Editor’s Note: In honor of Women’s History Month, we’re sharing profiles of remarkable female activists from American history we think you should know (if you don’t already).
By the time Dorothy Bolden was a teenager, she was already working full time as a maid, cooking and cleaning for a white family. Born in 1924, in Atlanta, Georgia, Bolden left high school in the 11th grade to work and help provide for her family. But Bolden’s life behind the scenes would pivot drastically during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, as she became a formidable activist fighting for the rights of domestic workers across the country.
Bolden remembered the long hours from her decades spent as a domestic worker. She would, “Get up at 4 a.m. to leave home by 6 a.m., and be on the job by 8 a.m., perform all those duties necessary to the proper management of a household for eight hours, leave there by 4 p.m. to be home by 6 p.m. where I would do the same things I’ve done all over again for my own family,” she was quoted as saying in “Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement” by Premilla Nadasen.
Bolden commuted to work everyday on the bus – and it was here on public transportation that a sense of community was fostered among domestic workers. The bus became a place where women working as maids, cleaners and nannies could “share grievances and concerns, trade stories of abuse, exchange information about wages and workload and learn about their rights,” writes Nadasen.
In her twenties, Bolden married a man named Abram Thompson, with whom she had six children. In the evenings, when she would return home from work, “I was sewing…sewing at night for my daughters. And I would listen to Dr. [Martin Luther] King on television,” she later recounted to Chris Lutz, who conducted an oral history project with Bolden for Georgia State University Library’s Voices of Labor Oral History Project in 1995.
It was through the television that Bolden also became familiar with another famous Civil Rights activist of the time, Rosa Parks. “I remember when Parks wouldn’t get off the bus, they were showing that [on television]. I was telling her to sit there. I know she couldn’t hear me, but I said, ‘Sit on down honey, don’t move. You tired, I know you is,'” Bolden said to Lutz. “Because I knew how it was.”
Inspired by activists like Parks and King, Bolden began to get more involved in the Civil Rights Movement. “I marched with Dr. King every time he came to town. I went to rallies, I was the most vocal person there,” Bolden recounted in her oral history. And she made a point of emphasizing the role women played in supporting King’s work. “He had women. Strong women that didn’t back down…Nothing you offered them would make them change. I was one of them.”
Her path forward as an activist further crystallized around her own life experiences. “A domestic worker is a counselor, a doctor, a nurse…She cares about the family she works for as she cares about her own,” Bolden said in a supplement to The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution in 1983. But she noted that domestic workers, “have never been recognized as part of the labor force.”
In the late 1960s, Bolden, who had become friendly with King, told him that she wanted to start organizing on behalf of household workers – to improve their and their family’s quality of life. When she asked King for help, he told her, “You do it, and don’t let nobody take it.”
Do it, she did. In 1968, Bolden founded the National Domestic Workers Union of America – which was not a formal labor union, but rather an advocacy group – and she led the organization for nearly three decades. During this time, The National Domestic Workers Union of America helped thousands of domestic workers secure better wages and improve their working conditions.
The late Representative John Lewis of Georgia told The New York Times in 2019 that Bolden “spoke up, and she spoke out, and when she saw something that wasn’t fair, or just, or right, she would say something.”
Ai-Jen Poo, the executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance (which largely took over the space previously occupied by Bolden’s Domestic Workers Union in the 2000s), told The New York Times that, “The National Domestic Workers Union was the first time there was ever a voice that was powerful in terms of raising standards for the work force and improving wages.”
Bolden further strengthened the power of NDWUA by requiring all members to register to vote. At its height, the organization had over 10,000 members in Atlanta alone, making the group a powerful voting bloc. Representative Lewis remembered, “You had to go through her, it didn’t matter if you were black or white, but if you were running for city office, or outside, you had to get her blessing.”
Bolden would speak on behalf of the plight of domestic workers with Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. These conversations helped to influence federal labor policies and led to the eventual inclusion of domestic workers in laws like the Fair Labor Standards Act, which granted them minimum wage protection.
When Lutz and Bolden finished their oral history interview back in 1995, about 10 years before her death in 2005 at age 81, Lutz asked her, “If you could stand in front of a room full of young people and give them advice…what would you say to them?” Bolden paused, thought, and then said,
I would say to them that you have got to show yourself that you can be independent on your own. You don’t have to follow. Why do we have to follow Tom, Dick and Harry to anything when we…have the strength to be ourselves and be what we ought to be. What do you want to be? Ask yourself. Get in the mirror and look at yourself and say, ‘So what do I want to be, what do I want to do? Where do I want to go and how do I get there?’ ◾