Letter to Emma Davis

Mrs. Emma Davis
400 Forest Avenue
Atlanta, Georgia

15 June 2020

Dear Mrs. Davis,

I am writing as follow up to your letter dated December 5, 1938 to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In your letter you asked that Mr. Roosevelt send someone to investigate Sam Wix, the owner of Imperial Laundry where you worked. You probably heard President Roosevelt on the radio explaining his New Deal. He championed a minimum wage and sought to regulate the length of a work-week. He was from a wealthy family but his concern for the common man must have given you reason to hope.

You really could have used a new deal because the old one sucked. Your letter explained that your children were going without food to eat and that they did not have clothes to wear. Yet you were working at the laundry night and day.

You, like so many African Americans before you and countless since, believed in the promise of democracy. So you wrote the White House imagining the new laws might also benefit you. My telling you now that your hope was misplaced is like counting the life rafts on the Titanic.

I am writing to you 82 years late because I know that the response you received was woefully inadequate. My letter cannot rectify that fact. The facts are that the laundry industry was supported by notorious rulings like the 1936 case of Joseph Tipaldo who managed a laundry in Brooklyn, New York. He skirted the state law by coercing nine women laundry workers to return the difference between the $14.88 demanded by the New York minimum wage and the $10 a week he intended to pay them. After Tipaldo was jailed for forgery, conspiracy, and violating the State’s minimum wage law, his lawyers sought a writ of habeas corpus on the grounds that the New York law was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court ruled in his favor, voiding the law. The decision was among the Court’s least popular. Conservative Republican Congressman Hamilton Fish condemned the ruling as akin to the Dred Scott decision, one in his estimation that doomed 3 million women and children to economic slavery. So in 1936 when Roosevelt won re-election by a landslide, he saw it as a mandate to reform labor laws.

Laborers, like you who worked for poverty wages at laundries, wrote to him. The White House sent your letter over to the Women’s Bureau where the director kindly returned a neatly typed response stating in part: “I am sorry to inform you that the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act which gives the Federal government authority to fix the hours in private industry, applies only to industries of an interstate character, and laundries are not included under its regulation.” It would take decades for the law to apply to workers like you.

I found your letter in a box labeled Record Group No. 86 at the National Archives containing General Correspondence of the Women’s Bureau, 1919-1948. Mrs. Davis, as you well know, FDR would never go see about that bastard Mr. Wix. But I have read your letter.

You and my grandmother were contemporaries. Both of you from Georgia. Domestic workers. I never met you or your children, but your story is the story of the majority of black women in the South. And I want you to know that your children were not left naked and starving. They lived. And they died. Between, they argued, they laughed, they danced, they vomited, they fell ill, they drank too much, they got high, they fell out of love, they smoked, they made really funky music, they made babies, they made war, they spoke their peace, they shut their mouths, and they lived.

The principles of democracy have been put to the test every day for more than 200 years. Some days are hungry ones. But it has been women like you with the audacity to write to the people’s house to blow the whistle that reveal what’s most important. Nevertheless, hope is not external. You carried it within you.

Mrs. Davis, I look to you and the women of your generation in these troubling times. The question of democracy will not likely be settled by protest and marches. Instead it will be resolved by the resilience and quiet persistence of women who managed to wash the dirty clothes; that will yet determine if and when this nation-state succeeds. Because they raise the soldiers and teachers and artists and politicians and writers—the citizens. They are at the root.

We will not find our salve in industry and consumerism. Look to the hands that taught us thrift. To those who cleaned. To the ones who conserved and sustained. Mrs. Davis, I look to you.

Warmest regards,
V. Efua Prince