The Ongoing Neglect of Black Women in America
Claudia Jones at the Communist Party of the United States of America national headquarters, New York City, 1948
Claudia Jones
Claudia Jones was born Claudia Vera Cumberbatch in Trinidad and Tobago (when the islands were still part of the British West Indian colonies) on February 21, 1915. Her family immigrated to the United States and settled in Harlem, New York in 1924. There, Claudia witnessed the harsh working conditions that Black women—including her garment worker mother, Sybil Cumberbatch— experienced. Sybil passed away just five years after the family’s move to Harlem, leaving Claudia’s father Charles Cumberbatch to support the family alone. Still, Claudia graduated from Wadleigh High School in 1935 and soon became involved with activism, joining the Communist Party of the United States and The Young Communist League in 1936. In 1940, she married Abraham Scholnick and after their divorce in 1947, she began to use the last name Jones in an effort to protect her identity.
In 1949 Claudia Jones published “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman”. The article detailed the struggles unique to Black women in the domestic U.S. workforce and the importance of acknowledging the various ways the working-class movement neglected these conditions. Often considered as one of the earliest groundworks of intersectional feminism, Jones correctly observed that communists could not be successful if they ignored working Black women. Jones compared the occupational statistics of White women to that of Black women, primarily to highlight that any movement aimed at improving the conditions of the working class had to seriously contend with the working conditions of Black women, who had been and continue to be the most stable employed base for Black communities in the U.S. This article compares the conditions presented then with the struggle of Black women in the US today.
The Continued Struggle of Working-Class Black Women
Due in part to the low wages allotted to both Black women and men in the post-emancipation workforce, as well as the exclusion from almost all other fields of work, Black women (often the primary breadwinner) were pressed into domestic labor for white families. Black women — whether married or single — entered into the workforce and were relegated to low-paying jobs. The “Handbook of Facts of Women Workers’’ from the US Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau listed the median earnings of white women workers at almost three times that of Black women in 1948, with white women earning a yearly $1,269 to Black women’s $432. In the 2020s, the disparity between white women workers and Black women workers is $40,000 to approx. $32,000, respectively. Jones goes on to compare the earnings of northern Black families and white families, as well as industries where Black women workers dominated (read, were allowed to) at the time. In her 1949 work, Claudia Jones cites statistics from “three large Northern communities” (though she does not indicate which communities) where the median yearly income of white families was $1,720, which is almost 60% higher than that of Black families in those communities, where the median yearly income was $1,095. With regards to families in urban locales, as of 2023 the income of white families averaged $81,060, as opposed to Black families earning an average of $52,860.
Per Jones’ analysis, we can look at contemporary data to get a clear picture of where Black women workers have been funneled. As of the 2020s the number of Black Women in Domestic Service reaches about 4,149,500: 174,279 in House cleaning, and 344,408 as nannies. 1,103,767 work in agency-based homecare and 722,013 in non-agency based homecare. Further, Black women make up about 13% of the Healthcare industry.
In “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman,’’ Claudia Jones attacked another issue Black women workers faced: discrimination within the liberation movement. Even today, Black women workers are spoken over, dismissed or flat out ignored in activist circles, leaving some to feel isolated and disinterested in political parties. The aim of both authors is not to negate or ignore the working class issues of other marginalized communities but to address how and where this all began. Claudia Jones addressed the militancy of Black women in political movements not to sing their praises but to point out that Black women are the economic fulcrum of the Black community. As the exploitation of the Black community is central to the US economy as a whole, the organization of Black women is paramount in the construction of socialism in the US.