Black women crab pickers risked it all in 1938. Maryland finally recognizes them.
The Maryland Department of Transportation recently installed a historic marker on Route 413 in Crisfield to commemorate the 86th anniversary of a strike by about 600 workers — predominantly Black women — for fair wages in the seafood industry. It’s part of a statewide effort to recognize history...
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Black women crab pickers risked it all in 1938. Maryland finally recognizes them.
Rona Kobell7/16/24 5:30 a.m. EDT
State finally recognizes Black women’s 1938 strike for fair wages in the seafood industry
In 1938, about 600 workers — predominantly Black women — walked off the job in what was then the self-proclaimed “Crab Capital of the World” to protest a wage cut at the Crisfield crab-picking houses.For five weeks, the crab pickers fought to reinstate their pay. As they did, angry white mobs burned cars, invaded homes, and threatened their union representatives. Labor organizers brought in groceries; white residents blocked them from delivering them to the strikers, hoping starvation would bring them back to work. The women persisted. After five weeks, crab-picking houses reinstated the wages from 25 cents per gallon of crabmeat picked to 35 cents, and they recognized the crab pickers’ union.
At a time when Jim Crow laws still reigned and lynchings were common, these women and their labor organizers stood up for their right to make a living turning the crustaceans that watermen caught in Tangier Sound into a product consumed in crab cakes, crab balls, crab casseroles and other dishes. The Crisfield crab pickers’ strike was a turning point for both racial and labor relations, proving that collective action could bring about meaningful change.
And yet, how it happened remained largely unknown outside of the tight-knit community of roughly 2,500 in Maryland’s poorest county. This past May, the Maryland Department of Transportation installed a historic marker on Route 413 to commemorate the strike on its 86th anniversary, part of a statewide effort to recognize history that has been left out or gone unacknowledged. Those markers, state officials say, help increase not just awareness of history, but also tourism; some aficionados of the signs keep online databases and logs and try to visit all of them.
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Leaders of Shiloh United Methodist Church, where the pickers met to strategize with labor leaders and seek protection from car bombings, asked the state to erect the marker, one of about 780 historic markers along state roads today.
“You had 20 crab houses here that were the backbone of this economy, and it was the women who were truly the backbone of that workforce,” said the Rev. Emanuel Johnson, the pastor of Shiloh. “And then, 600 women, most of them African American, stood up and said, ‘Hell no. You are not going to cut our pay.’”
Crabs run the Shore
Crabs have always been a tough business. Bounty, or scarcity, depends on how many pregnant females reach the Chesapeake’s mouth in Virginia to reproduce, and how many juvenile crabs return to the rivers, creeks, sounds and inner bays to grow and allow themselves to be caught in traps or along trotlines. Over the past 30 years, the few crab houses in Maryland that remain have brought in women from Mexico under special H2B visas to pick crabmeat, for which they are paid by the pound.
But for decades before that, American women picked the Chesapeake’s large and plentiful crabs. First, it was the wives of watermen. And then, as the industry expanded, those jobs went to Black women. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, crab-picking houses dotted the Eastern Shore, employing thousands of Black women. Often, their children would sneak in under their mothers’ skirts, helping to crack the claws.
“They did not allow us in there, but we would do it anyway, and whenever they said the inspector was coming, they would send us outside to play. As soon as they left, we were right back in there, messing with the crabs again,” said Joyce Fitchett, 78, a three-time cancer survivor who still picked crabs until a few years ago, when the last house in Crisfield closed that part of its operation.
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Black families ran a few picking houses. One of them, Coulbourne & Jewett, was the only one not to cut the women’s pay and avoid the strike.
Crab pickers were already struggling before the wage cut. They only earned $1 to $1.50 a week, and they had to pay 35 cents back to the company for removing the crab shells they picked, according to the Afro-American newspaper. Crisfield, and the Shore, had not been kind to previous collective bargaining efforts. The previous year, almost 2,000 Black and white employees of the Phillips Packing House in Cambridge went on strike. That strike ended without recognition of the union or a raise.
Three weeks into the Crisfield work stoppage, white mobs invaded homes searching for labor organizer Michael Howard, from Baltimore. After failing to find him, the mob burned his car. As historian Craig Simpson wrote, white mobs then blocked Howard’s efforts to deliver food to the striking workers, hoping to starve them into returning to work. All the while, racial tensions remained high; only five years before, a lynch mob beat, hanged and dragged George Armwood through the streets of Princess Anne. Four white men were tried; all-white Somerset County juries acquitted them.
‘They did a great thing’
After five long weeks, though, the crab houses were feeling the pinch. The Black women pickers had commanded an audience with Wisconsin Sen. Robert La Follette, a progressive who had promised to look into their reports of deplorable working conditions. The threat of such an investigation, coupled with their economic hardship, convinced the crab houses to buckle. They agreed to the female workers’ demands. With their union recognized, the women returned to work and could negotiate for ever-higher wages and better conditions until the end of the 20th century, when many crab houses began to close because of a shortage of crabs as well as economic pressures.Fitchett, who picked crabs all of her life just as her mother had, said that because of the strikers, she earned enough to buy all of her clothes and, when she was older, a home and several cars.
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“Nothing is going to change unless you stand up for yourself,” she said. “Back in the day, they did a great thing, and I am so glad they are getting recognized for that.”
The United Methodist Church established United Covenant Union chapels, which are associations of fixed-income seniors and part-time workers that help connect them with social services and organize thrift stores and prayer meetings. Shiloh’s is called the Holy Pickers Union Center; the highway marker is across the street from it. Johnson and members of the center wrote the marker, with minimal editing from the state.
Aaron Levinthal, a senior archaeologist with MDOT, said that the Black communities of the Eastern Shore have always fought to display their history, and that the lower Shore has many markers telling their stories.
“That may seem counterintuitive when you think about the history of the Shore, because in a lot of ways, this area was the Deep South, especially prior to the Bay Bridge,” Levinthal said. “But the African American communities here are really active, and they recognize their history.”
