Domestic workers in Georgia mobilize for Stacey Abrams in the birthplace of their movement

ATLANTA – Gwinnett County, Georgia is one of the most diverse counties in the country, but you would not know about the houses in this particular building. AIn addition to some political signs and some overzealous Halloween decorators, this street in the city of Duluth includes similar, cream-and-brick, single-storey homes, all facing well-manicured lawns.

On a Thursday in October, six black women dressed in t-shirts and bright orange jeans arrive in the Atlanta North Atlantic suburbs, very clean, just before sunset, after half an hour of road from the city. traffic. They are housekeepers a day – housekeepers, housekeepers and housekeepers – but they spend their evenings going door-to-door to Stacey Abrams, who would be the first black governor in the nation's history.

The plan is to skip the houses inhabited by whites and target the color voters. Women have a solicitation application, MiniVAN, which lets them know which ones. A little more than half of this county, made up of immigrants, is not white, but they are rare and sporadic voters – so it is crucial to vote here for the election of Abrams in what is now a Tiny breed against Republican Brian Kemp.

Work can be dangerous, so women always stand in the eye while going door-to-door. Sometimes their application fails them, and they come across a house with a Confederate flag or another symbol of white supremacy. Sometimes, there is a confrontation with their Georgian compatriots – an old white couple, for example, pulling out their white Ford pickup truck from their driveway and parking next to the women I accompanied today. A Kemp sign springs into the couple's yard and a large German shepherd takes a pair of trousers in the back. The woman lowers the window and asks the women what they are doing there, while the husband takes pictures of one of them and the license plate of their car.

Shechel Williams, a 45-year-old grooming home care aide, explains warmly that it's all about domestic workers who are campaigning for Abrams. She hands the woman a flyer out the window and the suspicious couple runs away without saying anything.

The applicant who has just been photographed, Nilaja Fabien, is a 46-year-old native of Trinidad who has been working for nearly 30 years as a nanny for white children in Atlanta. She wears a blue denim cap on her shaved hair and speaks softly and deliberately, as if bending down to reveal a secret in the library. She is momentarily shaken by the meeting with the white couple.

"What in the world?" She asks.

"You know what's in this world," retorts Williams. "Just people trying to scare us."

Prior to this historic election, more than 300 domestic workers in Georgia – almost all black women, as well as two men – perform the largest independently financed ground game in the state. Their organization, Care in Action, is the political arm of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which represents 2.5 million domestic workers across the country. They are appealing to colored voters from four critical counties, from Atlanta's suburbs to southwestern Georgia, who could turn from red to blue if more non-white voters go to the polls.

Although the immediate goal is to elect Abrams, the efforts of domestic workers are a continuation of an activist movement that really began in the middle of the last century. Largely derived from the popular history of post-war social movements, domestic workers have in fact played a leading role in the struggle for labor rights and civil rights. They played a central role, albeit largely invisible, in the bus boycott of Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 and 1956. "From the 1960s, domestic workers organized forums, spoke in public , distributed brochures, testified and put pressure on the legislatures, "writes Premilla Nadasen. in Domestic workers unite. Nadasen adds that what began as a "local movement of domestic workers" has turned into a mass movement that has fundamentally redefined the relationship of black women to the world of work. "

"Yes, we want to get Stacey elected, but it's not just about getting someone elected," said Nikema Williams, senator and state director of Care in Action. "It's about recovering our power, taking back our voices and making sure our problems are addressed, because we live them every day as women of color here in the South."

The Abrams platform would directly and indirectly improve the lives of domestic workers. She would develop Medicaid; she is in favor of a living wage across Georgia, instead of the current minimum wage of 5.15 USD; she has a plan to reintegrate people incarcerated in society and guarantee access to quality public education for all children. It aims to broaden broadband access and improve transportation in low-income and rural communities throughout Georgia to better integrate them into the economy.

These are important issues for domestic workers, as women of color "are usually looking for everything," says Williams. "When things are cut off, we are at the bottom of the totem. So we are very deliberate in defending people who identify as domestic, because the work of care makes any other work possible. "

Williams, 40, led the election campaign I observed in Gwinnett County on October 18th. She is a champion for Abrams, but she is also part of the wave of new post-Donald Trump candidates. In December, she became the first woman elected to Atlanta's historic headquarters in the state legislature of Georgia, occupied by civil rights leader Julian Bond in the 1960s. She joined Care in Action in June to mobilize other women of color.

"I really felt that my voice was needed in this conversation," she says. "After the 2016 elections, many white women rallied to find their voices and launched their movements and Facebook groups. And black women are the base of the base. I was like, if not now, so when? And if not me, then who? So I went for that. "

Abrams is the first candidate Care in Action has ever endorsed – a first strong entry into politics since the beginning of the domestic workers movement in Atlanta. Back at the group's headquarters, a framed photo of Dorothy Lee Bolden hangs on the wall. Bolden, a neighbor and friend of Martin Luther King Jr., founded the National Domestic Workers Union in 1968. In the photo she wears cat-eye glasses, hair on her head and a Peace sign for the crowd on the stage apparently making a speech. She is surrounded by men.

Under the poster, his quote fits into a frame: "We are not Aunt Jemima's wives, and I'm sure God does not want people to think we are. We are politically strong and independent. " On the wall nearby are two posters from the Georgia House and Senate Labor Committees, with photos of mostly white men sitting there – a powerful reminder that the fight Bolden has begun is ongoing.

The solicitors are all well informed about the history of the defense of Bolden's interests. Bolden, one of six children, began washing diapers after school in 1930, at the age of 9, for $ 1.25 a week. She then cleaned the house of a Jewish family at $ 1.50 a week at the age of 12. In 1940, she was sent back to the county jail and subjected to a psychological assessment for refusing the request of her boss, a white woman, to stay late and do the dishes. "She had come to believe that poverty and economic deprivation were of crucial importance" to the goals of the civil rights movement, writes Nadasen, "and that it was impossible to integrate the schools if children did not have shoes to wear ".

Bolden began learning from King's activism and organization in the early 1960s. She had 10 children, three of whom died at a young age, and her first experience as an organized activist was to fight for equal rights in education. In 1964, the Atlanta School Board sought to transfer the all-black school of his children to a condemned building, and Bolden led the protest and the boycott that ultimately prevented that from happening.

That same year, after taking the bus with other domestic workers and hearing their complaints about low wages, long hours of work and racism at work, she decided to hire housekeepers in Atlanta to get them to work. beat for better working conditions. She conducted voter registration campaigns for domestic workers and sensitized them to the tactics of the civil rights movement. In 1968, with the consultation of representatives of the organized labor movement, she convened the first meeting of the national union of domestic workers. To become a member, you only needed one dollar and one voter card.

The union succeeded in defeating the first referendum on the public transit system MARTA in Atlanta in 1968 because it did not include blacks in planning. Under Bolden's charismatic leadership, domestic workers became a powerful union in 10 states. They increased Atlanta wages by 33% and secured the inclusion of domestic workers in workers' compensation and social security schemes.

In the 1970s, three presidents consulted Bolden on labor issues and President Richard Nixon appointed her to an Advisory Committee on Social Assistance and Social Services. "I was the only Democrat out there," she told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1986. "It's me who went to Washington so that women do not get the chance to get the job done. be careful that they deserve. "She led the National Domestic Workers' Union until 1996, often faced with racist harassment. As Nadasen relates, Bolden once received a phone call from a member of the Ku Klux Klan who threatened to "whip her ass". Bolden's answer: "I told them at any time to come, grab him. You have a plump donkey to whip. "

"She did not give up on anyone," says Williams. "She stood up to make sure the workers had contracts and a base salary, one of the things we are fighting for today, just to have dignity and to be heard in order to do their job. We absolutely rely on Dorothy Bolden's work and her vision of everything we do. "

"Yeah, my daughter, did you see" help "?"

Around 3 pm Every day except Sunday, more than a dozen women gather here at Care in Action headquarters to share a dinner on paper plates, get together and get ready for telephone banking and ringtones at home. door. "We'll see if I want to talk to people today," Diadra Nelson said with a wink while she was walking in it. She is a retired 59-year-old sous-chef at the Georgia State University bookstore and wears giant round earrings. who say: "Strong black queen."

The NDWA recruits these women from parks, bus stations and other public places. Domestic workers are easy to spot, says Williams. they are those who carry cleaning products on the bus in the middle of the day or who push strollers with babies who are clearly not theirs.

Fabien was approached in a Barnes and Noble in 2011, where she had brought the two white children she was attending at the time. She remembers that it was about the time of the publication of "The Help" because Atlanta nannies were talking about the film adaptation in which black housewives speak in 1963 to a journalist racism they face at work. The light depiction of the civil rights movement in the film and her story of white heroine stem from broader and offensive myths about domestic workers, but Fabien says that this nonetheless sparked an important conversation.

"It was a huge mobilizing factor of what I saw," she says. "When I talked to other mothers about coming to the first meeting, they would say," Yeah, girl, did you see "The Help"? It was on everyone's lips and they understood the importance of organizing and supporting each other. "

Abrams' candidacy in Georgia comes at a time when women of color undeniably win tough elections for Southern Democrats. Senator Doug Jones (Al-D.), for example, beat Republican Roy Moore in last year's special election. thanks mainly to the participation of black women.

But their organization is particularly critical in Georgia right now, where Kemp has been caught red-handed with multiple attempts to crack down on the black vote. Earlier this month, a report from the Associated Press revealed that more than 53,000 voter applications in Georgia – nearly 70 percent of them black people – were stranded in the office of the Kemp Secretary of State, who oversees the elections. And Kemp denies being part of a plan to closed seven polling stations in a black majority zone. But Rolling Stone reporter Jamil Smith recently got a sound from Kemp saying that The operation of Abrams' electoral participation "continues to worry us, especially if everyone uses and exercises their right to vote".

Georgia does not have the habit of seeing women of color on the governor's ballot. The state has always been ruled by white men – mostly Democrats until 2002, then government. Roy Barnes (D) led a success effort to remove the Confederate battle cross of the state flag. Republican men have won every election since.

The GOP still hopes to capitalize on the same anger provoked by the state's flag to galvanize a subgroup of white voters who are furious at the idea that their "heritage" is being erased. The night before the Abrams-Kent debate this week, a picture appeared on social media Abrams participating in the fire of the old national flag in 1992, during his last year at Spelman College.

Abrams defended joining the "peaceful demonstration authorized against the Confederate emblem in the flag", while Kemp camp declined to comment. But Kemp is committed to protecting other Confederate monuments in Georgia, saying that Georgians should not "attempt to rewrite" the past by removing them.

Fabien is more than ready to step out of the racist history of the state. "I think the time that has passed since that end, this scary life they want people to live in, is done," she says. "We are fed up."

In this racist climate, it would be extremely comforting for women of color in Georgia to see a person heading the state that resembles them and understands their lives. Williams said when she read in the paper that Abrams would be the first black female governor of the country, she was "in tears".

"Because I knew I did not remember ever having known a black woman as governor in the country, but I never thought about it," Williams says. "To see it printed, it gave me shivers."

Abrams grew up poor in Mississippi, one of six children of a mother who worked as a librarian and a father who worked in a shipyard. She then graduated from Yale Law School but remains in debt of $ 200,000 to students and credit card loans. Single, she became the first black woman to head the Georgia House of Representatives and wrote romances of love. His brother is struggling with addiction and has been jailed several times.

When Abrams talks about reducing student debt, expanding access to addiction and mental health treatment services, or rehabilitating incarcerated people, she talks about it through experience .

Denise Small, a retired nurse aged 50 who now looks after an elderly member of her family, says that she trusts Abrams for this reason. "When she talks about these problems, it's not just on her mouth, it's in her heart. Its program to reorganize the criminal justice system, mental health care, is very valuable and necessary. "

Small is about to knock on another door when I ask her if she thinks Georgia is really ready for a candidate like Abrams.

"Oh, damn yes," she said. "I think the time has come. Because people who practice humanity in this world, they are looking for someone who is watching them. "