Women's Work

When the Great Depression gripped Tulsa in the early 1930’s, it squeezed black women the hardest

An anonymous black woman in a domestic servant uniform kneeling in front of a fireplace in a bedroom. Photo courtesy Library of Congress

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On a summer day in 1923, a young woman named Cleora Butler pulled into Tulsa’s Union Depot, gliding along the train tracks that divided the white world from the black one. Cleora knew of the horrible events that had unfolded north of the tracks just two years before–a “racial disturbance,” she called it with a delicate ambiguity--but she was confident her Aunt Minnie would keep her safe. For a 22-year-old aspiring chef who was looking for steady work, there was no better place to be than Tulsa. As soon as Cleora hopped off the train, Aunt Minnie whisked her off the bustling platform and toward her new home. But the women didn’t head to Greenwood; they traveled south to the decadent mansions of south Tulsa, where Cleora was about to embark on her new life as a white family’s 24-hour cook. 

Cleora was one of more than 3,000 black women in Tulsa who worked as a domestic servant in the 1920’s. These women were cooks, maids, laundresses, gardeners, and nannies–sometimes all on the same day. Some left their homes before their own children stirred each morning to commute on foot or by bus to their 12-hour shifts in upper-class residences and lavish, whites-only hotels. Other women lived permanently in “servants’ quarters,'' small apartments white families placed above their garages to accommodate the help. Even as Tulsa eagerly adopted Jim Crow laws, whites carefully guarded their relationships with black servants. A 1916 ordinance that excluded black people from living in white neighborhoods included a carve-out so that domestic servants could stay put. 

Aunt Minnie helped Cleora land a job at the home of Charles Robertson, a wealthy Tulsa businessman. The 22-year-old moved into a nicely furnished three-room apartment above the Robertsons’ garage. Having grown up in a modest home in the town of Muskogee with three siblings, Cleora could hardly have dreamt of more. The Robertsons paid her $14 per week to translate the lessons she had learned in her mother’s expansive kitchen into scrumptious meals for high white society. She cooked stuffed potato casserole, braised short ribs, and, after being introduced to an unusual tropical fruit by her employer, avocado dressing. Soon, she earned a $3 raise. Money seemed to flow as effortlessly through the Robertsons’ coffers as the bourbon cocktails they regularly ordered her to mix. “Everybody was caught up in the high style of living that was characteristic of the entire nation,” she wrote later. 

But that style of living couldn’t last. In 1927, after one of Charles Robertsons’ investments in Mexico went sour, Cleora was abruptly fired. If it had been a case of individual misfortune, it wouldn’t have fazed her much; there were rich white folks to go around in Tulsa. But Cleora soon realized the Robertsons’ bad luck wasn’t a fluke, but a “telltale sign of the coming economic disaster.” 

When the Great Depression gripped Tulsa in the early 1930’s, it squeezed black women the hardest. For decades they had been the economic engine that kept Greenwood’s consumer-focused economy humming. More than 60% of black women in Tulsa had jobs and nearly all of those jobs--some 93%--were in domestic work, like Cleora’s. When upper class whites saw their fortunes wiped out as banks failed and oil prices collapsed, they gutted the help first. By 1934, the average weekly wages of Tulsa’s black female workers had fallen below $5, according to a survey of women who sought financial relief during the Depression. “Frugality was the watchword in the early thirties,” Cleora recalled. “Stretching the dollar was an absolute necessity for everyone.” 

Many black women found that their employers worked them harder than their white counterparts, almost out of instinct.  "When we had a white maid, I was always helping her,” an anonymous white woman told a University of Oklahoma sociologist named Francis Burke in the mid-1930s. “I felt kind of sorry for her and didn't want to see her work so hard. But when we have a colored girl, I don't mind letting her do all of the work herself." In interviews with Burke, some whites quoted the Book of Genesis fable about the cursed son of Ham: And he said, Cursed be Canaan, a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. It was the same Biblical scripture that slaveholders had used to rationalize keeping black people in bondage.

These were not just personal prejudices. White Tulsans’ racism was reflected on an institutional scale. Burke found that a private social services agency focused on family relief took on 1,700 cases in April 1935, but only included 96 black families. The Salvation Army did not offer aid to black Tulsans at all. Among major private charities, only the Red Cross, which played a key role in helping Greenwood rebuild after the massacre, was a reliable help to black residents. 

The federal government’s aid through the New Deal was more impactful but came with its own problems. Relief jobs offered through the Works Progress Administration provided a vital lifeline to struggling families, but federal rules stipulated that only one adult per household could get a WPA job. That was largely fine for white families–only 15% of white women in Tulsa worked in the 1930’s–but it was disastrous for the two-income households in Greenwood, where 57% of married black women also had jobs. When women did find relief work they were paid less than their male counterparts and often worked more sporadic hours. 

These policies had calamitous effects on the Greenwood economy. For decades Thursdays had informally been known as the “maid’s day off,” when many of the domestic workers who lived in white people’s homes came to Greenwood to socialize and spend money. Cleora recalled fondly the nights spent dancing to the bands of Cab Calloway and Count Basie at the Crystal Palace ballroom, located above one of the neighborhood movie theaters on Greenwood Avenue. But during the Depression, Greenwood businessmen and businesswomen could no longer count on the Thursday ritual as a guaranteed boost to their own cash registers. Once a dollar entered Greenwood, it was famous for circulating between black folks dozens of times. But Greenwood was no economic snowglobe--it needed those dollars from white Tulsa’s explosive wealth to set its prosperous cycle of trade in motion. The Great Depression kicked that cycle out of sync. 

As joblessness and reduced earnings cascaded across the community, the lingering economic effects of the massacre were also laid bare once again. Many black families had exhausted their savings trying to rebuild after 1921, and some had fallen into further financial despair after getting ensnared with predatory lenders. “What made conditions so hard was the fact that most Negro homes had been rebuilt from the ashes of the race conflict back in the twenties,” the attorney B.C. Franklin said. “There were still heavy mortgages against them, with threats of foreclosure.” 

As the years dragged on and the economy continued to sputter along, Greenwood found it challenging to shake off its economic malaise. The massive manufacturing mobilization required for World War II helped to kickstart the Tulsa economy generally, but black workers were left out of factory jobs at the onset of the war, while New Deal programs that had offered them some support were defunded as national priorities shifted. “Tulsa domestics are working in the homes of white Americans who wax eloquent about the American way of life,” the Oklahoma Eagle wrote in a 1942 staff editorial. But the newspaper reported that many maids were making just $6 per week–barely more than they’d earned during the throes of the Depression. Getting Greenwood residents a fair shot at the growing number of well-paying Tulsa jobs would become the defining civil rights challenge of the 1940s. 

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Cleora Butler survived the Depression by stringing together odd jobs as a maid rather than a cook. As Tulsa climbed out of the Depression, work came easier for her. She kept concocting new recipes as she catered the elaborate parties that signaled white people’s return to boomtown optimism. But she always wanted to own something for herself. 

In April of 1962, Cleora and her husband, George Butler, decided to open a restaurant of their own. Cleora’s Pastry Shop and Catering became a sweet-tooth institution on Pine Street, just on the northern border of Greenwood. Cleora baked pies and sourdough French bread in the kitchen, while George deep fried donuts in the store’s front window. The neighborhood embraced her, of course; decades later, some of her youngest customers would remember all the pies splayed out behind the showcase glass as a “childhood fantasy.” Cleora saw more success than she ever had in her first four decades as a professional cook. “After all these years I was now employer,” she wrote later, “rather than employee.” Though she had long worked in white Tulsa, Greenwood was always Cleora’s true home.

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Sources

B.C. Franklin. My Life and an Era: The Autobiography of Buck Colbert Franklin.

Cleora Butler. Cleora’s Kitchens: The Memoir of a Cook and Eight Decades of Great American Food. (Council Oak Books: Tulsa, Okla., 1985).

“Four Good Ordinances.” Tulsa Democrat. Aug. 5 1916.

Francis Burke, “A Survey of the Negro Community of Tulsa, Oklahoma.” University of Oklahoma. 1936.

Lanetta Lyons, “The Guard.” Embers. Vol. 1 Issue 2.

Martha H. Swain. Ellen S. Woodward: New Deal Advocate for Women. (University Press of Mississippi: Jackson, Miss., 1995).

Tanya Adele Davis, “New Deal Work Relief for Women: The Case for Oklahoma.” Oklahoma State University. 1984.

“Tulsa’s Problem.” Oklahoma Eagle. March 21 1942.

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Thank you for reading. To learn more about the origins of Greenwood, the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, and the community’s astonishing rebirth, check out my narrative nonfiction book Built From the Fire. The book was named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times and the Washington Post. Buy Built From the Fire on Amazon, Bookshop, or at your local bookseller.

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