Tera W. Hunter

In To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War, Tera W. Hunter examines the lives of working women in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Atlanta. Discussing Atlanta’s image as the “New South,” Hunter writes, “For African Americans, however, Atlanta was a paradox. It fostered a great sense of hope but also despair about the realization of full citizenship rights. Although Atlanta was a self-consciously forward-looking city, it was retrogressive in its race, gender, and labor relations” (pg. ix). Hunter continues, “Racial caste and the demands of the Southern political economy dictated that black women work, and in Southern cities their options were confined to household labor. Their experiences as laborers would determine how meaningful freedom would be” (pg. 3).
Beginning with Reconstruction, Hunter writes, “Just as the city’s infrastructure had to be rebuilt for daily life to reach a new normalcy, so blacks had to rebuild their lives as free people by earning an independent living. Women’s success or frustrations in influencing the character of domestic labor would define how meaningful freedom would be” (pg. 26). Hunter focuses on the work of black women laundresses, writing, “One important advantage of laundry work was that whites were not employers of laundresses as much as they were clients” (pg. 58). She continues, “Laundry work was critical to the process of community building because it encouraged women to work together in communal spaces within their neighborhoods, fostering informal networks of reciprocity that sustained them through health and sickness, love and heartaches, birth and death” (pg. 62). Washer women staged protests and strikes during the International Cotton Exposition of 1881, demonstrating their political power. According to Hunter, “Atlanta officials may have controlled black men’s labor, but the washerwomen seemed determined to divest them of authority over all black workers by using the threat of regulation to their own advantage” (pg. 94). Hunter continues, “After the washerwomen’s strike, black women continued their direct protests. In response to official indifference toward police brutality, they retaliated in the streets. Initially, their physical resistance exasperated authorities unable to control their spontaneously organized eruptions…Political disenfranchisement, vigilante violence, and de jure segregation intensified in the 1890s and began to tip the scales of justice decidedly in favor of whites” (pg. 98).
Addressing the character of the city, Hunter writes, “Though young, vibrant, and ostensibly progressive cities like Atlanta offered the best hope for fulfilling black expectations for freedom, they were often repressive. The so-called modern cities were the first to rationalize segregation as the solution to the race problem. An all-white police force was the most visible symbol of the enforcement of Jim Crow codes and of the unwritten rules of racial etiquette” (pg. 122). Leisure was one of these areas that saw new etiquette. Hunter writes of saloon patronage, “Black women were also the target of complaints, however; they were criticized for violating both prohibitions against consuming intoxicating drinks and gender restrictions” (pg. 165). Further, “Women’s behavior became a trope for the race, their public deportment and carriage the basis by which some assumed the entire race would be judged” (pg. 166). Dancing further served to illustrate divisions. Hunter writes, “As working-class women and men danced the night away in dark, dingy, public, and, sometimes, shady places, the black elite danced to a different beat in more immaculate surroundings, demonstrating the class privileges they openly embraced” (pg. 172). Middle class whites and blacks likewise divided over the issue of dancing. Hunter writes, “Both sides understood that dancing interfered with wage work, though clearly from antithetical perspectives…Workers saw it as a respite from the deadening sensation of long hours of poorly compensated labor – critical to the task of claiming one’s life as one’s own” (pg. 180). Finally, “white Southerners had even more at stake in controlling black leisure and dancing, since they continued to make claims for reaping the benefits of black labor power long after African Americans had been divested as literal commodities” (pg. 186).
Hunter concludes in the World War I era, writing, “White Southerners sought recourse in legal and physical coercion to achieve black female subservience because they could not achieve this in any other way during a period of unusual mobility. Beneath the rhetoric of ‘vagrancy,’ ‘idleness,’ and ‘patriotism,’ employers were distressed by black women’s agency, just as they had been since Reconstruction” (pg. 231). Despite this, “African-American women were resilient and creative, if not always successful in thwarting oppression, in their use of a variety of survival strategies – the establishment of strong community infrastructures and the use of countless other tactics to achieve liberty and justice” (pg. 238).… (més)

Tera Hunter has written an excellent book, one which is both scholarly and engaging for non-scholars. She writes about black women in Atlanta from the Civil War through World War I and the beginnings of their “great migration” to northern cities. Throughout most that period, over 90% of black women in Atlanta worked as domestic servants, making it very relevant for Real Help.

T’Joy My Freedom is an appealing book. Hunter’s descriptions of particular women and events give the book an immediacy and make it an enjoyable read for a wide range of readers. Her stories of black women scandalizing white observers with their bright clothes and parasols, the little-known strike of Atlanta washerwomen, and the rise of black women as blues singers give readers a sense of women not beaten down by the limitations of their lives. In addition, her meticulous research and writing ensure that other historians respected her work.

Hunter’s approach is to place the black women of Atlanta in the context of the emergence of the city after the Civil War. As she describes, reconstruction in Atlanta and throughout the south involved the shift from slavery to wage labor. Atlanta was a new kind of southern city based on railroads and manufacturing rather than slavery, yet it was always a place determined to retain control over blacks. Through Hunter’s sources we can see the emerging black neighborhoods, the palatial mansions of rich whites, and Decatur Street where new entertainment enterprises were emerging. Gradually, we also see the development of virulent anti-black attitudes taking shape and becoming the legal limitations of the Jim Crow south where blacks were threatened with violence and segregation was the norm. Ironically, black women were still expected to work in the homes of whites even as fears of what they brought into those homes grew. By the time of World War I, the possibility of jobs and greater breathing space offered black women and men alternatives to what Atlanta offered, and they began to move to northern cities.

Read more on my blog: me, you and books
http://mdbrady.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/to-joy-my-freedom-by-tera-hunter/… (més)