Care amid crisis: Marvel Cooke's abolitionist writing on the “Bronx Slave Market”

During the Great Depression, New Deal legislation enshrined what Cheryl Harris termed “whiteness as property” through ostensibly “colorblind” regulations like excluding domestic and agricultural workers from Social Security. While white workers were subject to exploitation, their whiteness protected them from modes of expropriation affecting Black workers. One such mode was the informal economy that arose at New York City street corners, where Black women sought underpaid domestic work in white households, often facing abuse. In her reports on “The Bronx Slave Market,” the activist-journalist Marvel Cooke exposed how the expropriation and violence that structured Black women's care work had deep historical roots, turning to slavery as an analytic, rather than a metaphor. This paper theorizes Cooke's writing as a form of abolitionist critique that illuminates both how the afterlife of slavery structurally affects Black women's labor and the radical care practices countering “stolen care” and the property regime as such.