When Workers Resisted Labor Exploitation At Bronx ‘Slave Markets’
Following the Great Depression, Black working class women flocked to street corners in the Bronx, New York, forced to sell domestic labor for far below its value in order to make ends meet. “They come to the Bronx, not because of what it promises,” reads the renowned exposé by two Black radical activists, investigative journalist Marvel Cooke and civil rights leader Ella Baker. These informal domestic workers flocked to the infamous “Bronx Slave Market,” “largely in desperation,” Cooke and Baker wrote in 1935.
Desperation did indeed characterize the circumstances at the so-called slave markets, in which impoverished women braved the elements for hours, waiting to be exploited by wealthy families for a few cents and hour and risking all manner of dangerous working conditions and potential sexual abuse.
