This Labor Day, for the first time, St. Louis commemorated Unpaid Labor Day on the east steps of the Old Courthouse in downtown St. Louis.
“The founders of this holiday did so to celebrate, in their words, the American working man,” Deirdre Cooper Owens, associate professor of History at Queens College in New York, said of Labor Day at the event on September 3.
“But let me tell you who should sit in the center of remembering and commemoration: the first 12 generations of workers either born enslaved or transformed into slaves through their sale.”
Owens stressed that these unpaid laborers worked against their will, but through their labor they enriched this nation for centuries. She described the conditions and struggles of the unpaid laborers.
“The impact of that work came out of callused hands,” she said, “sun-damaged, weathered skin, rickety legs and deformed pelvises caused by lack of Vitamin C, mutilated limbs made so by chopping sugar cane – and a resolve to hold themselves up as the moral compass that this nation needed to follow.”
Peter H. Wood, professor emeritus of History at Duke University, said he welcomed this new dimension to Labor Day.
“This is a first for all the decades we’ve been celebrating Labor Day,” Wood said. “I don’t think there’s ever been a celebration like this focusing on 12 generations of unpaid labor, and I’m excited it’s happening here in St. Louis.”
The event was organized by the Unpaid Labor Project, based in St. Louis.
“It is fitting and proper that the role of Unpaid Labor be recognized in St. Louis, Missouri at this site,” they wrote in an unsigned blog post.
“The Old Courthouse is where slaves were bought and sold. It is where the Dred Scott case was decided. It faces the Gateway Arch, the symbol of the country’s western expansion that ignited the Civil War over slavery. On September 3, 2018 it will symbolize a new beginning in our history and a better tomorrow for our people, our nation and ourselves.”
They noted that the contribution of unpaid labor in what is now the United States “began in 1607. That’s 169 years before the United States became a country in 1776, and 287 years before Labor Day became an official holiday.”
Wood said that Unpaid Labor day reflects the insights of socially engaged academics being pushed into public view.
“We’ve learned a lot in the last 50 years, but the problem has been mostly professors talking to each other and writing books,” Wood said, “and not spending much time talking at churches , synagogues, mosques and sharing with other people.”
Reverend Freddy J. Clark, pastor of Shalom Church (City of Peace), is determined to make this message widely known.
“This is the first of many as we move forward to take this piece of historical information to people of color,” Clark said.
The Unpaid Labor Project openly opposes white supremacy, the theory of racial superiority that justified American slavery. At the event, Sandra Coleman spoke in character as “Hattie,” an ancestor connecting with the current generation of African Americans.
“Be aware and make your children aware that, indeed, all men are created equal.” Coleman said as Hattie. “America must abolish that false idea that one race is superior. That school of thought will certainly lead America down a dark and slippery slope.”
On its website, the Unpaid Labor Project notes that it will be 2123 “before African Americans will have been free as long as their ancestors were enslaved.”
For more information, visit unpaidlabor.com.
