How Harriet Tubman and Others Fought for Equal Pay

Though she’s best known for her work on the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman also served the Union Army during the Civil War. She worked as a military guide, scout and spy, gathering intelligence on Confederate troop movements and supply routes. She also served as a nurse, cook and laundress supporting Union camps, says Ventris C. Gibson, executive director of Harriet Tubman Home, Inc.

In 1863, Tubman helped plan and guide the Combahee River Raid in South Carolina, which destroyed Confederate supplies and led to the freedom of more than 700 enslaved people. “Her service made her one of the few Black women known to have served the Union as both a spy and military guide,” Gibson says.

For her wartime service, Tubman received approximately $200—half of which she distributed among the scouts who worked with her, says Ernestine "Tina" Martin Wyatt, great-great-great-grandniece of Harriet Tubman. Beginning in the mid-1860s, Tubman spent decades petitioning the federal government for compensation for her Civil War service, says Billye Chabot, executive director of the Seward House Museum.

Around 1898, Tubman submitted an affidavit to Congress seeking $1,800 in compensation for her services. Congress deliberated over her claim, explains Cindy Mullock, executive director of the Harriet Tubman Museum of New Jersey. In 1899, Congress passed a law increasing her widow's pension from $8 to $20 a month. “Congress anticipated that if they compensated Harriet Tubman on the basis of her own contributions, they would create a precedent for other women nurses to also claim that they had been underpaid,” Mullock says. 

Tubman's fight for fair recognition highlighted the broader inequities Black women faced in the workforce following the Civil War. “She recognized that Black women were often undervalued despite their contributions and demonstrated through her own entrepreneurial spirit, leadership and perseverance that their labor had value,” Wyatt says. “She continued advocating for justice throughout her life, including supporting women's suffrage, believing women should have a voice in decisions affecting their lives.”

As the daughter of a formerly enslaved mother and domestic worker, Nannie Helen Burroughs was always attentive to the working conditions of Black women, says Danielle Phillips-Cunningham, author of Nannie Helen Burroughs: A Tower of Strength in the Labor World.

Burroughs began her labor-organizing career in the Baptist church when she was in her early 20s at the turn of the 20th century. In 1900, she helped establish the Woman’s Convention, an auxiliary of the National Baptist Convention, after delivering her then-radical speech “How the Sisters Are Hindered From Helping.”  

“Burroughs declared to the predominantly clergymen audience that women were the economic and social backbones of the Baptist church as teachers and fundraisers who contributed significantly to church influence, wealth and expansion,” Phillips-Cunningham says.  

In 1917, Burroughs co-established the National Association of Wage Earners (NAWE) with her colleagues in the overlapping labor, women’s suffrage and civil rights movements. “The goal of their organization was to raise wages, improve working conditions and outlaw employment discrimination for Black women across occupational fields in Washington, D.C.,” Phillips-Cunningham says.

For Burroughs, education and labor justice were inseparable. “She understood that equal pay required legal reforms and it required expanding opportunities so Black women could enter professions, build wealth and exercise greater control over their economic futures,” says Kelisha B. Graves, editor of Nannie Helen Burroughs: A Documentary Portrait of an Early Civil Rights Pioneer 1900–1959.

“Her advocacy consistently challenged systems that undervalued Black women’s work," says Graves, "while advancing a vision in which they could own businesses, build wealth, influence public policy and shape the economic future of their communities.”

Born in Mississippi on October 6, 1917, Fannie Lou Hamer was the 20th child of Jim and Lou Ella Townsend—sharecroppers on a cotton plantation. She began working in the cotton fields at age 6. By age 12, she worked full time and continued working plantations for decades.

In 1961, a white doctor gave Hamer a hysterectomy without her knowledge or consent while she was undergoing surgery to remove a uterine tumor. Hamer later referred to involuntary sterilizations of Black women in the region as “Mississippi appendectomies.” The experience became one of several forces that shaped her activism for civil and economic rights.

After attempting to register to vote in 1962, the plantation owner she worked for demanded Hamer withdraw her application. Instead, she left. “They kicked me off the plantation, they set me free,” she said. “It’s the best thing that could happen. Now I can work for my people.”

Toward the end of the 1960s, Hamer became more involved in the labor movement. In 1969, she founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative (FFC) to increase agricultural and economic opportunities for African Americans in the Delta. Hamer was especially dedicated to fighting for fair wages for Black women. In 1971, she gave a speech entitled “It’s in Your Hands,” which described her own experiences with wage discrimination.

“But we are organizing ourselves now, because we don't have any other choice,” Hamer said. “We have a job as Black women, to support whatever is right and to bring in justice where we've had so much injustice.” 

Aline Elizabeth Black started working as a high school science teacher in the Norfolk, Virginia, public school system in 1924. She continued her education at Virginia State College and then the University of Pennsylvania, earning a master’s degree in 1935.

Three years later, while teaching at Booker T. Washington High School in Norfolk, Black learned that her salary was substantially less than white teachers at her school. In fact, at the time, the school’s white janitor was paid more than any Black member of the faculty. But when Black petitioned the school board for a salary equal to that of white teachers with similar qualifications, the board denied her request.

In March 1939, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Norfolk Teachers Association and the Virginia State Teachers Association filed suit on behalf of Black. After a local court dismissed the case, Black’s attorneys appealed to the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals. Meanwhile, in June 1939, the Norfolk School Board declined to renew Black’s teaching contract in retaliation for her lawsuit. After that, the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals refused to hear her case because she was no longer an employee of the school.

Black received a wave of support from the local Black community, which staged a large protest featuring schoolchildren demanding justice. Another Norfolk teacher, Melvin O. Alston, became the plaintiff in a new lawsuit. In November 1940, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review an appellate court ruling that discriminatory teacher salaries violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, making making the case the key precedent for equalization lawsuits across the South.

The Norfolk School Board began equalizing the salaries of Black and white teachers and rehired Black in 1941. She worked as an educator until she retired in 1973.