Definition
Slave markets is the term Black New Yorkers and Black journalists used during the Great Depression for the New York street corners — most famously at Simpson Street and Westchester Avenue in the Bronx — where Black domestic workers, mostly women, gathered each morning to be hired by white housewives for a day's cash cleaning and laundry work.
The phrase entered wide circulation through Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke's November 1935 article "The Bronx Slave Market" in The Crisis, the NAACP magazine. The corners persisted in some form into the 1950s before being displaced by union-organized domestic-worker placement and changes in middle-class household labor.
Why it matters
How it works
The mechanics were simple and grim. From early morning, Black women — most of them migrants from the South or their daughters — would arrive at the designated corners carrying their work clothes in paper bags. White housewives drove or walked up; bargaining was conducted on the sidewalk; the negotiated price was for a half-day or full day of housework, often the heaviest cleaning the household needed. The hourly rate was set by what desperate workers would accept rather than what the work was worth, and the Depression — when even white domestic workers and unionized white women were unemployed — drove the price down further.
The "slave market" name attached because the dynamic was indignified in ways that recalled the auction block. Workers stood in line for inspection; employers felt their arms, judged their build, asked them to bend over to test their backs. The relationship lasted only a day, which meant no recourse if the employer refused payment at the end of the day or paid only a fraction of the agreed amount. Baker and Cooke documented cases of women who worked a full day for a hot meal — no cash at all — because the alternative was returning home empty-handed.
Baker and Cooke's Crisis piece treated the markets as a labor problem, not a curiosity. They argued for unionization, for state regulation of domestic work, and for the kind of organized political pressure the New Deal was applying elsewhere — though the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, when it passed, explicitly excluded domestic and agricultural workers, the two occupations dominated by Black labor. That exclusion was not an accident; it was the price of Southern Democratic support for the rest of the New Deal, and it shaped the post-war wealth gap as durably as anything else in the era.
The corners faded after WWII as middle-class New York households shifted to weekly cleaners hired through agencies, and as the Black women who would have stood on those corners moved into hospital, factory, and clerical work as those sectors opened up. But the underlying pattern — a labor market that channeled Black women migrants into a single low-wage occupation, with no state protection — was the structure that shaped the first generation of the Great Migration's economic experience in New York.