Home Work: Mass incarceration and Margaret Murray Washington
field reports from my book The Secret History of Home Economics
Mass incarceration is an education issue. I’ve been on a tear about this lately, because I’m writing a long article about what’s next for New Orleans schools, and Louisiana has a prison problem—depending on the month, we have either the highest or the second-highest per capita incarceration rate in the country. Which affects a lot of kids. Stats:
14% of Louisiana children have had a parent in jail or prison. (Annie E. Casey Foundation)
150,000 Louisiana children have a parent, usually a father, who is currently incarcerated or on probation. (WWL)
Four of five incarcerated women are parents of young children. [Per(Sister) project]
More than 1.5 million children in the U.S. have incarcerated fathers. (Campaign for Youth Justice)
Having a parent locked up is incredibly hard for kids, and it makes school harder in many ways—everything from time spent on a bus to Angola to family members having to work longer hours instead of being around to check up on homework or check in with teachers. Of course, mass incarceration disproportionately affects Black families. As I mentally ranted about this traumatic disruption of home life, it reminded me of home economics founding mother Margaret Murray Washington.
Margaret Murray Washington, the third wife of Tuskegee Institute founder Booker T. Washington, was an extraordinary person. Presidents sent telegrams when she died. Born during the Civil War to a possibly enslaved washerwoman and an Irish railroad worker, Washington taught her way through Fisk Institute and became an English professor. After her marriage, she ran home economics at Tuskegee for more than 30 years. Her activities, however, reached far beyond the campus.
Matronly and perfectly groomed, Washington believed that better homes were the key to Black progress—moral, economic and political. “The salvation of the colored family is in the family life,” she said in 1896.
A leader of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, Washington made hundreds if not thousands of speeches across the country about the importance of the home. She also organized educated women like herself into the Tuskegee Woman’s Club, to intervene directly and locally in the lives of impoverished Black farm wives. “We knew that as they were lifted up, so might we rise,” she said.
Washington instituted community homemaking education in town through weekly "Mothers Meetings," offering instruction on cleaning, inexpensive furniture, proper nourishment, religion, marriage. There was a plantation outside Tuskegee tended by sharecroppers and former convicts who lived in one-room slave cabins—"left to themselves to drift,” she said. Washington’s friends opened a school; the teacher lived on site, and others visited with advice and help. A dozen years in, she said, “the life of the plantation is entirely changed.”
W.E.B. Du Bois and others criticized Washington and her husband for focusing on individual effort in a structurally racist world. Washington did think that if poor Black farmers led respectably middle-class lives, whites would have to respect them. However, she also thought that sitting on a chair instead of a bed or the floor, even if the chair was just a box covered with calico, built self-respect—and for Southern Black families, self-respect was a political statement in itself.
And she also worked for structural changes. Such as prison reform. The National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs campaigned for the end of chain gangs and the convict leasing system that turned prisoners back into slaves. In Alabama, where the state had separate detention centers for incarcerated White teenagers but imprisoned Black teenagers with adults, Washington raised money to buy 25 acres in Mt. Meigs and build a reform school for young Black men. It was a mini-Tuskegee, with academic classes, religious instruction and work training. The boys grew their own food and learned trades. Its most famous resident was future star Satchel Paige, who played on the Mt. Meigs baseball team.
And again the Tuskegee Woman’s Club worked even closer to home. “Each Sunday [Mrs. Matthews] has gone to the jail, distributed papers, talked with the prisoners and tried to influence them to a better life,” the club’s secretary wrote in 1908. “The man, Satchel who was put into jail for murder a year or two ago has a family living in South Greenwood. We are helping his children by giving them work, and Mrs. Matthews has taken an especial interest in these children and one of the girls has come from time to time to do work in our Laundry in order that she may receive clothing. The Tuskegee Woman’s Club goes on the principle that whatever you want, you must work for, and in this way it is creating an independence among its dependents.”
Home economists have always known that the household and the world are interlinked. Washington targeted the home. But her goal was to empower Black women and transform society.
Book Update
I’ve finished proofreading! We’re writing jacket copy! I got a couple of rave blurbs! The Norton publicist is mailing out these ridiculously cute packages to women’s college presidents! I knew those cheesy 1970s recipe cards would come in handy.
To answer the question many of you have asked: “Can I preorder your book?” The answer is SECRETLY, YES. I’m not supposed to make a big deal of it because we haven’t finalized the cover and because I don’t want to tire everyone out hawking the book—it’s not out ‘til May 4. But I have links to various bookstore options if you want to buy now.
Recipe of the Month
For those of you peering closely at the Norton book package, that card is part of the 1972 Dinner Is Served set from Marjon Promotions. I have found almost no information about the company or cards except that the cards were promos at gas stations, like the NFL glasses my family got in 1988. That information comes courtesy of Yinzerella, a Julie/Julia Project–style blogger who cooked the entire set. The recipes may well have been developed by home economists, because business home economists created a ton of promotional recipes.
Beef Pizza
(6-8 servings)
1 clove garlic, minced
1 onion, chopped (reserve 2 tbsp. for meat)
2 tbsp. oil, plus extra for brushing
12 oz. can tomato paste
1-1/2 c. water
1 tsp. basil
1/2 tsp. oregano
1 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. pepper
1 lb. ground beef
2 x 1 lb. frozen bread dough, thawed
1 lb. mozzarella, grated
1/3 c. grated Parmesan
Sauté garlic and most of the onion in oil until soft. Add tomato paste, water and seasonings. Simmer 1 hour. Meanwhile, lightly brown meat in skillet, breaking up to keep crumbly. Stir in 2 tbsp. sauteed onion. Roll out bread dough into 2 circles 1/4 inch thick. Place on cookie sheets. Pinch edges into raised rim. Brush with oil, fill with tomato sauce, top with mozzarella. Spoon meat in crisscross pattern. Sprinkle with Parmesan. Bake at 425 degrees for 20 minutes.
Marjon Productions suggests that you pair the pizza with a salad bar and Frozen Raspberry Fluff (Card #94). I’ve thought about organizing a book giveaway around cooking from those recipe cards, but I feel like that would be a little cruel, don’t you?
Yinzerella gave Beef Pizza a good review. Let me know if you agree. If you are the exact kind of nerd that I am, you will be delighted to see that you can still reread the entire Julie/Julia Project blog, which is much more detailed than the book. Read about face masks, piglets and more in the Home Work archives.
Sources: Nikki Brown, “Keeping Black Motherhood Out of Prison: Prison Reform and Woman Saving in the Progressive Era,” The Journal of African American History, Winter 2019; Tonya Evette Perry and Denise Davis-Maye, “Bein' Womanish: Womanist Efforts in Child Saving During the Progressive Era: The Founding of Mt. Meigs Reformatory,” Affilia, May 2007; Margaret Murray Washington, The Negro Home, 1920; “Working for a Truer Home Life,” Boston Daily Globe, Oct. 1, 1896.
Header photo: 1927 Tuskegee Institute weaving class, Keystone stereoview, Library of Congress. Margaret Murray Washington, Bain News Service, also Library of Congress. Book package photo by Norton publicist Erin Sinesky Lovett. Written content © 2020 Danielle Dreilinger. All rights reserved.