With Her Fist Raised

by Laura L. Lovett

  When we first discussed the idea of this biography, Dorothy insisted that I come to Charles Junction, just outside Lumpkin, for the quarterly Homecoming Communion at the church she had attended as a child. Clearly, in order to truly understand Dorothy, I needed to accompany her home, where her connections ran deep. We walked along the dirt road near the church that marked the old timber settlement that had been the site of her childhood home. The small houses would have been called shacks by locals who saw them melting back into the woods, but as we ventured inside, with an eye toward our footing on the wood floors with plants poking through, we found well-built cabins with high ceilings and sturdy hand-carved wooden cabinets. Outside, there were well-loved gardens, fighting against the intensity of the Georgia swamp brush that actively sought to take apart the cultivated traces of an entire community.

  Our walk concluded at the Mount Olive Primitive Baptist Church, at the end of the road near Highway 27. Inside the small white structure, fifty or so worshippers gathered for a service that lasted several hours, punctuated by many hymns and concluding with an amazing down-home feast, cooked to impress the brothers and sisters of the congregation. Dorothy was certainly welcomed home to her childhood church, but some undoubtedly remembered her earlier days as a Black Panther.1

  The church itself had marked the limits of Dorothy’s geographical freedom as a child, but it had also provided her with the means to eventually leave this small, close-knit community. Dorothy learned to sing at church, but she also came from a family that loved music: her mother composed, her father played some guitar, and her brothers and sisters sang beautifully. This place for raising her voice in song trained her to speak up for herself, a trait she turned into a tool for making profound change in all the communities in which she would live. Ironically, the work Dorothy would become best known for challenged the basic tenets of Mount Olive, a church that excluded women from holding positions as elders, based on the biblical proscription that women must not speak in church except in submission, “for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church” (1 Corinthians 14:35) and kept handkerchiefs near the altar to drape over the legs of any woman whose skirt seemed too short. Nevertheless, Dorothy, who devoted her life to speaking out and advocating for women, returned to this site throughout her life and was always welcomed in. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t tension sometimes. In the early 1970s, Dorothy brought the first white person to the church, when she was traveling with Gloria Steinem. She remembers the congregation “sort of thought I was crazy, because I was in the movement, and they called me Black Panther.” Dorothy admits that “running around with this white woman [Gloria]” in rural Georgia and elsewhere was a little crazy, but the two women were fearless and didn’t think that much could happen to them.2 Nevertheless, Lumpkin and the Mount Olive Baptist Church were touchstones for Dorothy. Her roots in this community laid the very groundwork for her to later challenge the basic social structure of society.

  Her church was not the first thing that came to mind for Dorothy when she recounted how her upbringing influenced her political activism. In her recollection, it was the visible divide within the larger community that most influenced her penchant to work for change. Dorothy lived seven miles north of Lumpkin, Georgia, in the unincorporated community of Charles Junction. Located along Charles Road at its intersection with Highway 27, it consisted of a stretch of houses gathered around a spring.

  The relationship between race and class in Charles Junction was evident to Dorothy at a very early age. She later recalled an incident involving a white neighbor family that clarified her incapacity to accept inequity and mistreatment at age nine. She vividly remembered the children of this family, who lived across the railroad tracks, were poorer than her own family. The Ridley family had chickens, hogs, and an expansive vegetable garden, while these children lived in a home with only a pecan tree in the front yard. The children would play with Dorothy and her siblings until near dinnertime when they would linger until Dorothy’s mother, Lessie, offered to feed them along with her family. One Christmas, the children played for the entire day, and when the time came for Christmas dinner, they showed no signs of leaving. Lessie, in exasperation, asked the white children what their mother was cooking for Christmas dinner. Their answer was “pee-cans.” After the children went home, Lessie fixed a plate of food and sent her third daughter to deliver it. As Dorothy recalls:

  I walked the few hundred yards to her house filled with the spirit of Christmas. When I got to the house, plate in hand, I cheerfully knocked on the front door. “Who’s that?” the woman called out. “It’s Dorothy Jean,” I said. “My momma fixed you a plate of food for Christmas.” The ratty bed sheet on her front window was pulled aside, and she peeked out and said flatly, “Bring it ‘round back.” So, I did, my Christian patience wearing thin. I knocked again. “Set it down on the step,” she yelled from the other side of the door. So, I took a couple of steps back off of the porch and I threw the plate as hard as I could against the back door. I’m sure a couple of pieces of ham must have landed on the step. Upon my return home, I casually told my mother, “Mrs. (so & so) said she’ll bring your plate back next week.”3

  Even sixty years after the incident, Dorothy makes sure to note that some of the ham must have landed on the step. Dorothy never wanted to be seen as lying, even though her mother would surely have appreciated, if not have approved of, responding to the insult with force.

  Knowing that her mother would never press the white woman to return the plate, Dorothy counted on the racial distance between the families to protect her. Dorothy was spared the kind of punishment that Black families during this era often imposed on children in order to keep them safe in a world of racial injustice and violence.4 Had Dorothy’s mother asked for her plate back, or been told of her daughter’s actions, or had the white neighbor decided to warn the Ridley family that their daughter was “trouble,” the likelihood of a “training” to warn Dorothy to abide by the racial code that might promise some protection from violent attacks was fairly high. As sociologist Charles S. Johnson and his research staff, in a project for the American Council on Education, noted three years before Dorothy was born, insults from whites seemed to “generate active resentment” among “Negro youth,” and they were often a source of concern for Black parents who saw reactions to the insults of white children as leading to potential danger for their children.5

  The experience of Sephus Davis illustrates just how deadly racial missteps could be. Although Jessie Daniel Ames, a white suffragist credited with founding the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, reported no lynchings in Georgia in 1931 or 1932, four lynchings occurred the following year, one in the small town near Dorothy’s birthplace.6 Sephus, variously spelled Cephus and Sevis, Davis was a veteran of World War I who had seen combat in France, fighting in the Saint-Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne campaigns. When he returned from Europe, he lived with his sister’s family and then, after she died in 1929, found his way to Stewart County as a laborer. During an arrest for drunkenness, Davis hit a white policeman on the head. A mob removed him from the Richland City Jail the next morning and beat him severely, shot him with four bullets, and left him to die in the woods about two miles from the jail. The Constitution, published in Atlanta, described Davis as assaulting a ten-year-old African American girl in the headline “Negro Girl’s Attacker Slain by Georgia Mob.” No evidence corroborates this charge against him, but the article makes clear that his offense was getting out of line. Davis was beaten brutally about the head, a seeming reference to the report of the arresting officer, who complained that “Davis beat him over the head while he was making the arrest.”7 A moment of insobriety could lead to a horrific death; a single mistake could be fatal.

  This event was the second example of extralegal vigilante violence in the region at that time. Fourteen years earlier, a seventeen-year-old African American named Johnnie Webb had been hanged and then shot. In testimony to the local sherif
f, probably at gunpoint, his brother identified the young man as shooting wildlife in a field near livestock owned by R. J. Dixon, when E. W. Brightwell, the property’s overseer, came out to warn the youth about shooting near cattle. Whether it was an accident or an incident that escalated, Webb shot Brightwell in the abdomen, then fled with his brother. Webb got all the way to Jacksonville, Florida, before the local sheriff, Walter Knox Johnston Jr., learned of the youth’s whereabouts, and went to get him. Somehow, fifty miles from Lumpkin, in Stewart County, a mob found out about Webb’s location, despite Johnston’s claims of keeping the return secret. Around fifty hooded white men and youth from the Richland area drove to the Smith ville jail, extracted Webb, and brutally murdered him near the site of the original shooting.8 The enforcement of white supremacy with extralegal violence determined how Black parents taught their children to behave, with the understanding that any infraction of the racial order could result in death.

  This message of racial danger was vividly brought home to Dorothy at a young age. As she puts it, “I was very much taught by the things that I saw.” What she saw was routine extralegal violence from the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens’ Councils. In a conversation with her daughter Delethia, Dorothy tells the story of her grandmother spying on KKK members while cooking for them on weekends at a cabin in the woods. These white men “would get drunk and then they would come down into the community, burning crosses or shooting up the community.” Dorothy’s grandmother on her father’s side “would take some young kids up with her to the cabin to make the fires and she would send them down to the community to let them know where the next crosses were going to be burned.” Dorothy remembers fearing being shot in her bed on Friday and Saturday nights as a child when the KKK would ride through Black neighborhoods, shooting at whomever they pleased.9 When Dorothy was ten, her father was beaten and left on the family doorstep. “It was the KKK,” she remembers.10 She prayed that night that, if her father lived, she would dedicate her herself to “making the world a better place.”11 In retrospect, Dorothy still wonders at “how twisted” it was that “these white men worked alongside the black men at the mill, yet could still hide behind their robes to do something like that?”12 According to her, “We grew up very conscious of what was happening to us.”13 These incidents, and others like them, instilled in her a lifelong desire to find ways to keep her family safe, just as her grandmother had.

  More than likely, this incident signaled the moment when Dorothy began to withdraw from playing with the white children of her impoverished neighbor and think about ways to fight racial injustice. As Johnson notes, the 1940s often saw a divide develop between white and Black children between the ages of ten and fifteen. According to his study, touted as the first to give readers an in-depth scientific report on the “intimate lives of Negro youth,” the age for dissociation was around the age that Dorothy threw the plate. In his words, “Playing with white children begins to become taboo for Negro children at about the age of 10.”14 Connections often end abruptly with overt conflict. While Dorothy’s response to the insult from the neighbor parent likely changed her attitude toward the children, her keen sense of their precarious situation and their poverty may have also made her more generous toward her white playmates.

  Lessie Ridley’s attitude toward the impoverished white neighbors modeled for her daughters a community care ethic that Dorothy could not help but internalize. It was rooted in the religious and community ideas of generosity and support, even for abusive adults who had only pecans on their table. She lived by this maxim: “If one of your brothers or sisters falls from grace, go to them and help them get back on the road. Be there for each other.”

  MUDEA RIDLEY

  Dorothy’s mother, Lessie White, and her twin sister, Bessie Lee White, were born in 1916 in Stewart County, Georgia, the youngest daughters of Jim and Alice White, who had three sons and another daughter in a house they shared with Alice’s unmarried twenty-four-year-old sister, Gracie Clark. It’s not clear how much education Lessie received, but her daughters remember that she was known for her singing and musical composition, even recording a song, “God Laid the Foundation,” in 1983. In it, her strong, clear voice, even in her late sixties, sounds the gospel notes loudly and authoritatively, claiming that God not only makes everything the way He wanted it to be but that “he fixed me like He wanted me to be.”15 That “fixing” began with her family life.

  Lessie married Melton Lee Ridley, whom most people called Ray but white people referred to as Rayfiel. She gave birth to her first daughter, Arye Lou, around the age of eighteen, in 1935. Within a few years, she had two more daughters—Julia in 1937 and Dorothy Jean, called Dot by the family, in 1938. Two other children, who did not survive, were commemorated with the family saying “Dot got to be the baby three times,” because she lost her opportunity to be a big sister twice. Lessie did make her an older sister after the birth of Mary in 1943. Then Mildred was born in the last year of World War II, followed by a son, Melton Lee “Roger” Jr., in 1948; a daughter, Alice, called Tan, in 1952; and a much younger son, James Deland “Jimmy,” in 1959.16 For this last child, Lessie was pregnant at the same time as three of her daughters. By then, “Mudea,” as her children called her for “Mother Dear,” had demonstrated her absolute dedication to taking care of a growing family, doing the endless cooking, cleaning, and caring for not only her immediate family but also for many of the families and children in her community.

  Such caretaking included the material conditions of her kin and their spiritual life too. The influence of religion on Lessie’s life and world was apparent. She was named the first Church Mother of the Mount Olive Primitive Baptist Church, an honor she eventually shared with her twin sister. The Church Mother title was a concession to the fact that though women were prohibited from preaching, their labor held the community together, in the roles of church educator, counselor, social worker, and intermediary. Some African American denominations authorized women to preach from the pulpit, but the gender roles in the Mount Olive Baptist Church were more constrained. As historian Bettye Collier-Thomas notes, women often had to fight for respect in the male-dominated churches in which they worked.17 It is possible that this religious struggle led Lessie to emphasize personal over community devotion. Perhaps this is why it was that her twin sister, and not she, was eventually elected to the supervisory Senior Mother role in the congregation.

  One thing Lessie passed on to her children was her love of singing, and she sometimes composed music for the church. Yet even as her lyrics found “God Laid the Foundation,” Lessie saw that foundation as somewhat freestanding. As her daughter would later remember, she urged her offspring to “use the insight provided to you by God” and depend on that insight and your own belief. In her words, “When trouble seems all around, just stand still. God will fight your battle,” and, “If you are right and righteous, trust God. You will make it.” For Lessie, her belief in God was a source of individual strength and a resource for battling wrongs. This kind of independence would help frame her children’s perspectives on their lives and trajectories. If they missed the subtlety of this religious recommendation, their mother had other ways of conveying her message. She urged her sons and daughters to think for themselves and not to be led “by anyone and everyone.” She insisted that they “listen and think before you speak” and “look before you leap.” Lessie trusted they would develop their own sense to take them far. They were told to “stand on your own two feet,” not “lean on the wall,” but “learn to stand up,” after being certain you stood on solid ground. Most telling, Lessie urged her family, “Remember, if you don’t love yourself, you can’t love anyone else.” Such counsel was about personal competence, thoughtfulness, and self-love.18

  “Mudea” also had thoughts about caring for others: “Treat others as you wish to be treated,” “Be careful how you treat people on the way up; you may see them on the way down,” and “Do not take without putting something in.” Whe
n warning her children about difficult situations, she had a clear message about avoiding trouble. The African American proverb about distancing oneself—“Feed some from a long-handled spoon”—was accompanied with the original suggestion—“You don’t have to have a large ham bone to choke a mad dog; you can use a cup of butter.” These two pieces of advice urged keeping some folks at a polite distance and offering something soft and unexpected to address “mad dogs” instead of using the largest weapon available.

  The world that Dorothy was exposed to through her mother was framed by the Black church and the kind of Social Gospel doctrine found throughout Protestant denominations at the turn of the nineteenth century. Duty to community and others was rooted firmly in an understanding of the self. This self was competent, self-loving, intuitive, and intelligent, able to stand on its own while still looking after the fallen.

  HIS “OWN TRUCK”

  Melton Lee “Ray” Ridley, Lessie’s husband, was a man who appreciated the independent ideas of his wife. He worked for his father, Andrew Ridley, hauling lumber for the Alexander Bland Timber Company with a privately owned truck. The 1940 US Census lists “Rayfiel” as a “Driver” but with the indication that he drove his “own truck” in the section of the form that identified occupation.19 This was an unusual occupation in the small unincorporated section of the tiny town of Charles Junction. By the federal definition, the named section of an unincorporated area required one hundred or more inhabitants to warrant a separate study of their population. Charles Junction had just that. Indeed, the community was clearly divided between those associated with the lumber company and with farming.

  On the eve of World War II, African American male heads of households were identified by their work for these industries. For the last year of the Great Depression, the families living in the rented houses in the small community could usually identify the male heads of households and sometimes their teenaged sons as fully employed, working fifty-two weeks in the previous year. Despite full-time employment status, the salaries of Blacks at the mills were almost without exception only $480 a year, or $40 a month, a bit more than half the salaries of the whites working in the same jobs and living in the same settlement. Frequent exceptions were the lower-paid Black youth, earning around $30 a month as they learned the trade instead of attending school from around fourteen or fifteen years of age.