The Black Rep season continues with a production that aligns Women’s History Month – and demonstrates one of the many instances where Black women helped shape history.
“The Wash” is a play written by a Black woman (Kelundra Smith), directed by a Black woman (Chris Anthony) and starring Black women. The play brings to life a forgotten moment in history that demonstrates the unstoppable will that Black women possess.
Less than twenty years after slavery ended – and nearly forty years before women had the right to vote, a group of Black washer women decided to stand up for their right to a living wage in Atlanta. Their strike caught the world’s attention when it happened in 1881. By the time Smith stumbled upon women who put their lives on the line to secure proper pay for their services, it was a long-forgotten historical footnote.
“I am a journalist by training, and I was on assignment to cover the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture,” Smith said during a Q&A following the March 13th preview performance. “I saw an article about the Atlanta Washer Women’s Strike, and I was like, ‘What is that?’ I’m born and raised in Georgia – and I’ve never heard this story before.”
When Smith returned to Atlanta, she was on a mission to learn everything about it. She went through newspaper archives and was astounded by how the story made international news at the time.
“It was so wild to me that Black women not working was such a radical act – and it would still be now,” Smith said. “After researching those articles, there was something about this narrative that just wouldn’t leave me.”
She was driving home from work one day and she heard these voices in her head. She saw the characters and she wrote what became the first pages of “The Wash.”
“I think so often that the historical narrative about Black people is that of servants with no lives, no connection to others,” Smith said. “These women – and the people from that time, despite everything, had full lives.”
Audiences get a glimpse of these lives through The Black Rep’s staging – which stars Velma Austin, Paulette Dawn, Christina Yancy, Joy Ike, Alex Jay and Jennifer Theby-Quinn.
Push has come to shove for these washer women. The white people who are supposed to pay them for their services simply decide to opt out of the agreed upon rate. The expectation that the washing will continue with whatever amount or form of payment they decide – or none.
While the Emancipation Proclamation declared their freedom, these women – and the vast majority Black people in general – were at the mercy of white people’s perceived value of their work, no matter how essential.
“The Wash” is part of a trilogy of plays she is writing about the African American experience during Reconstruction.
Though the moment in history was an era of great progress for Black people – progress that was soon snatched away – any form of resistance against the systems of oppression meant the possibility of life-ending consequences. And yet these women persisted in their resistance. Less than one generation out of enslavement, they put their lives and livelihoods on the line for themselves and future generations to have the opportunity to live and thrive.
“To me, ‘The Wash’ is a triumph story,” Smith said. “They won.”
The Black Rep’s presentation of “The Wash,” a rolling world-premiere, will continue through Sunday, March 30 at COCA’s Catherine B. Berges Theatre, 6880 Washington Avenue, St. Louis MO 63130. For more information, visit www.theblackrep.org or call 314.534.3807.