1896 to the Present. Edited by Paul Finkelman.  Oxford University Press, 2009. Accessible via Oxford Reference Online. Also see “Harlem Riots” by Nicole L. Plummer.

Taylor, Lois. “An Investigation of the Bronx Slave Markets.” Master’s thesis, Columbia University, 1940.

Thompson, Louise. “Toward a Brighter Dawn.” The Woman Today (New York, NY), Apr. 1, 1936.

“6,000 Placed in Jobs: Committee Set Up to End Bronx ‘Slave Markets’ Makes Report.” New York Times, Sep. 29, 1941.

“Unionization of Domestics is Launched.” Daily Worker (New York, NY), June 11, 1936.

ProQuest Historical Newspapers

America’s Historical Newspapers

Oxford Reference Online

African America, Communists, and the National Negro Congress, 1933-1947

(A library card is required for access to these databases—apply for a card here.)

Schomburg Center Scrapbooks: New York (City and State).

Schomburg Clipping File - “Domestic Workers” subject heading 001,451 

Black Female Domestics During the Depression in New York City, 1930-1940 by Brenda Clegg Gray

National Domestic Workers Alliance - A History of Domestic Workers and Worker Organizing.