VIDEO SCRIPT COPY SAMPLE
ASSIGNMENT: The Atlanta History Center wants a three-minute video to accompany their exhibit on the Washer Women’s strike that they can also upload to their website for virtual visits during the pandemic. Depending on budget, scan and pan historical photos of actual washerwomen striking and working, along with city reaction can replace costlier, but more engaging historical reenactments.
VIDEO HEADLINE: The Atlanta Laundry Workers Strike Proved Black Women Could Flex and Win
Title Card: Atlanta 1881
The white, wealthy part of town.
Cynthia Avery, curator, Atlanta Historical Society. Voiceover narration: It’s summer, 1881. Under 20 years have passed since the Civil War. Atlanta has decrepit, outdated water and sewer systems but a booming population.
Well to do white folks in Atlanta shop for clothes at the department stores, without a care in the world.
Cynthia Avery: Innovations in cotton production has made clothes cheaper than ever. And guess who gets to wash them?
Black women working terrifically hard in the midst of laundering spike the lens with a fed up look on their faces.
A YOUNG WASHERWOMAN does just as Cynthia Avery describes throughout the course of her normal brutal work day. At the end of her work week as she goes to return clothes to a white woman declines to pay her and snidely tells her to beat it.
Cynthia Avery: You wake at the crack of dawn to gather the stinking laundry of white families. You trudge home to home, grabbing nasty diapers and sweat-soaked linens ‘til you have an unwieldy mound you tie atop your head. Then you beat feet miles to the black part of town. You whallop the clothes with a giant wooden spoon in scalding hot water you’ve lugged blocks from the pumps, with wood you’ve carted,washing with soap you’ve make by hand. You beat the clothes silly til you’re stupid tired and your big reward is you now get to hang, iron, fold, and tug it back -- where a white woman might just decide not to pay that week.
WHITE CITY OFFICIALS inspect giant signage and banners that black workers prepare to welcome the oncoming influx of out-of-towners.
Cynthia Avery: But just as the city of Atlanta was gearing up to host a big international cotton exposition, and show off their “able-bodied” and severely underpaid work force to exploit to white northern businessmen...
Twenty black WASHERWOMEN gather in a black church and discuss their prospects.
Cynthia Avery: Twenty washerwomen meet up and found the Washing Society.
The Washerwomen canvass door to door, amassing a vast crowd of more washerwomen. They gather in downtown Atlanta and strike in force.
Cynthia Avery: And they decide to strike! Within three weeks they’ve got 3,000 members. Their message is clear: pay a fair wage or wash your own dirty laundry!
The response from COPS in white Atlanta as described in narration: cops arrest people off the line of strikers. Harrass strikers in their homes. Issue fines. Try to break the strike through force.
Cynthia Avery: White Atlanta was livid. Cops tried to make their lives hell. But the leaders were not deterred!
BLACK COOKS and MAIDS, working in white houses walk off their job... HOTEL WORKERS join the picket lines...
Cynthia Avery: Soon cooks, maids, and nurses began demanding higher wages. Then hotel workers struck in solidarity.
Laundry piles up in the white homes not getting done... White city councilmen withdraw their levy and back support for increased wages, looking angry and beaten.
Cynthia Avery: But as the laundry piled up and hotels had to shutter with the Exposition soon to start, white Atlanta had no choice but to be the ones to fold.
The original WASHERWOMEN celebrate their historic win in a huge gathering at the black church.
Cynthia Avery: Soon after cooks, maids, hotel workers, and nurses won higher pay. The laundresses didn’t get everything they asked for...
The original white woman who refused to pay before begrudgingly ponies up the money she owed to our original laundress.
Cynthia Avery: But they’d asserted their still new freedom and gained begrudged respect.
The group of 13 laundresses pose for a celebratory still photo, not smiling but proudly standing strong.
Sources: “Atlanta Washerwomen Strike.” AFL-CIO. https://aflcio.org/about/history/labor-history-events/atlanta-washerwomen-strike. Accessed on 5 January 2021.
Bentley, Rosalind. “Black Women Magic: The Atlanta Laundry Workers’ Strikes of 1881.” Atlanta Journal Consititution. https://www.ajc.com/news/black-woman-magic-the-atlanta-laundry-workers-strike-1881/FvNH0PZLejzsq4VYULejmN/. Accessed on 5 January 2021.
“July 19, 1881: Atlanta Washerwomen’s Strike.” Zinn Education Project. https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/atlanta-washerwomens-strike-reconstruction. Accessed on 5 January 2021.
“The Atlanta Washerwomen Strike of 1881.” Atlanta Tribune.https://atlantatribune.com/2017/03/08/the-atlanta-washerwoman-strike-of-1881-whm/. Accessed on 5 January 2021.
