Rosa Rayside and Domestic Workers in the Fight against War and Fascism

Born in 1898 in Stony Creek, Virginia, Rosa Rayside grew up during what is known as the “nadir” of U.S. race relations, after Reconstruction, from the 1880s to 1915 when Jim Crow legal segregation consolidated and racial violence peaked. While weeding cotton and peanuts on the land her uncle sharecropped, Rayside completed seventh grade, and several years later she married Tommie Bugg. The two moved to Brunswick, Virginia, where he worked on a sawmill; and they had four children by 1925.⁹

Racial and economic resentments after soldiers returned from the First World War sparked the “Red Summer” of 1919 that left hundreds of African Americans dead. In Norfolk, near Rayside’s home, a white mob attacked a homecoming celebration for African American war veterans, and nationally, the 1920s saw the reorganization of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).¹⁰ This terror and violence drove Rayside and her young family to join the more than one million southern African Americans who moved North in the Great Migration between 1910 and 1930, in search of safety and industrial jobs. When they moved to Harlem, Bugg gained new work opportunities, and Rayside worked as a domestic to support their family. However, after the Great Depression struck in 1929, Bugg became one of thousands who lost his job in Harlem where the Black unemployment rate was between one-and-a-half to three times that of white.¹¹

Rayside was forced to work for longer hours at a time when domestic work was harder to find and rife with exploitation.¹² The work of sustaining a private household, as Premilla Nadasen writes, “was one of the few occupations open to African American women and was weighted with a long history of slavery, servitude, and racial oppression.”¹³ The devaluing of Black women’s labor, assumptions of subservience, and exploitative nature of white employment, all holdovers from slavery, became even more severe when the economic crisis forced more women, Black and white, into domestic work.¹⁴ Rayside and other Black women found themselves competing for as little as ten cents an hour, or ten dollars a month, for fourteen-to-sixteeen-hour days of cooking, cleaning, laundry, ironing, serving food, childcare, and other tasks.¹⁵ White employers had long subjected Black domestics to intense supervision and to verbal, physical, and sexual abuse; and now many domestics found it hard to turn down even the most oppressive work conditions. Predatory employment agencies shepherded young Black women from the South, often for a fee, to work as live-ins in Northern cities, for starvation wages.¹⁶

By 1931, Rayside, unemployed and with four children to feed, joined thousands of other Black women in Harlem who were starting to fight back against these conditions and against racial inequities in employment and relief.¹⁷ She and other women responsible for their families’ welfare flooded the communist-linked Unemployed Councils and Tenants Unions. They launched hunger marches, strikes, and boycotts around the rising price of food; mobilized against evictions, police brutality, and discriminatory relief and labor practices; and pooled resources in mutual aid.¹⁸ The Black freedom struggle had become central to the CPUSA since the 1928 Sixth Comintern Congress adopted the Black Belt Thesis that called for an independent Black nation in the south, and launched new organizing efforts around Black sharecroppers, Northern desegregation, and racial justice.¹⁹ Now in New York and other cities during the Great Depression, these communist organizations were some of the only vehicles demanding jobs, housing, and aid for Black communities. Harlem, a mecca for Black political organizing and cultural power, became critical to these campaigns.

In 1931, the communist global campaign for the defendants known as the “Scottsboro Boys” solidified popular understandings of communism as an engine for economic and social justice for Black Americans. Traveling on a freight train that year to secure work, these nine Black youths had been arrested for vagrancy in Paint Rock, Alabama, and then falsely accused of raping two white women. When they were summarily charged, tried, convicted, and all but the youngest sentenced to death by an all-white jury, the “Scottsboro Boys” became the focus of a communist anti-lynching crusade, and the CPUSA’s New York City–based International Labor Defense (ILD) took on their legal work.²⁰

In Harlem and elsewhere, Black working-class women led Scottsboro Committees, and the youths’ working-class southern Black mothers became well-known activists, traveling the country to demand justice for their sons.²¹ ILD’s Comintern-led parent organization, International Red Aid (MOPR), sponsored a tour of Ada Wright, mother of two of the boys, around Western and Eastern Europe. After Wright returned in late 1932, the U.S. Supreme Court stayed the youths’ executions, and she announced that the Communist Party had saved her sons.²² Wright and other Scottsboro Mothers were domestic workers. Participating in this activism catalyzed Rayside and other domestics who saw themselves in the mothers’ struggles.

At the same time, Rayside was influenced by communist women leaders in Harlem who were articulating domestic workers’ plights as part of a global Black proletariat struggle. In 1933, after spending two years in the Soviet Union, schoolteacher, journalist, and communist leader Williana Jones Burroughs returned to Harlem where she started a Workers School that offered classes on Marxist-Leninism and the Black freedom struggle, including the labor of Black domestic workers. Burroughs’s own widowed mother had worked as a live-in maid while putting her and her brother in an orphanage. Burroughs recognized domestics as among the most exploited of the working class due to gender, race, and their unique difficulties of organizing, working in private homes and isolated from each other.

Burroughs seized her opportunity as the first Black woman to address the Comintern at its 1928 Sixth Congress in Moscow, and as a speaker at the 1927 World Congress of the League against Imperialism in Brussels, to articulate her “vision of a global effort to organize black people centered on black women” including domestics.²³ “Our work of organization,” she said, “must be extended to include the domestic worker and day’s worker.”²⁴ As historian Erik McDuffie explains, at a time when domestics were still mostly unorganized, and when “working class” referred to those working in mines, mills, factories, shops, fields, and offices rather than private homes, Burroughs and other Black left feminist leaders made a radical intervention. They “countered prevailing assumptions within the CPUSA and the black Left that constructed the ‘worker’ as a white male factory laborer,” and they repositioned the global revolutionary proletariat around the Black domestic. As McDuffie explains, they “recognized how black women’s employment as domestics in white women’s homes, their subjugation to racialized sexual violence, and the denigration of their bodies and reputations by their oppressors…were critical in shaping black women’s materiality and consciousness.”²⁵ By positioning Black domestic and day workers at the heart of the working class, due to the class, gendered, and racialized forms of oppression they faced, Burroughs and others insisted not only that their perspectives be centered, but also that they be viewed as leaders in the global class struggle.

Although Burroughs’s theories did not guide Comintern policy, they circulated internationally among communist women and took deep root in Harlem. There, working Black men and women, including domestics like Rayside, took classes at Burroughs’s Workers School and learned about labor struggles Black women were waging around the United States.²⁶ In early 1933, Black women waged a victorious nutpickers’ strike in St. Louis that in turn galvanized women in Chicago who won a strike in a garment factory against Jim Crow segregation and racist pay differentials.²⁷ In Harlem, women in the newly formed Laundry Workers Industrial Union launched several strikes, winning concessions at some of the largest laundry plants in Harlem and the Bronx.²⁸ These insurgent efforts were supported by the communist-linked TUUL, established in 1929 to form independent left-led unions.²⁹

This welter of activism spurred Rayside and other domestics in Harlem to launch a new initiative in spring 1933: a Domestic Workers’ Section of a new TUUL-affiliated Food Workers Industrial Union in Harlem.³⁰ Earlier efforts undergirded this one, including the Harlem Women Day Workers League co-founded in 1928 by Black communist Fanny Austin; but the Great Depression and the exclusions of domestic workers from governmental relief necessitated new organizing.³¹ The first tranche of legislation to mitigate the Depression’s effects in 1933, including the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), excluded agricultural and domestic workers, occupations dominated by Black workers.³²

The outrage that Rayside and many other domestics felt about these exclusions led them to form the DWU. In the summer and fall of 1933, Rayside, with Mary T. Ford of Harlem, Dora Lee Jones of Queens, and other domestic workers, met weekly and held open-air meetings in Harlem, speaking about their struggles and demands.³³ The Harlem Liberator reported that “response has been immediate and enthusiastic. Each meeting shows a substantial increase in membership.”³⁴ The Daily Worker concurred that “the unbearable conditions under which they work make it easy to show them the need for organization and struggle…particularly [for] the Negro domestic workers.”³⁵ By founding the DWU, Rayside and other domestic workers planned to stand up against the uniquely oppressive conditions of domestic work, the Black and white wage differentials, mass unemployment, and exclusion from government relief and aid.

The New York DWU was one of the first unions that sought not only to improve working conditions of Black domestic workers, but also to demand full labor rights and protections.³⁶ DWU members insisted upon the rights from which the National Recovery Administration (NRA) excluded them, to bargain collectively for minimum wages and maximum hours. They formulated a code calling for $20 a week minimum for full-time houseworkers, a 48-hour week with overtime only in emergencies, transportation out of city limits paid for by employers, unemployment insurance, and the right of workers to organize and strike. They also sought to ban unemployment agencies that charged fees and offered their work for low wages.³⁷

DWU members recognized the serious challenges they faced working in private homes, and they knew their power came from the collective strength of their members. They insisted on establishing a headquarters “in the heart of Harlem” where workers could meet and talk with each other.³⁸ While the DWU was not a communist organization and worked closely with the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), Urban League, and other liberal groups, its ties with the insurgent communist-linked TUUL boosted its militancy.³⁹ The DWU’s Upper Harlem headquarters at 415 Lenox Avenue were in the same building as the Harlem section of the Communist Party and communist-affiliated League for Struggle for Negro Rights (LSNR), Unemployed Councils, International Workers Order (IWO), International Labor Defense, and Harlem Workers Center. The Daily Worker and Harlem Liberator, daily papers of the CPUSA and LSNR respectively, reported enthusiastically on the DWU’s early successes demanding sick pay, back pay, and higher wages.⁴⁰

The DWU’s communist connections also meant that its members, numbering around two hundred by 1934, understood their union as part of a Black freedom movement and as responding to the global rise of fascism. Between 1932 and 1933, Japan’s attacks on China, Hitler’s rise in Germany, and the failure of the League of Nations to stem the advance of militarism and imperialism, sparked the formation of the Comintern-linked World Committee against War and Fascism, also known as the Amsterdam-Pleyel movement for its congresses in Amsterdam in 1932 and at the Salle Pleyel in Paris in 1933.⁴¹ Led by German communist Willi Münzenberg, and French pacifist writers Henri Barbusse and Romain Rolland, Amsterdam-Pleyel spurred numerous offshoots around the world, including the American League against War and Fascism (ALWF) in New York, which was closely connected to ILD. The World Committee departed from the Comintern in calling for a united front among all who opposed fascism and war. It offered a broad definition of fascism, as a radical form of authoritarian nationalism that targeted and oppressed ethnic and racial minorities, workers, and communists.⁴² The group spoke out against anti-worker actions anywhere, the U.S. intervention in Cuba, and racial violence in the United States. Barbusse and Münzenberg visited Harlem, where they sought adherents to this movement and drew connections in public speeches among racism, colonialism, and fascism.⁴³

In the 1930s, when lynchings were on the rise in the United States, connections between racial nationalism and fascism were not just metaphorical. Indeed, as historian of European fascism Robert Paxton has explained, the United States’s KKK, a violent “militia to restore an overturned social order” could be understood as “the earliest phenomenon that can be functionally related to fascism.”⁴⁴ Black and communist newspapers reported widely on the KKK’s direct links with European fascism, including the “American Fascisti, Order of Black shirts” in Georgia.⁴⁵ Rayside would have heard the “legal lynching” of the Scottsboro youth compared to Nazi imprisonment of thousands of communists, including leaders Ernst Thaelmann and Georgi Dimitrov.⁴⁶ She and her fellow domestic workers were all too familiar with the racist, patriarchal, and militarist nationalism that defined fascism. Thus, when a World Committee of Women against War and Fascism called for U.S. women to attend a Paris congress on the twentieth anniversary of the First World War, Rayside’s DWU responded, as did other Black working-class women.

From the start, the World Congress of Women against War and Fascism, which grew out of the Amsterdam-Pleyel movement, was intended to be not just a “European” but a “world-wide” event, including Black women from the United States.⁴⁷ Its organizers included French pacifist, feminist, and communist women based in Paris; and, from Moscow, Elena Stassova, Soviet leader of MOPR, the organization responsible for Ada Wright’s global Scottsboro solidarity tour. At a time when the Comintern and CPUSA focused on U.S. racial injustice, Stassova and other congress organizers prioritized Black women’s participation. The organizing committee’s Paris-based organ, Les Femmes dans l’action mondiale, featured a prominent portrait of Black communist leader and Harlem teacher Williana Burroughs over a photo montage of women protesting, in an article highlighting U.S. women’s mobilizations for the congress.⁴⁸ In Harlem, Burroughs, who likely knew Stassova personally from her years living in Moscow, took a lead in mobilizing Black women around the congress.⁴⁹

These efforts were reinforced by the activism of white U.S. communist firebrand Ella Reeve “Mother” Bloor, who sought out Black delegates in her role as leader of the U.S. delegation to the Paris congress. In Pennsylvania, Lulia R. Jackson, a Black schoolteacher from Pittsburgh, was appointed to represent the Ladies Auxiliary of the United Mine Workers of America. The CPUSA women’s magazine The Working Woman described Jackson as “one of the most active forces in mobilizing the miners’ wives in Fayette County in the movement against war and fascism.”⁵⁰ Black communist leader Louise Thompson, who traveled to Alabama to help organize sharecroppers, was tasked by the IWO with finding “a woman comrade in the South, one who is a steel worker, a sharecropper, or generally a good proletarian negro or white comrade from Alabama,” to go to Paris.⁵¹ Thompson identified Capitola Tasker, a Black sharecropper union leader and organizer of its women’s auxiliary, to be part of the delegation to Paris.⁵²

From Chicago, Mabel Byrd, a Black social worker, economist, and journalist, was elected to co-lead the U.S. delegation with Bloor. After resigning from a government post in the NRA when the office thwarted her efforts to study its racial implications in the South, Byrd had recently made headline news when visiting Washington, D.C., to testify at the anti-lynching bill hearings.⁵³ After waitstaff at the Senate Café denied her service because she was Black, Byrd refused to leave, and her violent removal by police sparked national outrage.⁵⁴ Byrd had also studied forced labor in the colonies in the Geneva International Labour Organization (ILO) office. At a 1929 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom congress in Prague, she criticized the organization’s limited attention to racial violence within countries.⁵⁵ A new member of the Chicago ALWF wing, Byrd formed part of the Joint Committee on National Recovery, a coalition of Black activists seeking to redress the New Deal codes’ exclusion of Black workers.

Meanwhile, in Harlem, in May 1934, Rosa Rayside and other DWU organizers formed a Harlem Women’s Anti-War Committee under Williana Burroughs’s leadership; and for the next several months they sought to send a domestic worker to Paris. The group spread news of the congress, secured endorsements from Black churches, and campaigned door-to-door to raise funds.⁵⁶ In early July, Louise Thompson and sculptor Augusta Savage co-hosted a fundraiser at their left-wing Harlem political club, Vanguard.⁵⁷ Later that month, days before the U.S. delegates planned to leave, the Committee raised the necessary funds to send a Harlem delegate to Paris and elected Rayside, then DWU financial officer, to represent them.⁵⁸ Rayside would also speak for the mothers of the “Scottsboro Boys,” two of whom had just been sentenced to death, again, by the Alabama Supreme Court. The New York International Labor Defense office gave her a statement to read on the mothers’ behalf.⁵⁹

On July 29, 1934, Rayside carried this message aboard the Ile de France with the thirty-five-member U.S. delegation and bade farewell to a crowd of three hundred at the French Line pier. The delegation, aged nineteen to seventy-two years, ranged, as one Black newspaper noted, “from stockyard workers to well-to-do society dowagers and of both races.”⁶⁰ The Black and communist press celebrated Rayside, Tasker, Jackson, and Byrd. At a time when federal investigations were exploring connections between munitions profits and U.S. entry in the First World War, the Amsterdam News urged Paris-bound women “white and black” to speak out against war, emphasizing that Black women had the most to lose, when so many had sacrificed their sons to war and only to see racial violence upon veterans’ returns.⁶¹ As a mother and as a domestic worker, Rayside must have felt her duty keenly. Before she left, the Negro Liberator (the new name for the Harlem Liberator) announced that Rayside would join women from around the world fighting war and fascism and would “represent…thousands of Negro women workers” in this fight.⁶²

Indeed, the World Congress’s inclusion of working-class women of different races from around the world distinguished it from most international women’s gatherings of the era.⁶³ Of the roughly 1,200 women who gathered in the Maison de la Mutualité from August 4th to 6th, 350 were factory workers, and many others were rural and household workers. Although European women were the best-represented, including those who escaped regimes in Germany, Italy, Greece, and Austria, women from Mexico, Argentina, Indonesia, and Vietnam attended and explained their fights against imperialism and colonialism as part of the anti-fascist struggle.⁶⁴

The congress also underscored commitments to fighting racism, and the four Black U.S. delegates held prominent roles. Rayside and Tasker were speakers, Byrd was conference secretary, and Jackson formed part of the resolutions committee. The four would have noted attention to U.S. racism in the pamphlet MOPR disseminated to congress attendees. Titled Women under Fascist Terror! Women on the Front of Solidarity and Combat!, it offered a global survey of far-right attacks on women. In addition to highlighting violence against women in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, the report condemned extralegal violence against Black women in the United States.⁶⁵ At a time when accounts of lynchings often overlooked Black women as victims, this report included several Black women and children’s experiences of racialized violence, centering the unique harms that Black women faced under fascism.⁶⁶

Racialized violence against Black women and children were the themes of Tasker’s and Rayside’s interventions at the Paris congress. On the second day, Tasker spoke to over 4,500 working-class Parisian women and men at a sporting and arts event about sharecroppers’ harsh, unfair, and worsening working conditions. After the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) incentivized cotton farmers to reduce acreage, landowners had mechanized cotton production and evicted tenant farmers.⁶⁷ When Tasker and other sharecroppers organized, she explained, they faced violence from lynch mobs to whom the legal system gave impunity.⁶⁸ She concluded by singing into the microphone the sharecroppers’ song “We Shall Not be Moved,” adapting the penultimate stanza to “Like a tree that’s standing by the water, We shall not be moved—We’re against war and fascism, We shall not be moved.”⁶⁹ As the Daily Worker reported, her “voice floated over the greensward on the bank of the Seine that clear Sunday afternoon.” Soon, the crowd started to sing, too.⁷⁰

Tasker’s intervention primed the congress for Rayside’s speech the following afternoon. Still seasick from her journey to France, Rayside recalled, she could “hardly sit up,” but when she was introduced as a friend of the Scottsboro mothers, the cyclonic applause that greeted her made her forget “all about my aches and pains.”⁷¹ “When I rose to speak,” she recalled, “everybody began applauding. It was a very long time before they would let me say a word.⁷²

When Rayside began, she read the International Labor Defense statement as it was written, in the first-person plural, thus speaking on behalf of the Scottsboro mothers and claiming their struggle as her own: “We, mothers of the Scottsboro boys, appeal to all of you women from so many different countries of the whole world to help us save the lives of our innocent boys.”⁷³ A campaigner for their cause, Rayside was also a mother who faced the unique hardships of protecting and providing for her Black children. She identified strongly with the working-class Scottsboro mothers.

The statement appealed to the maternalism of the women in the audience, while also mobilizing them to action: “Many of you women are mothers yourselves,” Rayside continued. “You can understand what we feel when…our boys, who didn’t do nothing wrong but go on a freight train looking for work they couldn’t find at home, were thrown into jail and sentenced to burn in the electric chair.” Two defendants had newly been sentenced to death, Rayside explained, and the ILD would again appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. She urged the audience to renew protests they had launched in 1931 and 1932. “We know that many of you women from France and England and Austria and Germany and China have already helped…keep our boys alive these three years.” She urged them to help again: “We feel sure that you will answer our cry.”⁷⁴

As Tasker later marveled, after Rayside finished reading “the entire audience understood and rose to its feet.”⁷⁵ Rayside remembered “[T]hey all clapped their hands. It was thrilling,’”⁷⁶ The congress’s French and British organizers had rallied on behalf of the “Scottsboro Boys” over the past several years, as had congress attendees Nydia Lamarque from Argentina and Consuelo Uranga from Mexico.⁷⁷ Due to Rayside’s speech, the congress included a resolution for the “liberation of the young blacks of Scottsboro” that passed unanimously, as well as resolutions against racism and colonialism.⁷⁸

Just as thrilling to Rayside was the congress’s establishment of a broad anti-fascist program for women’s rights, government responsibility for the poor, and social security provisions for all, including domestics. Stassova’s speech distinguished the role of household workers in an anti-fascist women’s movement that had “taken over the factory, the workshop, the university, and also the kitchen.” Labor protections for these workers were part of the anti-fascist fight. The congress’s “minimum program” insisted on women’s “complete equality with men in all social, economic, political, and cultural domains,” and on “new institutions, especially those that deal with reconciling the demands of productive work with those of the family.” It demanded “the right to work and, consequently, to all insurance, social services, unemployment relief, family allowances, etc., existing or to be created” for all.⁷⁹ As Rayside likely learned, representatives had come to Paris from Denmark, Switzerland, and Sweden, where domestic workers unions had achieved compulsory sickness insurance. In the Soviet Union, the Domestic Worker Order of 1926 regulated conditions of domestics’ employment in the Labor Code.⁸⁰

Although the congress resolutions did not highlight the specific forms of racism and abuse Black domestic workers faced, their endorsement of government support for household workers and opposition to racism inspired Rayside. Upon their return home, Rayside, Bloor, Tasker, and other delegates toured New York, sharing news about the congress to different groups.⁸¹ At one event, the Daily Worker described Rayside as “so flaming with enthusiasm that she couldn’t describe it and her repeated declarations to that effect were hugely relished and applauded.”⁸²

The Paris congress cemented the connections between Rayside’s domestic worker activism and a broader, global anti-fascist movement. Her and Tasker’s speeches illustrated how Black working women were targeted by fascism and were central to the fight against it. As Mabel Byrd declared soon after returning from Paris at the Second ALWF Congress in Chicago, “The Negro has known Fascism as no other group in this country and for a longer time.”⁸³

The moral, organizational, and global solidarities Rayside gained from the Paris congress served as a springboard for her local and national anti-fascist work focused on the DWU. Those solidarities had convinced her that the mission of the DWU—organizing poor and working-class Black women laboring in white homes—was inseparable from the anti-fascist fight, given that Black domestic workers bore the brunt of fascism’s intersecting forms of racial, gender, and labor oppression. After returning from Paris in 1934, Rayside advanced DWU organizing in Harlem, while also building on connections with anti-fascist leaders with whom she had collaborated in Paris. She drew national attention to domestics’ plight and made it central to the country’s growing Black anti-fascist movement, which emphasized class struggle and unity among Black workers.

The goal of expanding social security to include domestic workers—one of the Paris resolutions—became central to Rayside’s mission back home. From its start, the DWU worked closely with Harlem’s Unemployed Councils and LSNR to promote a broader social security system inclusive of domestic and rural workers. These groups, in coalition with the CPUSA and ALWF, had fostered unprecedented grassroots mobilizations, strikes, and hunger marches throughout the country, to push the federal government to address mass suffering and unemployment of all workers.

In 1934 and 1935 these efforts concentrated on the Workers’ Unemployment and Social Insurance Bill, popularly known as the Lundeen Bill. Introduced by representative Ernest Lundeen of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party, this proposal promised far more expansive coverage for unemployed, aged, and disabled workers than the ultimately enacted Social Security Act. The only social security proposal that included domestic workers, the Lundeen Bill offered unemployment benefits to “all workers, whether they be industrial, agricultural, domestic, office, or professional workers, and to farmers, without discrimination because of age, sex, race, color, religious, or political opinion or affiliation.”⁸⁴

Rayside’s DWU and allied groups—the YWCA, National Urban League, Federation of Colored Women, and Joint Committee on National Recovery—heartily endorsed the bill. In February 1935, after Lundeen reintroduced the bill into Congress, eighty workers spoke before the House labor sub-committee hearing. The Nation announced that “probably never in American history…have the underprivileged had a better opportunity to present their case before Congress.”⁸⁵

Rayside, one of these speakers, became perhaps the first domestic worker to testify before U.S. Congress. Her words provide a vital record of the Depression’s devastating effects on domestics. With a total of 4,952,451 domestic workers in the United States, 3,180,251 of whom were women, according to the 1930 census, and with those numbers steadily rising during the Depression, Rayside declared it was “essential that any bill designed honestly to give security to workers against unemployment should include domestic workers.” Including domestics was even more urgent, she said, when “employers have taken advantage of the crisis to force [their] wages…below a subsistence level.”⁸⁶

Rayside’s testimony shone a spotlight on the exploitation of domestic workers as a racial issue, as well as a gendered and class one. Black women, she explained, “represent nearly one-third of all women employed as domestics.” Moreover, “nearly three-fourths…of all Negro women gainfully employed” worked as domestics. She linked the exploitation Black women suffered under slavery with their continuing exploitation as domestics, outlining the predatory practices of employment agencies, as well as the “slave markets” that had emerged throughout New York. Rayside was perhaps the first to discuss these informal labor markets on the national stage: “In certain sections of New York and Brooklyn,” she explained, “women stand on the streets in a modern form of slave market waiting for employers to offer them a few hours of work. The wages on the corners vary from 10 to 25 cents an hour.” Since these workers were oppressed because of both sex and race, she said, “the section of the bill which provides for the extension of the benefits of the act to workers…without discrimination because of sex, race, or color is of utmost importance to domestic workers.”⁸⁷ Although the strength of Rayside’s and other testimonies led the House Labor Committee to vote in favor of the Lundeen Bill, the House defeated it 204 to 52.⁸⁸ The Social Security Bill that passed, though purportedly race- and sex-neutral, discriminated on the basis of both categories, excluding domestic and farm labor and seasonal or part-time work.⁸⁹

Despite this blow, Rayside’s testimony brought the plight of domestic workers to a larger audience. Black journalists gave unprecedented attention to the “slave markets” that Rayside introduced.⁹⁰ In July, 1935, the New York Age published the first of what would be several exposés on the Bronx Slave Market on the corner of 167th Street and Jerome Avenue. Later that year, Black left reporters Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke ran an exposé of this same “slave market” in the Crisis. ⁹¹ In the following years, these and other journalists, who interviewed Rayside and other DWU members at length, would find nearly two-hundred “slave markets” in New York.⁹²

In the months after Rayside’s national testimony, these exposés also spread knowledge of domestic worker activism, which grew alongside Black anti-fascist organizing. The long lead-up to fascist Italy’s October 1935 invasion of the independent African nation of Abyssinia mobilized intense activism in Black communities. In Harlem, several thousand Garveyite nationalists, communists, and religious leaders united in spring of 1935 to condemn Italy’s threats and support the “struggle against fascism.” A little over a week later, during the mass rebellion that resulted in the destruction of white-owned commercial property in Harlem, sparked by police violence against a Puerto Rican teenager, and by long-standing economic and social injustices the Black community faced, protestors chanted “Down with Mussolini!,” drawing an implicit parallel between violence and racism in urban America, on the one hand, and fascism and threats to Black sovereignty in Ethiopia on the other.⁹³

These connections between fascism abroad and economic inequalities, segregation, and racial violence at home deeply informed the DWU’s organizing efforts, which grew dramatically. The Daily Worker identified the DWU, along with the Harlem ILD and LSNR as the most important and “permanent united front associations and unions which are today leading the struggle of the Negro people” in Harlem. It reported the DWU was “carrying forward the struggle for day-to-day needs of the most oppressed group of the working class, the domestic worker, a large proportion of whom are Negro women.”⁹⁴ In May 1935 the DWU made labor history when it became Local 149-B of the AFL-affiliated Building Service Employees International Union (BSEIU, a predecessor to today’s SEIU). This was the first domestic workers union local to affiliate with the AFL.⁹⁵

Over the next several years, the DWU became the largest domestic workers union in the country, expanding to around one thousand members, most of whom were Black women from Harlem.⁹⁶ At the same time, its antifascist activism grew alongside its connections with the National Negro Congress (NNC). In May 1935, John Preston Davis, a Harvard-trained economist and one of the Lundeen Bill’s biggest supporters, spearheaded a Joint Committee on National Recovery meeting at Howard University to develop plans for a national congress to address the relationship between Black workers, Jim Crow segregation, and the global struggle “against war and fascism.”⁹⁷ This meeting, growing out of the crisis in Ethiopia and the Comintern’s recent “popular front” endorsement of an anti-fascist alliance among communists and more moderate leftists, catalyzed the creation of the NNC, what one historian describes as “the black vanguard of the Popular Front” whose purpose was to “beat back what they saw as an alarming growth of fascism, both at home and abroad.”⁹⁸

Prioritizing the Black working-class struggle, and especially Black agricultural and domestic workers excluded from New Deal legislation, Davis and other NNC organizers included domestic workers in its founding congress in Chicago, February 14–16, 1936. Because of her growing national reputation after the Paris congress and the Lundeen hearings, Rayside attended as one of the NNC’s “prominent” delegates, according to one newspaper.⁹⁹ In the congress’s “Women’s Sub-Session,” Rayside and Chicago domestic worker organizer Nelva Ryan shared their working-class experiences with many of the country’s best-known liberal and radical Black women reformers and intellectuals, including Thyra Edwards, Louise Thompson, Marion Cuthbert, and Charlotte Hawkins Brown.¹⁰⁰ They spoke about domestic workers’ struggles, organizing strategies, and accomplishments, with Rayside touting the DWU’s AFL charter.¹⁰¹

Rayside’s and Ryan’s presentations to the NNC Women’s Sub-Session were pivotal. They helped inspire NNC resolutions to form a national domestic workers union and to aid Black women’s organizing efforts in both industrial and domestic work.¹⁰² Their testimonies also gave ballast to a new formulation of Black working women’s plight—“triple exploitation.” The term had appeared earlier in a report to the Joint Committee on National Recovery, analyzing losses among Black women in domestic, agricultural, and industrial work; the report noted that the Black woman “suffers from the triple exploitation as worker, Negro, and woman.”¹⁰³ This language shaped the NNC congress resolution, “The Negro women of America are subjected to three-fold exploitation as women, as workers, and as Negroes are forced through discrimination into the most menial labor under the worst conditions without organizational protection.”¹⁰⁴

After the NNC congress, Louise Thompson elaborated on “triple exploitation” in her groundbreaking essay “Toward a Brighter Dawn” in the CPUSA women’s journal Woman Today. Citing Rayside’s and Ryan’s contributions at the NNC congress, Thompson framed the Black domestic as specifically illustrative of these overlapping forms of exploitation.¹⁰⁵ In doing so, as Erik McDuffie has written, Thompson “posited a useful theoretical paradigm for critically exploring black women’s exploitation and agency historically…She implied that black women constituted key agents in realizing socialism and the gauge by which to measure democracy.”¹⁰⁶

This framing provided by Thompson, along with domestic workers’ increasingly visible struggles, fostered greater awareness of domestic workers, who came to be viewed both as the most vulnerable population amidst rising fascism, and as central to the fight against it. In the ALWF journal Fight, NNC treasurer and YWCA leader Marion Cuthbert spelled out these linkages. “What groups does a Fascist state oppress?” she asked. “Labor, racial minorities, and women. What then is the case of the Negro woman? She works, she is black, and—she is a woman. Exploitable on three counts by the forces of reaction.” Since “the percentage of women workers in the Negro population is twice as great as that in the white” and “since most Negro women are in the domestic service,” Cuthbert focused her essay on the “serfdom” of Black domestics. She highlighted Rayside’s New York DWU and similar unionizing efforts elsewhere and called for white working women to stand in solidarity with Black domestics in these collective efforts. “A Fascist state,” she warned, “requires a divided mass of workers…so that they cannot join to resist a system that exploits them mercilessly.”¹⁰⁷

Although Fight magazine provided a space for articles like Cuthbert’s to reach white audiences, her plea for white men and women to bolster Black domestic worker struggles was not widely embraced. While some white women in the Communist Party and popular front groups supported these struggles, many continued to overlook the unique forms of oppression that Black women workers faced and to prioritize the white male industrial worker.¹⁰⁸

On the other hand, Black anti-fascist activists, especially women, took up domestic workers’ struggles in writing and advocacy. Marxist thought conceived of the oppressed proletariat as the engine of social change, and so Black anti-fascist thinkers posited domestic workers—the most oppressed of the working class—as the true vanguard of social change. Novelist Richard Wright (who was connected with the NNC) drew on extensive interviews with DWU members to write Black Hope, a never-published novel about fascism in the United States. Wright’s protagonist, a domestic worker who organizes a fictional version of the DWU, represented the “Black Hope” who could fight against fascism for the whole Black community.¹⁰⁹ Likewise, Esther V. Cooper, part of the anti-fascist Southern Youth Congress, got her start as an activist by researching and writing her Oberlin thesis about domestic workers. Like Wright, she saw their organizing as part of a global anti-fascist fight. Similarly, in later years after the Second World War, pivotal Black left feminists Claudia Jones and Alice Childress positioned the militant Black domestic as the vanguard of global anti-fascism and anti-imperialism.¹¹⁰ These analyses came from what these writers and activists saw around them—the vital and unprecedented activism of domestic workers organizing in unions, mobilizing not only for enhanced wages and working conditions, but also for the welfare of their communities and against racism and fascism.

Over the next several years, close collaborations between the NNC and domestic workers solidified mutually constitutive links between anti-fascist and domestic worker organizing. At the founding NNC congress, Rayside and Ryan had been among sixty-five people elected to its National Executive Council, and the New York DWU actively partnered with the NNC in community meetings, creating a new local in Brooklyn.¹¹¹ One 1936 NNC meeting in Harlem sought to create a “united front” of women to “FIGHT AGAINST POLICE BRUTALITY, WAR, AND FASCISM!,” demanding “a living wage and shorter hours for women workers, especially for domestic workers.” They also sought lower costs of living and rents, greater relief for families, better hospitalization for the sick, and less crowded classrooms and safer schools for children.¹¹² When the Daily Worker exposed a New York report detailing major inequalities in Harlem’s hospitals, the NNC and DWU collaborated on a campaign to further expose and fight these conditions, and Rayside was a spokesperson for this effort.¹¹³

Rayside also continued the DWU fight to include domestics in the labor and security codes from which they were excluded, now with the collaboration of the NNC. In October 1936, she met with other Local 149 and NNC representatives in new Harlem DWU headquarters to draw up a state bill demanding a six-day week, ten-hour day, and inclusion of domestic workers in Social Security Act benefits.¹¹⁴ New York’s Unemployment Insurance law stipulated that domestic workers in homes employing four or more could qualify for such benefits; but it failed to cover most domestics, who worked in homes employing fewer people.¹¹⁵ The DWU gained endorsements on their bill from the New York Federation of Labor and the New York section of the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL).¹¹⁶ In February, 1937, William T. Andrews, assemblyman of the 21st District in New York, longtime Harlem resident, and member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), introduced an amendment to the New York Unemployment Law to extend its coverage to households employing as few as two.¹¹⁷ The next month, Andrews introduced Local 149’s bill for a six-day, sixty-hour week for all domestic workers.¹¹⁸ Citing this and a similar bill introduced in California, the New York Amsterdam News credited the “trend on the part of domestic workers to look for an improvement of their working conditions through legislation” as the most visible momentum on the “labor frontier.”¹¹⁹

Although these measures did not pass, Rayside and the NNC worked at the same time on national campaigns to address inequities in existing national legislation, to promote national domestic worker organizing, and to help influence new state laws. In October 1937, Rayside attended the Second NNC congress in Philadelphia, where she met with Ada Wright and several of the Scottsboro youth who had been newly freed from prison. She shaped that conference’s resolutions for a social security system that included domestic and rural workers.¹²⁰ Noting that “domestic workers are victims of flagrant exploitation in their field of labor” and excluded from social security legislation, the NNC committed to “an intensive campaign on the part of the CIO and the AFL toward organizing the domestic workers throughout the country.”¹²¹

After the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act established a minimum wage, a forty-four-hour work week, and time-and-a-half compensation for overtime—but excluded domestic workers yet again—Rayside worked with the NNC and the DWU to help fuel coordinated activism of domestic unions around the country. While the NNC’s John P. Davis spoke before the House of Representatives urging extension of the Social Security Act to domestics, the DWU pushed the New York legislature for an amendment for domestics’ minimum wages. The same year, Nelva Ryan’s Chicago union propelled into the Illinois legislature a similar amendment to the state minimum wage law.¹²² Meanwhile, many liberal groups like the YWCA, WTUL, NAACP, and the Urban League joined and strongly aided these efforts to secure labor standards.

Ultimately, these coordinated campaigns did not bring domestic workers inclusion in New Deal labor codes. Legislative work and other attempts to set uniform wage, hour, and other standards were thwarted by lack of funding, by employment agencies, and by employers who refused to countenance labor standards in their homes that they deemed private spaces.¹²³

Nonetheless, the DWU’s analysis of the interconnectedness of gendered, racial, and class oppression, and their coalitions with other anti-fascist groups like the NNC, boosted their militancy and raised the consciousness of domestic workers and the public alike about the unjust work conditions and the race- and sex-based discrimination they faced. These efforts resulted in several concrete gains, such as the elimination of racist health ordinances that required physical exams before working in private homes. They also launched campaigns around individual cases of domestic worker abuse and failure to pay back wages. The DWU connected these struggles with the global and local fight against fascism. Many groups, such as the NNC, ILD, NAACP, YWCA and others, understood these domestic worker campaigns that they supported as central to the rights and welfare of their Black working-class community more broadly and as part of an anti-fascist struggle.¹²⁴

Records of Rayside after 1940 are slim. Her son served in the Navy during the Second World War, and she was likely a heartfelt supporter of the Black justice “Double V” campaign that linked fighting fascism abroad with fighting Jim Crow at home.¹²⁵ During and after the war, many domestic workers left those jobs behind for work in the war industries, at least during the war’s duration.¹²⁶

But the DWU that Rayside helped form lasted until at least the 1950s, and its broad-based organizing strategies forged in the 1930s laid the groundwork for accomplishments decades later. In 1974, the U.S. Congress included live-out domestic workers in the protections of minimum wage and overtime laws of the Fair Labor Standards Act. In 1999, workers finally organized a national union, Domestic Workers United, which helped pass the 2010 Domestic Worker Bill of Rights in New York. This bill, the first of its kind in the United States, provided overtime pay, protection from discrimination and harassment, a minimum of one day of rest per week, and a minimum of three days of paid leave per year; it has been a model for other states.¹²⁷

Rosa Rayside would have recognized these efforts as a culmination of the DWU’s work from the 1930s. Organizing in alliance with left-liberal political groups and community organizations; demanding legislative change; and recognizing intersectional forms of oppression based on race, class, and gender were strategies the DWU forged in the context of the Great Depression. In the 1930s, these strategies also shaped the meanings and practice of anti-fascism. The influential work that Black women activists did, focusing on working women’s conditions as evidence of fascist oppression, while fighting against state violence against their communities, demonstrates that anti-fascism in the United States was more widespread and more radical than traditionally portrayed.¹²⁸ Black women’s theorization of fascism and activism against it recognized the economic bases of racism, militarism, sexism, and imperialism; they argued that justice for Black domestic workers would bring justice to all exploited laborers. Championing their dignity and the welfare of their communities, Rayside and other Black domestic workers, among those fascism most oppressed, were also at the forefront of the global fight against it.