A number of factors fed this expansion. Black women were forced into domestic service, but they gravitated to the jobs that gave them the most autonomy. Whereas under slavery, domestics lived and worked under the close supervision of slaveholders, under freedom, Black women were determined to live on their own. They refused to live in the homes of employers even when they chose to be general housekeepers and cooks. But taking in wash gave them the most flexibility. It changed the dynamic of the conventional employer-employee relationship by giving the washerwomen more control over their labor. Women picked up loads of dirty clothes and brought them back to their homes, just as the lithograph depicted. Married women and those with children especially found the flexibility of the work attractive, as it allowed them to take care of their children and perform other chores intermittently.
The popularity of washerwomen was also driven by demand. As more whites moved into the city, they desired a variety of housekeeping services. Laundry work was among the most arduous household chores for women, and any who could afford to do so preferred to send out their wash for others to literally do their dirty work. Even some poor whites, only slightly better off, took advantage of Black women’s labor.
The community life that was invisible to Ingersoll’s sightseeing enabled more than women’s work. Just two years before, the washerwomen had started to mobilize, deciding to adopt a uniform rate of pay for their labor. And in 1879 they gathered to form the first organization, a protective association, modeled on the prolific mutual aid societies founded by African Americans in the postwar South. Two years later this would all build up to the launch of the largest strike in the city’s history.
The broader context of these working-class mobilizations was a thriving grassroots political culture that persisted beyond the formal end of Reconstruction. Neighborhoods like Shermantown were bases for community organizing. Mass meetings were held in churches and halls where men, women, and children gathered to deliberate on the important issues of the day: to demand the hiring of Black teachers and police officers, jobs on the state railroads, more public schools, and the provision of potable water and sewer lines.
These political mobilizations were intensifying when Ingersoll visited. African American men came close to winning city council elections, defeated only by the last-minute scramble by white voters who shrank the field of candidates and closed ranks. Only men could legally vote, but women eagerly engaged in local Republican politics, much to the chagrin of employers who complained about their absenteeism as a result of their partisan work.
Shermantown of 1879 was by no means unique. The limitations of racial and economic oppression and the collective efforts to push against them were common in Black communities throughout the South and the nation. Truth be told, similar disparities persist today. Despite progress since the civil rights era, African Americans are disproportionately confined to inferior, overpriced housing, live near hazardous waste sites, and even lack clean drinking water in places like Flint, Michigan, Ingersoll’s home state. And yet, out of the shabbiest of conditions, miracles have been made.
Dreams have been deferred but not always defeated.
1879–1884
JOHN WAYNE NILES
William A. Darity, Jr.
In the early 1880s, John Wayne Niles proposed a territorial reparations program under the aegis of his all-Black Indemnity Party. It arrived during the period between the unmet promise of the Black demand for slavery restitution in the form of forty-acre land grants and Callie House’s 1890s movement claiming pensions for the formerly enslaved. While Callie House’s National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association reached a membership numbering in the hundreds of thousands, Niles’s Indemnity Party probably never exceeded two thousand members. But the notoriety of his efforts extended much further than the scale of his political party. His personal notoriety as a swindler stretched nationwide. His numerous exploits were covered in newspapers from New York to San Francisco.
In 1883 he brought a petition to the U.S. Congress seeking an allocation of separate public lands for settlement of the “colored folk” living in the South. In 1884 he mysteriously vanished from the national eye and historical record. It is unclear what happened to him after 1883, and precisely when or how he died.
John Wayne Niles was born in 1842, the son of a white man and a Black woman in Mississippi. In adulthood, white reporters described him variously as “a burly and muscular negro, weighing over two hundred pounds, light in color, with features rather Caucasian than Senegambian, and with a winning and self-confident rather than an intelligent expression,” as “[a] heavily built colored man,” and as “the most remarkable negro in the Southwest.”
Niles may have been semiliterate, but evidently he was a remarkable orator with uncanny powers of persuasion. Not only did he have a convincing impact on “the more illiterate of his own race,” but he included well-heeled white bankers among the victims of his artistry as a con man.
In 1869, in Tennessee, he had been incarcerated for killing a man, but somehow obtained a pardon from the governor long before his sentence was complete. Upon release from prison, Niles moved to Kentucky and became engaged with the Exodusters movement, the effort to form settlements in Kansas on the part of Black immigrants to the state. He joined the Nicodemus, Kansas, colony project in a leadership capacity and arrived at the settlement site in 1877. Apparently he left a wife and children behind in Kentucky, and there is no evidence that he was with them again after his migration to Kansas.
His presence in Nicodemus leaves a contradictory trail. While most of the Black settlers applauded Niles for the community’s survival in mid-1878 in the midst of food shortages and viewed him with admiration, he also developed a reputation as a nineteenth-century hustler, a scoundrel always on the make.
In 1881, during his time in Nicodemus, he managed to obtain a substantial loan from banker Jay J. Smith, by offering as collateral fifteen hundred bushels of corn he said he had bought from local Blacks at twenty cents a bushel. Niles convinced Smith not only that he had this large amount of corn in his possession but also that he anticipated he could resell it at thirty cents a bushel—and required a loan to tide him over until the price of corn reached a suitable level.
When Smith learned that local Black farmers had not raised an amount of corn that even approached the quantity that Niles claimed to have, he brought Niles to trial on charges of fraud. Drawing upon his oratorical prowess, Niles successfully defended himself against a team of professional lawyers hired by the banker without calling a single witness. In a stem-winding, three-hour statement, described by one observer as both “eloquent and soulful,” Niles drew the attention of the all-white jury not only to the plight of the Black man in the near aftermath of slavery but to their own experience of oppressive encounters with local banks. Niles won his case. “The judge who criticized the ‘jurymen for ignoring the evidence and their instructions,’ the county attorney, the assisting lawyers, and the bankers were all astonished at the verdict,” according to a report.