With Her Fist Raised

by Laura L. Lovett

  By this time, the nouveau transplant had established a network. She had met a Black policeman on Long Island and, after packing her things, went to the police station to find him. Naive about the process of getting around, she asked him to show her how to get to Harlem so she could find a cousin who had also fled the South. Waiting at the station for the policeman to get off work, Dorothy realized that she needed a new plan.

  After leaving her things with her cousin in Harlem, Dorothy returned to the domestic service agency on Long Island. Her second placement taught her more. The agent assigned her a family named Moskowitz in Rockville Center, but she had also begun to make political friends and to identify what was important to her.

  The Moskowitz home seemed to offer a different kind of experience. Taking charge of her own well-being also helped make Dorothy a different kind of person. She moved in with the Moskowitz family, continuing to connect with friends who worked in service and went out on “Thursday nights off” together. The Apollo Theater became a regular destination.

  One night, Dorothy clicked with a young man she met at the theater. He returned on another Thursday night looking for her. This time, he had had his hair done, “straightened, bleached, and curled’ in the style popular in the 1950s. When she saw him outside the theater, Dorothy reached out and touched his hair, uttering something like, “Oh, so cute.” The man slapped her so hard that her head flew. As she noted, “I was from Georgia—I was not a timid little girl who was going to accept getting hit.” Dorothy reciprocated by “beating the hell out of him,” so much so that she had to call his mother to pick him up. For Dorothy, the message was to be wary of whom she befriended, electing to seek out “people in the movement” after this unfortunate encounter.

  Her new employers, like her new political friends, respected her choices. Mrs. Moskowitz knew that Dorothy had hopes of singing and helped by lending her clothes, fixing her up, telling her which clubs to try, and offering her some Saturday nights off in addition to Thursdays. Within a short time, Dorothy Jean, who gave herself the stage name Jean Myers, was making enough money singing and doing domestic work that she could afford to move out of the Moskowitz home and rent an apartment in the Black section of Rockville, above a barbershop on Bank Street.

  Dorothy continued to juggle domestic work with nightclub singing and, for a while, things worked very well as she booked evening events in Freeport, just a few miles from Rockville Center. Singing at the Freeport Club and Guy Lombardo’s East Point House allowed Dorothy to build her reputation. She eventually moved into the club scene in New York City, starting with the Piano Bar in Greenwich Village and then the Central Ballroom, the Celebrity Club, the Showman’s Club, and even the famed Cotton Club in Harlem once in a while.

  As she grew more secure, and more assured that she could take care of herself, things changed. Dorothy visited a white doctor at the recommendation of a fellow “Thursday-night-out” housekeeper-friend. She had been experiencing abdominal pains and wanted to find out why. Before she had left Georgia, Dorothy had been afraid to tell her mother, knowing that if she brought it up, Aunt Velma would have made a tea out of “grass or weeds” to help her with the pain and her period. When her own daughters had similar struggles, Lessie Ridley sent tea greens to brew. But Dorothy was now in New York, and New York doctors saw patients about such things.

  The doctor examined Dorothy and asked when she had had her last period. When she revealed that she had not yet had her period, he gave her medication to bring on menses without pain. When she returned the following Thursday, still in pain, the physician examined her again, and asked whether she had ever had sexual intercourse. Dorothy, who answered that she was still a virgin, was then told by the doctor that she needed to have sex.

  Returning yet again, still in pain, the physician gave her an extraordinary piece of advice—not to return to his office without having had sexual relations with a man. This piece of “medical” advice was not accompanied with any recommendation for protection from pregnancy or disease. Coming from a home in Georgia where the sexual education she received from her mother consisted of warnings not to get caught “going out” or “to bed,” Dorothy had no idea how to protect herself.

  Under doctor’s orders, Dorothy began plotting to address her pain. At her next singing engagement at the Celebrity Club, she chose her first sexual partner from the crowd based on how he danced. As she put it, she “smoothed up to him and danced with him after I sang.” After making arrangements to have lunch with him the next Thursday, she found she liked him enough in the daytime to continue meeting him for a few weeks, before having sex with him. Her doctor’s appointment, set for the month after her last visit, gave her a few weeks.

  Having sex once, as ordered by her doctor, changed her life. Dorothy found out from that same doctor that she was pregnant. She told the father, who urged her to go to his mother’s home, where his mother would take the baby. This was not something the newly pregnant Dorothy could consider: “If I was going to have it, I was going to keep it. It would be my baby.”13 She continued working for a while in New York, after leaving the Moskowitz home, to work in a cardiologist’s office in Brooklyn, prepping EKG patients and cleaning the office to save up money.

  A short while later, Dorothy decided to go live with her sister Julia, who had married and moved to Florida. Dorothy took a job in a Palmetto restaurant as she prepared for her baby. Her fears of letting her family down by getting pregnant, after all her mother’s warnings, turned out to be misplaced. Dorothy’s mother reached out to her, saying “It’s a baby, not a sin,” and insisted that her daughter come home. Her mother was pregnant as well.

  Reconnecting with her family was affirming. As Dorothy noted, “family attitude was key.” Not only did they embrace her, but her presence turned out to be positive for her mother. The community that Dorothy lived in tended to dress in white gowns almost like “uniforms” to signal that a woman was expecting. The clothes were large, flowing, and practical but not very fun or flattering. With her savings as a maid and singer, Dorothy “bought pretty maternity clothes for Mom and me,” the first real maternity clothing that her mother had owned. As Dorothy reminisced, “Mother enjoyed that pregnancy.”14

  Dorothy named her daughter for the angel Delethia. She was born on March 10, 1960, at home with the aid of Dorothy’s aunts, mother, and family friends. The baby and her mother flourished in the family home. For the rest of her life, Dorothy would make regular pilgrimages to Charles Junction with her daughter, staying almost every summer or leaving the kids while she traveled, making sure the connection between Georgia and New York continued for another generation.

  Having her baby in the small hamlet did not make the racial politics any more bearable. Dorothy soon yearned to leave again. This time Dorothy left Delethia with her mother and traveled back to New York to sing with her younger brother, Roger, and her sisters Julia and Mary. The foursome billed themselves as Roger and the Ridley Sisters, and they sang in venues from churches to New York City nightclubs. With an easygoing manner, Roger Ridley developed a rapport with the Cotton Club and the Baby Grand, eventually singing at the wedding of Robert F. Kennedy’s son Douglas. His name was featured in the group’s moniker, Roger and the Ridley Sisters, who eventually recorded their own song, “Morning, Noon, I Cry,” in 1966.

  A picture taken at the time reveals an elegant foursome. Roger in a double-breasted gray suit with a white shirt, tie, and pocket square stands at the front, smiling with a mustache, a full foot taller than his three sisters. The backup singers—Dorothy, Julia, and Mary—are dressed in elegant fitted outfits with tight sparkled bodices and ankle-length skirts. All three wear pointed shoes with their legs posed on a step and their hands poised, similar but slightly different. Their individuality is apparent through their smiles, hairstyles, and rings. The differences, though, between them and their brother illustrate the relevance of his assorted nicknames, including Buh-Buh, Ajax, and Big Man.

  Though suc
cessful, the group was not making enough money to support itself in New York. Just as she had promised her mother, though, Dorothy found another way of making enough to support herself. She began to move around the city, relocating to the West Side. Along the way she worked for Warner LeRoy, the owner of Maxwell’s Plum, a restaurant and bar that became synonymous with the sexual revolution.15 As author Peter Benchley described it, Maxwell Plum’s was “one of the true paradoxes of the city’s night life. . . . By being consciously—almost self-consciously—democratic, by avoiding all pretense to exclusivity, it had become one of the most smashingly successful places in the city, attracting everyone from movie stars to restaurateurs to—yes, even the fabled Brooklyn secretary. And contrary to the social imperative, they all seem to coexist in relative bliss.”16 This kind of democratic mash-up also characterized LeRoy’s connection to Dorothy. While working as a live-in maid for a family in the LeRoys’ apartment building, Dorothy had shown concern for Warner’s wife, Gen, who had become ill and would sometimes sit outside the building, where Dorothy saw her on breaks. This kindness to his wife prompted Warner to hire Dorothy to work in the kitchen of his Second Avenue restaurant and occasionally to sing. This opportunity had a remarkable impact on her life.

  At a party celebrating a Broadway show that Warner’s father, Melvyn, had directed, Dorothy was hired to accompany a two-piece band. Dorothy’s concern for Gen had evolved into a caretaking relationship in the LeRoy home. It was this relationship that spurred Warner’s sister to complain at the party, “Gen is in there with her arm around the maid. It’s embarrassing.” Dorothy, provoked, leaned into the sister’s husband on a break, saying something that further enraged Warner’s sister. Racism existed, including in the avant-garde theatrical crowd that gathered at Maxwell’s Plum, where interracial intimacies were still startling and provocative.

  Such interracial interactions were also jarring to Dorothy. Indeed, it was at the LeRoys’ party that the attractive Georgian met Bill Pitman, a white man from Ireland. Bill Pitman had been seeking Dorothy’s attention that night and tried charming her with stories of his past. He must have been pleased when she told him about the insulting incident with the host’s sister, since it allowed the creative Irish builder to plant himself by her side for the rest of the evening to protect Dorothy from further insult.

  Warner’s sister eventually left in outrage. Meeting Bill, who worked redesigning Maxwell’s Plum and would go on to help rebuild Tavern on the Green, intrigued Dorothy. As she shared with her friend Flo Kennedy, an outspoken activist and attorney, Bill Pitman’s politics fascinated her. It didn’t hurt that he was handsome and charming. Pitman, an Irish Nationalist and member of the IRA, had helped steal guns from an armory in Ireland.17 He eventually persuaded Dorothy that because the British colonization of Ireland was similar enough to the colonized position of African Americans in the United States, the two had much in common. Bill was enthralled by Dorothy’s interest in politics, and by her singing, and the two quickly planned for another conversation. Within months, they were married.

  On returning to New York from Georgia, Dorothy had made every effort to surround herself with like-minded, left-wing political friends. She had left Georgia for political reasons and had grown to think of her politics as an important part of who she was. In addition to working as a singer and a domestic, Dorothy had begun working at the offices of the Congress of Racial Equality.18 Her initial position at CORE was mostly secretarial and began sometime before May 1963. Through her work in the office, she became acquainted with grassroots organizing on civil rights issues and decided to go further with her vision, which her CORE coworkers did not necessarily consider important.19

  At the same party where Dorothy met Bill Pitman, she also met the film director Otto Preminger. Her work for CORE intrigued him. On June 22, 1964, two CORE workers, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, and Queens College student organizer Andrew Goodman, had disappeared in Philadelphia, Mississippi. James Farmer, one of the original CORE student founders and CORE’s national director in 1964, flew to Mississippi from New York to help coordinate the search. In her part-time position at CORE’s national office, Dorothy decided the grassroots organization needed a large fundraiser to raise money to send people to Mississippi to look for the missing Freedom Summer workers. As a rural Georgian, she distrusted the steps being taken in the South and believed that only an externally funded group could find the CORE workers. Preminger was fascinated by Dorothy’s conviction and invited her to discuss the possibility of a New York fundraiser at his office.

  Preminger, an Austrian-born filmmaker, shared Dorothy’s politics, not only in terms of race but with other issues too. Ten years earlier, Preminger had decided to challenge what he saw as sexually restrictive morality clauses by premiering his film The Moon Is Blue, which had been denied the Motion Picture Production Code Administration’s seal of approval for its “unacceptably light attitude towards seduction, illicit sex, chastity and virginity.” Indeed, Preminger’s challenging of this constraint would go on to weaken the code, but only after the director had filed lawsuits against theaters in Maryland and Kansas where there were separate showings for men and women. He eventually took the suit to the Supreme Court. When Dorothy met Preminger at his office, he gave her a list of people to contact and maneuvered to reserve the Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center. The nascent event would be a star-studded evening, complete with an original play script and songs, drama and dance. Importantly, Preminger connected Dorothy to his circle of radical artist friends.

  Dorothy’s new friends, including writers John Oliver Killens and Loften Mitchell, took to the project.20 The two writers often convened at Dorothy’s house to work on the production’s script over her home cooking. Killens, who had cofounded the Harlem Writers Guild, believed that politics and writing could connect actors to actions. Many of the ideas that would appear in the work to be staged by CORE would also appear the following year in Killens’s book Black Man’s Burden. Loften Mitchell, having just written Tell Pharaoh, a concert drama about the history of Harlem in 1963, helped imagine how to tell the story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney and their commitment as “Winter Soldiers” to the long-standing battle for African American freedom.

  This project of raising money with a New York extravaganza tore at the fabric of CORE. By its own definition, CORE was a national civil rights organization created to “erase the color line through direct, nonviolent action.” Modeled on Mahatma Gandhi’s procedures to “free India from foreign domination,” CORE had been an activist organization for twenty years.21 Like Gandhi, CORE’s founders were interracial pacifists and created CORE from the Chicago branch of the Fellowship for Reconciliation in 1942 as an organization fighting for civil rights with nonviolent civil disobedience.22 By the time Dorothy began working for them, the national office coordinated dozens of local branches, orchestrating the famous Freedom Rides and Freedom Summers, as well as sit-ins, the standing-line technique, and other direct forms of protest. CORE was a civil rights organization focused on direct action, so it was not clear that the production of an elaborate stage show, one to be performed at Lincoln Center, fit with the vision of shock troops of change.

  Ballad of the Winter Soldiers, described as “a study in music, verse and satire of the magnificent struggle of the American Negro for his dignity and rightful place in society,” was the first joint project for Killens and Mitchell.23 The “lyric-poetic” performance featured an all-star volunteer cast that included Shelley Winters, Dick Gregory, Robert Ryan, Theodore Bikel, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Madeleine Sherwood, Martha Schlamme, Godfrey Cambridge, John Henry Faulk, and Frederick O’Neal. Frank Silvera served as the narrator. The producer was the unknown Mrs. Dorothy Pitman.

  The play’s title, which comes from Thomas Paine, reflects the investment in hard times. Beginning with the song “Motherless Child,” the script champions a commitment to “America’s Winter Soldiers” who “came in many garbs, in many shapes and of many ra
ces—fighting for the rights and equality of all mankind and especially man’s right to be free of enslavement by his fellow man.”24

  The first act tells the story of Rabbi Shneur Zalman, who founded the Hassidic sect of Chabad as he led Jews away from pogroms in Russia. It is followed by a representation of Irish rebels, introduced by words unmistakably written by John Oliver Killens:

  Ireland also had her summer soldiers and her sunshine patriots; her “uncle toms,” her “gang dins,” her traitors to the cause of freedom. But, fellow Americans, list to Ireland’s winter soldiers in the dark days of her degradation.25

  The list of Winter Soldiers begins with Robert Emmet in 1803, went on to John Brown, the Kansas Liberator, and was followed by accounts of Gabriel Prosser’s slave rebellion, and Harriet Tubman, played by Ruby Dee. Sojourner Truth, played by African American actress Alyce Webb, represents the nexus of racial and gender oppression, while white abolitionist Ernestine Rose introduces Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois. The final individuals named are Wladyslaw Broniewski and the Winter Soldiers of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. A poem by Margaret Walker, “For My People,” was read under a screen projecting film clips of African Americans being attacked by the police in Birmingham, in St. Augustine in Florida, and, finally, in Harlem. As the script put it, “We see now films of the Harlem riots, of policemen standing with their white helmets, some shooting into the air, and we hear the crashing of bottles. We see wounded people outside the Harlem Hospital. Then we see the screaming headlines from Brooklyn, Rochester and Jersey City.” The film concludes with Dick Gregory being asked to “comment on your experiences on the battlefield,” a scene from a North Carolina school integration case, and a speech by CORE national director James Farmer.26