Black History Month: What We Owe to the Black Domestic Servants of the Jim Crow South

Katherine van Wormer*

Cheering a speaker in a Montgomery
bus boycott church meeting. From Life
magazine, February 6, 1956.

For Black History Month, let us honor the women who worked as domestic servants for white families in the Jim Crow South. They endured the indignities of segregation to help support their families. Moving in between black and white worlds, such women played enormously important roles in the first successful Civil Rights struggle: the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56, where the young Martin Luther King, Jr., got his start. 

David W. Jackson III, Charletta Sudduth, and I (one the descendant of Louisiana slave owners, the others the descendants of slaves) have written a book based on interviews with former housekeepers, caretakers, and cooks and members of the white families they worked for, The Maid Narratives: Black Domestics and White Families in the Jim CrowSouth (Louisiana State University Press, 2012).