Stripped of Freedom: How Black Women Were Forced Back into Servitude to Satisfy a White Society’s Need for Control
Picture this: a Black man fights on foreign soil, his heart full of the promise that his sacrifice will provide his family a small piece of freedom at home. Across the ocean, his wife finds herself, perhaps for the first time, able to stay home, able to raise her children and build her own household. She’s free from the demand to clean white kitchens, free from raising other women’s children. And yet, in small Southern towns, this freedom would become a spark of rage among those who depended on her servitude.
In 1923, Greenville, South Carolina, made an unmistakable move to halt this independence. The town enacted an ordinance criminalizing what they termed "idleness"—laws that forbade Black women from staying at home. As the Charleston Courier and other Southern papers documented, “loitering laws” took root, statutes that explicitly targeted Black women. They could be fined or even jailed, forced to choose between lives of free homemaking or the risk of imprisonment. The message was clear: Black women would serve white households, and white families would not face the prospect of managing their own.
A System Built on Black Servitude
The need for Black women’s labor was not only economic but deeply symbolic. Southern households had long relied on the dehumanization of Black people to maintain their sense of security and identity. To be a homemaker, to have control over one’s own home and children, was a privilege Southern white society simply would not allow Black women to claim.
Historian Tera W. Hunter, in To 'Joy My Freedom, explains that these restrictive laws weren’t just a product of Southern economies but rather an intentional choice to enforce white supremacy. The ability for Black women to choose homemaking, to live beyond the control of white families, was a threat. And so, towns like Greenville turned to loitering laws, ordinances that would “ensure that freedom, even in modest doses, would not be granted without a fight.”
“America begins in Black plunder and white democracy,” as Ta-Nehisi Coates famously observed. “To be Black in America is to always hold freedom in one hand, even as it’s stolen with the other.” For Black men and women in the 1920s, freedom came through work, labor shaped by external dictates, never their own choice.
“To be Black in America is to always hold freedom in one hand, even as it’s stolen with the other.”
The Denial of Black Men’s Right to Provide and Protect
The consequences of these laws stretched far beyond the daily lives of Black women. They struck at the heart of Black families, denying Black men the basic right to protect, provide, and problem-solve for their households in ways they saw fit. These men, who had sent wages home from foreign fronts, now watched their wives stripped of autonomy. What kind of freedom could a Black man offer his family when the law kept his wife bound to the demands of white households?
“To control a Black woman is to control the community,” says Eddie Glaude. “It’s to control the very nucleus of the Black family, to impose upon it a vulnerability from the outside.” The South’s grip on Black women’s labor was as much an assault on Black masculinity as it was an imposition on Black femininity. Through these loitering laws, Black men were told they had no right to define how their wives and families lived, no right to assert a freedom they had bled to earn.
Forced Labor and the Conditioning of a People
These laws sought not only to bind Black women to labor but to condition a people, to instill a belief that their labor was their destiny, that to be Black was to toil endlessly, to “work by the sweat of their brow” for the benefit of others. And that conditioning, rooted deeply in policy, seeped into the generations that followed. For many Black families, the demand to labor, to constantly prove their worth through sweat and survival, became a lasting legacy.
This cycle—this relentless expectation to labor—was not happenstance but a byproduct of laws like Greenville’s, laws that forbade Black women from anything that even resembled idleness. We see this conditioning today: the belief that to pause is to invite failure, that to rest is to deny our own struggle. We were taught to work endlessly, to serve, never to question, never to imagine the world on our own terms.
An Injustice to Remember and Redress
These stories, these laws, and the conditions they created are more than history; they are blueprints. They are reminders that the systems which sought to steal our autonomy still linger. If we are to honor those women—our ancestors who were denied their freedom to live on their own terms—we must interrogate the ways we have been trained to believe that constant labor is the only path to dignity.
“There is no Black history without freedom,” Coates writes. “And there is no freedom without the refusal to be defined by anyone’s demands but our own.”
Today, as we remember the women who were forced into servitude and the men who were denied the right to build independent households, let us reclaim that story, not as one of endless work, but as a call to restore and protect our ability to choose rest, to claim our lives and labor as our own.
References:
Charleston Courier, 1923-1925 editions.
Historical editions of the Charleston Courier document local ordinances that enforced “loitering” and “idleness” laws aimed at Black women, providing primary evidence of the legal strategies used to coerce Black women back into servitude.Hunter, Tera W. To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War. Harvard University Press, 1997.
This book provides essential context on the systemic forces that confined Black women to domestic labor in the South, even post-emancipation, emphasizing how laws and cultural expectations restricted their autonomy.Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. Spiegel & Grau, 2015.
Coates’ insights into the legacy of Black labor, identity, and family dynamics under systemic oppression lend thematic weight to the article's discussion on freedom and the right to self-determination for Black families.
