by Anita Hill
Between 1957 and 1962, Williams purchased a range of household goods from Walker-Thomas Furniture. All the items, including sheets, curtains, rugs, chairs, a chest of drawers, beds, mattresses, a washing machine, and a stereo set, were bought on an installment plan. The lawsuit was occasioned by the terms of that plan, which kept a balance due on all items purchased until every item was paid for in full. Williams signed this type of agreement not once, but as many as fourteen times over the course of shopping at Walker-Thomas.
To all outward appearances, Ora Lee Williams was a reliable Walker-Thomas customer. She bought most of the items, including the $514.95 stereo set that was her final purchase, from a salesman who came to her home. Walker-Thomas salesmen kept coming back to sell her items large and small, and until the spring of 1962 she made her payments on time. When she defaulted on a payment shortly after she purchased the stereo set, Walker-Thomas sought to repossess all the items she had purchased since 1957, or what was left of them. Given that she had seven children, there must have been some wear and tear on chairs, chests of drawers, and mattresses, not to mention the washing machine. The resale value of these items was undoubtedly minuscule, but the furniture company went to court to get them. Williams, with the help of the Legal Assistance Office, fought back.
My classroom was always buzzing when Williams v. Walker-Thomas came up for discussion. And every time I taught the case, I felt a monumental challenge to get the students to overcome their prejudices and see the plaintiff as a real person not unlike themselves, and then to see themselves in her shoes. Each student had an opinion and eagerly shared it. The students easily grasped the legal basis for the court’s final decision to undo the contract, and were pretty evenly divided on whether it was correct or incorrect, but the discussion didn’t end with the merits of the legal opinion. The budding lawyers were much more interested in the case as a morality tale whose lessons they directed mainly at Ora Lee Williams, placing the burden of better behavior disproportionately on her.
“Mrs. Williams should not have bought such an expensive stereo set.” None of my students could ever tell me what a stereo set at a credit furniture store should have cost in 1962 or what she should have spent on one. “Mrs. Williams should have read the contract more carefully.” “Mrs. Williams should never have signed the contract.” “Mrs. Williams should not have had seven children.” I don’t have any children, but it doesn’t take much imagination to think of reasons a mother of seven might want to fill her home with music. Yet even though most of my students confessed to owning stereo systems of varying costs, they considered that kind of expenditure a luxury for Ora Lee Williams.
Was the stereo a necessity? Does it matter? What my students might have considered was that Mrs. Williams raised her seven children in Washington, DC, at a time when the public schools were in terrible shape. In 1954 the Supreme Court had ruled in favor of parents who sued to end racial segregation in the District of Columbia. Activists who sided with the plaintiffs believed that integration would push school officials to eliminate the overcrowding and part-time classes that were pervasive in black schools under the segregated system. But the poor condition of the schools in Washington, DC, persisted. With white flight from areas like the one where Walker-Thomas Furniture was located, the schools became even more segregated. In 1958 the DC board of education put a tracking system in place. Some important innovations were instituted under the system, like special reading programs for poor children, but poor black students were more likely to be put on a track where their exposure to advanced academic courses, preprofessional programs, and the arts was limited.
Would it matter that the home may have provided the only opportunity for the Williams children to be exposed to music? Would it matter if one of the children was interested in music? Would it matter if the stereo was Mrs. Williams’s valiant attempt to keep her children off the streets after school? What is a necessity? Would our opinion change if we learned that one of the Williams children went on to become a world-famous music critic or violinist? We don’t know why Mrs. Williams wanted a $514.95 stereo, but we do know that in the companion case, Thornes v. Walker-Thomas Furniture Company, the plaintiff had agreed to purchase a used refrigerator on credit for $305. We can easily understand that a refrigerator is essential, but would the law have us make a different rule for Mrs. Williams than for Mr. Thornes in the companion suit?
Interestingly, the higher on the policymaking scale I took the students—the more removed from Mrs. Walker—the less likely the students were to empathize with her. The furniture company was the target of some of my students’ admonitions, but usually in more general terms: “Walker-Thomas shouldn’t be allowed to cheat people.” The students were never clear as to where they would draw the line between cheating people and making money from selling expensive (overpriced) stereo units to poor people. When it came to the role of the courts and any legislative oversight of practices like Walker-Thomas’s, the students were even vaguer: “The court has to exercise caution.” “Legislatures have to balance a lot of different interests.” When I asked them whether they thought there were judges and legislators with life experiences similar to those of Mrs. Williams, they were willing to bet there were none. At the same time, they were sure that the decisions of hypothetical judges or legislators who had been poor or had lived in Mrs. Williams’s neighborhood would be informed by those experiences and might well be different from the decisions of those who had not.
In teaching the case, I asked my students to step out of their roles as lawyers representing a client and try on the role of a judge or legislator. This was not so difficult. The students enjoyed seeing themselves in positions of power over the process by which justice is served or law is made. The real challenge was to get them to see Mrs. Williams’s choices as not so different from their own. I found that the finger-wagging usually became much less pointed when I shifted the discussion to credit card debt. Many of my young students were already beholden to MasterCard and Visa, and they were much more inclined to put the responsibility for better behavior on the banks that loaned the money. When the lender was a bank and not a furniture store, they were much better able to understand how borrowers could be fooled into thinking they were getting one rate and end up with a higher rate. The nature of the purchases had little impact on their ability to empathize. Whether the debt was incurred for a necessity like a mattress or a luxury like an expensive stereo, credit card holders like themselves were somehow less responsible for bad deals than holders of furniture store credit accounts like Mrs. Williams.
Over the years, our class discussions varied; but generally, in analyzing Williams v. Walker-Thomas Furniture, my students were quick to focus on Mrs. Williams’s personal choices and pass judgment on them. In this way, I suspect, first-year law students are like most humans. (And even to the most ardent lawyerphobe, they still are human at this phase of their legal training.) I haven’t taught Anjanette Booker’s case to a class, but I imagine that the conversation would be similar: “Ms. Booker should have read the contract more carefully.” “Ms. Booker should have found a house she could afford.” “Ms. Booker should have rented and not tried to buy.” “Ms. Booker should have lived in the home her grandparents left her.” “Ms. Booker should have gotten a regular job and not tried to run her own business.”
When stories like that of Anjanette Booker first started to come to light, there was a widespread presumption that the victims of the mortgage crisis were to blame for their troubles. A CNN poll taken in December 2007 found that 51 percent of the public believed that the housing woes chronicled in newspapers and on television were the fault of borrowers. In an opinion column written for the Bowling Green University paper, a student put the sentiments of that 51 percent crassly, showing an eagerness to associate foreclosure with deviance:
Very little of this problem can be assessed to lenders since they already have to fully disclose everything and have scores of
federal and state laws to follow.
But a large amount of responsibility rests at the feet of the homeowners themselves. What kind of person gets into making one of the biggest investments of their life without knowing what’s going on?
Ignorance of how credit and debt work is not an excuse to cause financial havoc. We don’t tell crackheads that it’s OK that they did not know about the effects of smoking crack when they started smoking.7
To help answer the question of how the writer so easily made the leap from mortgage default to drug addiction, let’s look at the early portrayal of those caught in the subprime debacle. “What kind of person” entered into these toxic credit agreements? How did women like Anjanette Booker become “predatory borrowers” and social pariahs?
The term “predatory borrowers” was reportedly first coined in 2001 by Senator Phil Gramm in a speech to an appreciative audience of bankers who greeted him like a conquering hero.8 In the years that followed, Gramm, a former professor of economics, was called upon to respond to the meltdown of mortgage. He succeeded in creating the perception that people over their heads in debt were there because they had taken advantage of poor, defenseless lenders. A spin on the homeowner crisis had been born.
The housing market collapse initially manifested itself in poor black and Latino communities. Instead of urging the public to question the legality of subprime lending practices on grounds of discrimination, press stories simply gave the problem of subprime lending a race—black—and a gender—female. Media coverage of the foreclosure crisis calls to mind what happened with poverty and Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) policy in the 1980s. Just as women receiving assistance under the AFDC program became “welfare queens” in the political parlance of decades past, defaulters on subprime loans became “predators.”
By 2007 the kind of over-the-top commentary typical of student writings was appearing in mainstream news sources, tabloids, the blogosphere, and just about everywhere else the mortgage crisis was discussed. Few commentators took the time to distinguish borrowers who were victims of predatory lenders from those who got loans by supplying false information. People who were trying to get rich quick by flipping property, people who were simply trying to house their families, and the many who were somewhere in between were ultimately all branded with the same label.
It was in this atmosphere that Anjanette Booker found herself trying to make a monthly mortgage payment that had ballooned from $841 to $1,769. With her finances spinning out of control, Anjanette felt the pain of her grandparents’ deaths all over again. The absence of the two people who were always there for her loomed larger than ever, but she was determined to stand on her own two feet, just as her grandmother had preached, though not just to honor her grandmother’s memory. She had a living, breathing person who looked up to her as she had looked up to her grandmother. She didn’t want to be the disappointment to her daughter that her own mother had been to her. She was determined to save her home.
Many lenders might have looked at a small-business owner like Anjanette Booker and seen little chance that she could earn a steady income in a faltering economy. But perhaps Anjanette’s lender understood something about women that Henry Higgins did not when he dismissively declared, “Straightening up their hair is all they ever do.” Perhaps the lender understood the role of hair and beauty salons in the lives of black women and the black community.
In terms of the credit market, Ora Lee Williams and Anjanette Booker were very similar. Granted, Mrs. Williams’s and Mrs. Booker’s life situations were different. But the kinds of credit choices available in the 1960s to Williams and those available to Booker in 2004 were comparable. And even as Ora Lee Williams’s life and unpaid labor were based in her home, Anjanette Booker’s work was an evolution of labor that started as domestic work and moved into the paid labor market. Work—including child care, home health care, private and institutional housekeeping, and even garment making and hairstyling—with origins in women’s “traditional” domestic activities is undervalued in the paid labor market. And by some estimations, over 50 percent of women workers occupy those jobs. The percentage of working women of color in those jobs is even higher. Even with changes in the law’s protection of women’s credit rights, based on occupations alone, a large portion of people in the United States are disadvantaged by the market’s evaluation of their worthiness.
Nannie Helen Burroughs was right. Women’s work in the home was their point of entry into the marketplace. What never happened was Burroughs’s goal of getting the market to appreciate and value women’s work. The problem is not the often tedious and sometimes brutal work, but the view that society has of it and the years of gender discrimination that lessened its marketplace value and continues to impact it.
So how did Anjanette save her home? It helped that she had a cooperative lender. When she called to discuss her loan, Anjanette was pleasantly surprised to learn that her original lender still held it, and even more pleasantly surprised by what the loan officer told her next. “We don’t want this house back” was not what she had expected to hear. She was able to negotiate a loan modification that kicked in after she made the higher payment of over $1,700 for six months.
Anjanette got the income she needed by sticking with her trade, hairstyling. Hair has been a source of income for black women for more than a century. In the early part of the twentieth century, Sarah Breedlove, a.k.a. Madam C. J. Walker, built a fortune around “fixing up” women’s hair. In smaller, more intimate enterprises than Walker’s operations, hair is also a source of shared experiences.
As is common among black women my age, my first hairdresser was my mother, in our family kitchen. My first professional hairstyling experience was at the hands of my cousin Juanita Taylor, Great-Aunt Sara’s daughter. I don’t know if she had been professionally schooled in the style of Walker, or if she had any training at all, but Juanita Taylor had exceptional skills. She got her business started with seed money from her common-law husband, Fred. With it she built a shed on the back of her mother’s home and furnished it with a salon chair and a sink. Even though the floor dipped when too heavy a customer entered, Juanita’s beauty shop had two important things going for it: plenty of air and light. It was hers; it was a source of income for Juanita, her eight children, and her mother, and it was a foundation for Juanita’s independence.
I saw Juanita only on special occasions, but I knew each time that I would leave with a hairdo that neither heat nor humidity nor hard work could penetrate. That was her reputation, and she never disappointed. She locked in a “press and curl” in such a way that hair never “went back” (became kinky) before you had a chance to get back to her shop. Standing for hours over a hot gas burner, Juanita Taylor earned every dime of the money her customers paid her. She was as good-natured as she was hardworking. Every customer was “baby”: “How ya doin’, baby?” “Ya still in school, baby?” “Hold your head down, baby.” “I’m almost finished, baby.” Her greetings, instructions, and assurances were always delivered in the same interested, soothing tone of voice, and we, her happy customers, kept coming back for the chance to get our hair “fixed” and feel good about it, or at least not worry about it.
Valuing Women and Their Work
Admittedly, hair is a complicated concept. Hair issues are rooted in race and gender and are certainly not confined to black women. All the advertisements for hair growth products directed at men of all races attest to a preoccupation with hair. One could write an entire book on the identity politics of the stuff on our heads. This is not that book or chapter. Instead, I hope to understand fully Anjanette Booker and others like her and what they mean in the black community. Anjanette Booker has been successful because she found spaces for her enterprises: the beauty college—a gendered space—and the Vixxen salon, a racialized and gendered space where black women with their own authentic (as they define it) hair can be at home.
A similar observation can be made about beauty salons’ counterparts in black neighborhoods: barber shops.
Salons like Anjanette Booker’s Vixxen and her nearby competitor, Hair Vysions, are often social and economic anchors in black neighborhoods. They are also racialized and gendered because of what takes place in them and where they are most likely located. Since Madam C. J. Walker made black women’s hair an industry, thousands of working-class black women have increased their incomes in the hair business, mostly in small shops located in black neighborhoods. As places where black women gather for hours, these small salons are a community resource as well.
Despite all the odds, Anjanette’s ability to style black women’s hair allowed her to save her home. She may have been at a disadvantage in the lending market, but in the hairstyling market she was superbly positioned. There were times when the chairs in Vixxen sat empty, but she kept the shop operating. She adjusted her schedule. To supplement her income, she taught at a cosmetology school five days a week and moved her salon appointments to the evenings. Her daughter spent some of those evenings with her father, Anjanette says, and some in the shop “doing what she’s supposed to do”—her homework—while watching her mother “do what parents are supposed to do.” Anjanette’s clients began to adjust as well. They returned to their weekly appointments, saving money by making their own lunches or spending less on clothing. The regular hair appointment was more important than going out to eat or buying a new sweater. At the salon they could socialize, discuss their financial woes, share their problems, and trade information about how to resolve them.
Like so many other black neighborhood businesses, black beauty shops developed specifically as alternative spaces. Historically, black businesses were places where black people could go to get the goods and services they required without having to adapt to or respond to racial prejudice. But beauty shops are unique even among black businesses. They have remained in place in black neighborhoods years after black banks, grocery stores, dressmakers—all viable enterprises during segregation—disappeared. They have remained because they provide services that are not reliably available in white neighborhoods.
