“They Trapped Me with Chain and Gun”: Gender and Black Women’s Labor Struggles in 1970s Atlanta

In early June 1970, fifteen African American female workers walked off their jobs at Howard Johnson’s on Washington Street in southwest Atlanta. The restaurant held significant locational advantage for the city: it was one of the most popular restaurants in Atlanta and hosted crowds of sport enthusiasts coming and leaving Atlanta Stadium. However, as the working women described it, Howard Johnson’s resembled a southern plantation. When the workers began signing union cards, manager John Manion verbally abused the “agitators” and even fired a few workers.¹

Most of the strikers were waitresses who brought home sixty-five cents an hour as part-time workers, seventy-five cents an hour as day shift regulars, or one dollar per hour as night shift workers, plus tips. As a result, the restaurant possessed a locational disadvantage for the workers’ labor stability, wages, and ultimately their daily round capacity. As one striker pointed out, customers rarely tipped the waitresses because the food prices were too high. Plus, the stadium goers often ordered their food to go. “They order a dozen hamburgers to go, and we wait on them, but they don’t tip. During some ballgames, we don’t even have a chance to sit down.”² Only “regular” workers in name, waitresses were often laid off on days when there were no planned events at the stadium. Sometimes, waitresses were told to work at another Howard Johnson’s for the day and expected to pay the transportation themselves to a location in Hapeville. With this instability and wage theft, waitresses often took home less than twenty dollars a week. Few men worked at this Howard Johnson’s because, as one striker stated, “they don’t pay enough for men.”³

Supervisors and customers alike also subjected the waitresses to daily sexual harassment. Manion demanded that the women wear white bras, white girdles, and light pantyhose every day they came to work, speak in a “pleasant” tone, and “take it” when Manion dressed them down in front of the customers. Fed up with these conditions, the women went on strike. The restaurant attempted to replace the strikers, but the work stoppage crushed the business. One striker told Bob Goodman, “We’ve stopped the day shift regular customers almost completely.”⁴

Resource deprivation tied to the combined forces of capitalism, racism, and sexism informed how Black women workers constructed their protest activity. White unions and women’s rights organizations often neglected Black women workers. Additionally, they were excluded from legal benefits like minimum wage laws, the National Labor Relations Act, and other structural resources. White unions, already holding a discriminatory attitude toward Black women workers, designated their labor as domestic workers, waitresses, manual laborers, and clerical staff as too unstable and “unworthy” of organizing efforts. Therefore, Black working-class women’s material and social conditions were treated as more superfluous than their male counterparts’. Thus, these conditions made Black working-class women more prone to protonationalist organizing at the point of production including — extralegal wildcat strikes and housing rent strikes — to procure autonomy and resources for NSMC.

In fact, Black working-class women’s protonationalism challenged the rising second-wave feminist movement at the time. In their understanding of their historical role in the political economy of the United States and their superexploited status as Black women, they consciously chose not to fight in a gendered women’s movement that excluded their Black male counterparts and positioned them as antagonists. Rather, despite Black male chauvinism, they sought to educate, unite, and equalize their standing among Black men to weaken capitalism exploitation and white supremacy. At the 1970 International Women’s Day march in Atlanta, one of the few Black women in attendance argued that “the struggle is different for Black women [than white women]” and their objective must be to “unite with Black men in order to build a liberation army.” Black Atlantan Jean Jamison added, “I fail to see the feasibility of your being liberated as a woman when you have yet to be liberated as a Black…. How can a Black Sister be liberated while her Black Brother is being oppressed and enslaved?” WAGA TV news reporter Felicia Jeter’s perspective on white feminism offered insight as to why Black working-class women generally viewed the Black community as a colony: “Women’s groups get upset with me because I tell them ‘I’m Black before I’m a [woman] because that’s the order in which I’m threatened. If you deal with the problem of being a “nigger” then the other things seem to fall into place.’ I really believe that this the reason why so many Black women are not more involved in the women’s movement.”⁵

As historian Ashley Farmer argues, “Black women’s collective, and, at times, conflicting, debates over Black womanhood show that the . . . activists’ idealized, public projections of Black manhood and womanhood was a critical site of Black Power activism and theorizing.” Black women especially considered Black solidarity outside of Eurocentrism to be the path to autonomy. Thus, women in the Black Power era typically understood their position or identity as political. As Farmer continues, this was a cornerstone of the Black Power era. Black working-class women sought to redirect their political position in both the movement and society.⁶

Black women workers consciously chose the point of production to achieve these goals. Fighting for better working conditions, higher wages, and agency in the work space vastly improved women’s ability and positioned them closer to their male counterparts to move the neighborhoods closer through security, trust, and identity against those outsiders threatening them: banks, real estate agents, and elected officials. Thus, Black working-class leaders like Louise Whatley and Eva Davis recognized that organizing at the point of production offered Black working women the space and resources to equalize their standing with Black men while opposing racial exploitation.

In May 1970, Louise Whatley attempted to unionize Black women workers at Kessler’s Department Store in southwest Atlanta. She organized a union card drive with the independent Black union the National Council of Distributive Workers, which she had worked closely with in supporting the sanitation strike that year. Once store owner Ed Kessler discovered this, he immediately fired Whatley. Because Whatley was as an esteemed Black Belt activist, the community quickly set up pickets at Kessler’s, singing, “Ain’t gonn make no money today…. Ain’t gonna sell no records today.” The Kessler’s picket eventually disrupted the city’s busy weekend. On Saturday of the first week, virtually all the stores in the downtown area were in a state of confusion; many stores remained empty as shoppers feared crossing the picket lines. One protester made it clear that this fight was part of a larger struggle for Black Power: “This is not a fight for Louise Whatley. It is for all Blacks and women especially in the store.” After three weeks of picketing, Kessler’s was closed forever.⁷

Atlanta power brokers felt the potency of Black working-class women’s social movements, primarily because they secured enough leverage to disrupt multiple sectors of the urban region. One such organizer, Eva Davis, built overlapping movements across space, housing, and labor to upend the subproletarian status of African American women, both at work and in the oppressed East Lake Meadows community. Built in October 1970, East Lake Meadows public housing project in the DeKalb County section of Atlanta was criticized for its poor construction from the start. The $15 million units housed close to 5,000 residents with an estimated 8,000 additional people on the waiting list. Most of those individuals never saw the inside of an East Lake Meadows apartment, while others were displaced. The housing sat on land that was cleared for the city to build a new civic center, stadiums, insurance buildings, and banks. The twenty-five to thirty acres of land in East Lake Meadows earmarked for parks remained barren. Because East Lake had been built on country club grounds, the turf grass was removed and never replaced. Drainage was such a crisis that constant flooding produced what the residents called “red clay pools” around the project. Elderly residents lived in a high-rise section with no accessible nurses or recreational activities. Since the promised shopping center was never built, the closest stores were the high-priced Majik Market and Colonial Store on the other side of a four-lane street. Colonial Store employees especially were known to sexually harass Black female customers. As a result, Black East Lake residents were forced to constantly change their daily rounds to get to cheaper, better-quality grocery stores. The Atlanta Housing Authority and city hall often ignored residents’ demands for repairs. Because of a lack of traffic lights (commonly missing from Black urban spaces), a car hit three children and killed a woman at the intersection of East Lake Boulevard and Memorial Drive. The residents also had to choose between no police presence or police harassment and abuse. When Davis organized a confrontation with the African American aldermanic police chair, Q. V. Williamson, no action was taken to assist the residents.⁸

Davis channeled East Lake Meadows’ anger in early May 1972, when she gathered a dozen Black East Lake Meadows women to picket a Church’s Chicken restaurant on Second Avenue. When the protesters arrived, all employees inside walked off the job and joined the picketers. The strikers delivered a massive list of demands to end their wildcat strike: the rehiring of a Black assistant manager who was fired without cause; a pay raise above their $1.60-an-hour salary; sick leave; fringe benefits; and overtime pay. Davis sought to make the restaurant chain pay for its right to reside in Black Atlanta yet no longer operate in the community’s interests. “The enterprise makes over $7,000 a week in the Black neighborhood,” Davis stated, “but refuses to cooperate with neighborhood projects or hire within community.”⁹

By the second week of picketing, the Church’s wildcat strike became a Black working-class symbol for citywide resistance and class solidarity. The East Lake Meadows restaurant closed, and the protesters moved to the Moreland Avenue location, where employees did not walk out but customers refused to cross the picket line. By the end of the second week of May, Davis had created a movement with groups scheduled at different times of the day to picket five separate Church’s locations throughout the city. The strike produced a successful local movement center: protesters created pamphlets and flyers, walked door-to-door recruiting picketers and monetary donations, and set up resource centers at neighborhood churches and Davis’s home. By mid-May, the movement had closed ten Church’s restaurants with a plan to strike more.¹⁰

Much to the chagrin of Davis and her comrades, however, SCLC’s Hosea Williams requested to negotiate the labor contract on behalf of the Church’s Chicken workers. Williams’s fluid motion through multiple Atlanta movements created a paradox for grassroots Black revolutionary nationalists. Following his call for Martin Luther King Jr. to protest the murder of African American Henry Prather that sparked the 1966 Summerhill rebellion and his support for the sanitation strikers in 1970, Williams had fallen out of favor with other SCLC leadership. Tensions boiled over after he played an active role in other labor strikes for Black hospital, steel, and factory workers. Thus, Williams held an esteemed reputation for assisting labor struggles outside of the typical SCLC agenda. On the other side, though, he had also been heavily criticized for his liberal pluralist campaigns for elected office and for conceding to city hall and downtown businesses in some labor negotiations. As a result, working-class Black Atlantans were cautious with Williams: he was the exclusive member of the Black petty bourgeoisie with a reputation for fighting for the needs of poor Black people, but he took no concrete ideological stance on Black Power. Additionally, since this was an illegal wildcat strike, the workers had no real access to legal representation. Thus, it is more than likely that Davis reluctantly agreed to allow Williams to assist for access to legal resources; however, she made it known that Williams did not speak for her or the East Lake residents: “Church’s can do what they want with SCLC but they haven’t settled with us.”¹¹ In other words, Davis wanted to keep both residents’ and workers’ movements united while she carefully navigated Williams’s arrival and his role in both struggles.

Black Atlanta grew more enraged at Church’s when the company held an event in East Lake Meadows during the strike and gave 6,000 free pieces of chicken to the residents. Church’s attempt to co-opt Black working-class urbanites unleashed a groundswell of community support for the strikers. Morris Brown College students organized solidarity pickets at the Markham Northside Drive location, prompting a swarm of police to fight picketers. Officers severely beat two Black students, Andrew Mackey and Donald Denson, for their picketing. Police jailed Denson without medical care for three broken bones and eye and head injuries. When his brother stormed the jail and saw him bloodied, he mobilized 200 Morris Brown students to go to the Fulton County Jail. At the threat of possible violent rebellion, police finally released Denson and friends rushed him to Holy Family Hospital for treatment.¹²

Following this altercation, Hosea Williams ramped up negotiations and quickly announced a settlement with Church’s that raised more than a few eyebrows. The employees received a ten-cent-per-hour raise and the franchise implemented a policy to retain only two part-time employees. Church’s designated all other employees as “regular,” meaning they were granted hospitalization, insurance, overtime pay, holiday pay, and retirement pay.¹³ Williams hailed the settlement as “one of the greatest victories for the poor in the history of Atlanta,” but for East Lake Meadows, it left more to be desired. Although the East Lake women were central to improving the working conditions at Church’s restaurants, Williams did not bargain Davis’s original demand that Church’s hire from within the neighborhood and contribute funds to the community’s interests. In fact, Williams negotiated demands outside of community interests, including a clause for Black firms to receive “contracts.”¹⁴ While this agreement offered Black capitalists the opportunity to invest in the restaurant chain, it typically left Black workers out in the cold.

When evaluating the East Lake Meadows strike, the incorporation of Black petty bourgeois leadership at the negotiation table subverted the movement’s original protonationalist intent and reoriented it toward more conservative nationalist concessions. However, Davis and the East Lake women demonstrated that struggle inherently strengthened the use value of neighborhoods. The sheer amount of communication, coordination, picket training, political education, and resource mobilization involved in closing ten restaurants across the city bolstered their informal support networks both inside and outside the neighborhood boundaries. Their complicated experience in dealing with intraracial class conflict reinforced their security and trust values within their own neighborhood and strengthened their challenge of their affluent counterparts in Atlanta.

A month later, Davis and the East Lake activists escalated their struggle via coalition building with other Black Belt neighborhoods. They joined residents from Bankhead Courts, Carver Homes, Buttermilk Bottoms, Techwood/Clark Howell Homes, Thomasville Heights, Herndon Homes, and Bedford Pine in organizing a citywide rent strike for the 39,000 tenants living in deplorable AHA public housing. In the first week of July, over a dozen members from the tenants coalition stormed and overtook a city hall–sponsored “open house” ribbon cutting on Linden Avenue in northeast Atlanta for a new AHA project. The protesters set up an informational picket, shut down all remarks by AHA director Lester Persells, and took over the ribbon cutting, with Louise Whatley taking the scissors and proclaiming, “I’m cutting the ribbon of the model apartment the model hell.” After more speeches by other women, the police attempted arrests, but Whatley quickly shot back, “Go right ahead! Jail’s not that different from public housing!”¹⁵

Whatley’s enthusiastic and militant leadership educated and invigorated low-income residents leading up to the rent strike. Her subtle emphasis on Atlanta’s treatment of poor people as apartheid galvanized the movement into a quickly expanding rebellion. For example, Whatley spoke to the AHA about using welfare to keep poor Black people powerless and dependent on the state: “Once they get you on those welfare rolls they’ll never let you off. They throw you in public housing and go sky high on your rent. They don’t provide any childcare, so when you get a job, you have that extra expense at the same time they take away part of your support because you are working.” Also, there were locational disadvantages in AHA public housing that disrupted the residents’ daily routines and kinship networks. Tenants had to mail their rent each month because the city refused to create an on-site center. Because most public housing tenants lacked checking accounts, they had to pay extra costs for stamps and money orders. This required travel to and from the AHA office on South Pryor Street downtown, which for some residents was a four-hour bus ride! Last, the rent strikers acknowledged that the political economy of public housing exposed the AHA as only one symptom of a larger federal crisis. Because the city of Atlanta allocated little to no funds to support the AHA, the institution relied on rapidly decreasing federal funds under the Nixon regime. The instability of the release of federal housing funds which did not do long-range, comprehensive housing funding because “they make statewide grants a portion at a time completely tangled in red tape and restrictions” kept tenants in a constant state of volatility.¹⁶ This drastically undercut Black workers’ capacity to stabilize the use value of their neighborhood and, in turn, NSMC. Thus, the strikers’ major demand, besides full repairs of the housing projects, was to become voting members on the AHA Board of Commissioners. If Black working-class female tenants took control away from the five wealthy businessmen on the AHA board, they could obtain the power to control conditions in public housing across the city. In other words, protonationalism remained at the center of this social movement.¹⁷

The rent strike began with crucial support from several local organizations. The Georgia Tenants Association released a statement to all tenants requesting that they withhold their July rent. Additionally, leased housing residents in Betmar La Villa, Amanda Gardens, and Suburban Court refused rent payments as well. Community leaders led the pickets at each of the AHA’s project management offices. The education and organizing was so effective that one AHA project manager defected to the side of the rent strikers and vowed that no staff member at his site would cross the picket line.¹⁸

Not all Black Atlantans sympathized with the housing woes of the Black poor. One African American AHA official told the Atlanta Voice, “This is uncalled for. They’re blaming public housing for their uncleanliness.”¹⁹ The Atlanta Journal and Constitution refused to print tenant comments, but they eagerly ran AHA statements throughout the duration of the strike. Meanwhile, the city attempted multiple tactics to break the strike. City hall, the Economic Opportunity of Atlanta office, and the AHA conspired to send the police to intimidate picketing women and children. The AHA threatened to fire all managers, most of whom were underpaid Black women, who honored the strikers’ picket line (strikers included a demand for more assistance and pay for housing project managers). The AHA also appointed a Black tenant, Susie Labord, to dissuade strikers from continuing.²⁰

By the second week, the strikers had closed twelve AHA offices with sights set on the final ten. Indeed, city housing operations halted. Neighborhoods took turns hosting weekly political education sessions in community centers and in front yards on the history of housing discrimination in Atlanta. The leverage on display here rested on multiple residents from different housing projects engaged and socializing together. This dispelled the city power brokers’ often-used divisive tactic to claim that each project’s issues were distinct from one another.²¹ Instead, political education in these local movement centers unmasked the solidarity of the rebels’ interests. These sessions activated the consciousness of many residents, who pledged to donate their rent money for the duration of the strike toward housing repairs that AHA refused. In other words, the rent strike’s NSMC boosted the informal support networks by increasing resident buy-in and providing potential to remain long-lasting after the rent strike.

By the third week, Persells had reached desperation levels and begged the strikers for a meeting. However, Massell did not feel enough heat to concede to the strikers, and he refused to allow the strikers into city hall, forcing them to stand in pouring rain for hours. As a result, strikers gave the AHA a deadline of August 2 to develop an action plan or they would extend the rent strike into that month. When the meeting between the two sides occurred, over 300 strikers and supporters joined Whatley at the John Chiles Community Center. Ernest Jackson, the African American director of housing for AHA and second in line to Persells, arrogantly announced that they were only willing to change their lease agreements and grievance procedure without fixing the current inhumane conditions. Lilia Kapers did not hold back when expressing her disgust to Jackson about the clear class conflict: “[You’re] a Black man with a white heart…. You look on us like we’re rats and roaches.” Whatley added that they would continue to advocate for tenants to withhold payments under their own discretion, but the damage was clearly massive, with the city breaking out all the stops to scare the strikers into paying their rent.²²

The long-term booking and perseverance worked for the Black rebels. By mid-October that year, the AHA had lost over $185,000 in uncollected rents. Also, because of the length of the rent strike (many tenants refused rent payments through 1973), the national media attention, and other questionable AHA practices, the US Justice Department, Internal Revenue Service, FBI, and Department of Housing and Urban Development launched a fraud and corruption probe into the AHA.²³ Although it did not yield the protonationalist results they hoped for, the Black tenants’ rent strike created informal support networks across living and social spaces while also excavating hidden histories of grassroots struggles to show wider national and international audiences.

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This display of community solidarity, political education, and empowerment embodied the protonationalist spirit igniting Black working-class Atlanta. Revolutionary nationalism thrived in working-class Atlanta, and the massive offensive of protest activity symbolized the radical ideology and challenge to the subjugation of Black workers. Thus, when the Black worker struck first, it foregrounded the Black Power era in Atlanta. The city’s power brokers interpreted working-class rebellion as a threat and sought to restructure the political economy to discipline, destabilize, and ultimately subproletarianize the Black worker. The Black worker struck first, but the empire struck back.