With Her Fist Raised
Page 5
The event was followed by a series of benefit parties, including an after-show party at the home of Dr. Mathilde Krim, an early electron micrography expert. Krim, along with her husband, Arthur Krim, who was head of United Artists at the time, were inveterate fundraisers.27 Their party was preceded by celebrations at the LeRoys’ and an open house at the home of sculptor Bruno Lucchesi in August.28
Winter Soldiers grossed over $34,146 for CORE and cost the organization $17,478 to produce.29 For Dorothy, the most important lesson came from actress Shelley Winters. As producer-cum-file-clerk, Dorothy had a hard time commanding respect since, in her words, “CORE men were trying to take it over” and claim credit. Winters, long used to dealing with sexism in Hollywood and on Broadway, supported Dorothy, protecting her interests. Dorothy reflects that Winters “raised me in that situation,” indicating to everyone that the successful event would still be credited to Dorothy Pitman, and “cursing them really good when they wouldn’t listen” to the producer. Dorothy decided she would imitate Winters in the future. While Floyd McKissick, president of CORE, remained a friend, her immediate CORE supervisor “gave her hell.”30
By October, the New York Amsterdam News reported a split, with Dorothy deciding to sue CORE. She had been removed as the organization’s public relations director for “not taking direction,” according to reporter Marvin Rich. The September 28 production was declared to “not be a financial success.” To put things into perspective, Val Coleman had reported to Jet in October 1964 that Dick Gregory’s month-long, one-night performances raised “an excess of $50,000 for the organization,” quite a bit more than Dorothy’s event.31 The article reporting the break noted, “Mrs. Pitman however charged that her firing was discriminatory and the direct result of clashes with CORE officials from the beginning of her employment with the civil rights agency as a clerical worker.”32 The claim was against Marvin Rich and assistant public relations director Val Coleman. In an effort to get around the struggle with the community relations department, Dorothy had appealed directly to James Farmer, national CORE director, to try to create a separate fundraising department. The steering committee of the National Action Council of CORE, under Farmer, determined that her request was “out of order.”33
An earlier memo to Farmer, copied to Marvin Rich, reflects some tension around her proposed role. Writing two weeks before the show was to be mounted and thirteen days after the CORE president’s fundraising letter went out to subscribers, Dorothy’s letter suggests the lack of organizational support:
Since the benefit at Lincoln Center is a benefit for National CORE and is identified with CORE, I think it would be appropriate if you would lend your support to this project. If calls for tickets are coming into the CORE office, as they should, I think it would be best for you to assign one of the many people in the office just to take these calls.34
While the answer was vague, the appeal to James Farmer follows a memorandum to Dorothy from Marvin Rich dated September 9, 1964, which makes clear that the publicity director disapproved of Dorothy’s role:
Either you or whoever is helping you must be in the office to receive phone calls which are now coming in requesting tickets. We have had several complaints from people who have requested tickets and never received them. Ticket sales are not going so well that we can ignore those who want to buy. Certainly, we cannot antagonize our contributors.35
Dorothy’s duties as office staff did not include producing an event at Lincoln Center, but she remained committed to the project. As noted in Loften Mitchell’s 1969 book, Black Drama, the play was critically well received and slated to move to an off-Broadway playhouse. However, the tensions around the production and the role of the civil rights organization foiled the plan. As Mitchell noted, “The week after its initial showing, the producer and CORE had a devastating battle over policy—a battle that led the producer away from the civil rights organization. And that was the end of Ballad of the Winter Soldiers.”36
While Dorothy’s hopes for a longer run were not realized, the production had lasting ramifications for the writers, as the collaboration influenced their later work. For Mitchell, the role of history was of singular importance. In his words, “The white folks wrote those history books! And they’ve been writing plays about us and getting them on while we have to sweat and strain to be heard!”37 As Mitchell would note, the memory of the power to write and produce plays was tantamount to creating a new world. And forgetting it, by African Americans, was unforgivable. The production created to raise funds to find the three missing CORE workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, informed by a historical accounting of “patriots in true times,” offered a way to chronicle moments erased from collective memories that could inspire contemporary acts of heroism. For Mitchell, memory was important, and its erasure was devastating. As a Black intellectual, Mitchell insisted on the accountability of those known outside of the Black community for educating the nation about the legacy of Black actions. Singer Harry Belafonte, actor Marlon Brando, advertising executive Alfred Lasker, acting instructor Lee Strasberg, United Artists CEO Robert Benjamin, US senator Jacob Javits, and sculptor Bruno Lucchesi were all people to whom James Farmer, as head of CORE, wrote a personal thank-you for supporting the ode to omitted history. Presumably, they either attended or at least contributed to the benefit.38
For Killens, too, the chronicling of history was a lesson in power. In this way, some of the phrases and ideas in the script would feature in his other writings, especially in the 1965 essay collection Black Man’s Burden.39 For Killens, history is the key to unlocking change. Memory is not just the key to the future; the past has to be uncovered to allow for actions. As Killens writes in “The Black Writer Vis-à-Vis His Country”: “A cultural revolution is desperately needed, here and now, to un-brainwash the entire American people, black and white.”40 The essays in Black Man’s Burden were written at about the same time that Killens and John Henrik Clarke were helping to draft a statement for Malcolm X called the “Basic Aims and Objectives of the Organization of Afro-American Unity.” Read by Malcolm X on June 28, 1964, on his return to the United States from Africa, the statement reflected the mutual influence of the writers and activists on each other.41
In July 1964, just a month after Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman disappeared in Mississippi, a New York City police officer shot and killed a fifteen-year-old, James Powell, in front of several witnesses. Ensuing protests grew into riots that spread from Harlem to Bedford-Stuyvesant. CORE organized rallies immediately after the shooting, but the crowds were not satisfied with speeches and confronted the police, who then retaliated over several hot summer days. During the riots, Black Nationalist leaders such as Malcolm X and Bill Epton, as well as CORE and community leaders, spoke out. Dorothy witnessed it all and was drawn deeper into civil rights activism as a result. Like many others in Harlem, Dorothy was drawn to Malcolm X and knew she wanted to work with him after hearing him speak.
Malcolm X had broken with the Nation of Islam in March of 1964 and founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity to advocate Black nationalism. Dorothy volunteered for this new group, handing out flyers, working the door at meetings, and getting to know as many people as possible. Eventually she became known and trusted. It helped that Malcolm X and Bill Pitman loved talking strategies for resistance together—Bill’s experience in the IRA again forged the connection.42 Soon Malcolm’s wife, Betty, asked Dorothy to help babysit their four daughters.43 Dorothy remembers vividly the moment she heard about the firebombing of Malcolm’s house, on February 14, 1965, in the Nation of Islam’s first attempt to kill him. Even after having given birth to her second child only four days earlier, Dorothy felt the need to rush to Malcolm and Betty’s home to help with the children. Indeed, when Malcolm X was murdered a week later at the Audubon Ballroom, Dorothy was immediately flooded by friends who knew she would need support.44
For Dorothy, Malcolm X’s narrative of Black empowerment formed a basic tenet of her identity
. Perhaps growing up in an essentially autonomous Black settlement in Georgia and witnessing the control of whites laid the strong foundation for her that the Black community should be self-determined, economically as well as politically. As Malcolm X wrote in his autobiography about his father after being attacked and laid on a streetcar track, “Negroes born in Georgia had to be strong simply to survive.”45 Nationalism made sense to Dorothy.46
By the mid-1960s, Dorothy was also thinking about Black Nationalism in relation to other struggles. The person responsible for that shift was Bill Pitman. Having decided his interest in six hundred years of colonial oppression of the Irish by the English meant he might be able to understand hundreds of years of African American oppression by whites, Dorothy had taken to Bill Pitman almost immediately. Her friend Flo Kennedy, the attorney, persuaded Dorothy that her affection for this white man should not be framed by their differences but by their similarities. Kennedy’s unconventional marriage to a white science-fiction writer, in spite of a bad end to it caused by his drinking problems, encouraged Dorothy to take a risk on someone who supported her.47 Bill was supportive of Dorothy’s political organizing and helped in every way that he could. They wed in 1964.
Although she was not an advocate of racial separation, in 1964, Dorothy was meeting a wide circle of nationalist activists through Malcolm X. One such person in New York at the time was Bill Epton, an outspoken leader of the Harlem Progressive Labor Party and a leading protester of the police murder of James Powell. Epton, arrested for calling for protests while the city was in a declared state of emergency, was charged with criminal anarchy. He was later released on bail. At his trial, held in November and December 1965, he was convicted and sentenced to serve a year in jail.48 The evidence against him was a recording by an undercover police officer in which Epton is heard to say, “We will take our freedom. We will take it by any means necessary. . . . And in the process of smashing the state, we are going to have to kill a lot of these cops, a lot of these judges, and we’ll have to go up against their army. We’ll organize our own militia and our own army.” Epton appealed his sentence on grounds that he was exercising his right to free speech. He lost that appeal, but along the way, his trial became a focal point for activism that drew in Dorothy.
At one of many rallies to “Save Bill Epton,” Dorothy appeared with Ossie Davis, Mae Mallory, and others to “demand that the phony charges against Bill Epton be dropped.” Two days before Epton’s trial began, Dorothy traveled with him to Lincoln University for a conference on Black Nationalism. The Evening Journal, a white newspaper published in Wilmington, Delaware, described both Epton and Dorothy as telling students that “Negroes must fight ‘from within’ to liberate the ‘black man’ in America.” Epton, known to be sympathetic to China’s Mao Zedong, was said to urge students follow Mao’s advice to “have the audacity to seize power.” Dorothy was described as echoing “Epton’s call for violent revolution,” arguing that African Americans must not believe that nonviolence was the only way to “gain the confidence of white people.” Just as Epton had called for unity with oppressed white workers, Dorothy was described as having “no hesitancy about using white men to accomplish the black revolution.”49 Given Dorothy’s marriage to a white, Irish Nationalist, such a claim was more personal to Dorothy than the newspaper conveyed.
Bill Pitman supported Dorothy in many ways both privately and publicly, and she says she needed that support.50 His most public backing came through an organization he headed called the John Brown Coordinating Committee. The committee of white men and women was formed to “stand with our Afro-American brothers and sisters.”51 Bill argued that “Afro-American people” were at the forefront of the fight for “freedom, dignity, and equality.” He called on white people to “put an end to the moth-eaten and self-debasing slanders of white supremacy.” Tellingly, the committee was organized out of Dorothy and Bill’s apartment on West 82nd Street. In fact, the call for one march ended with an open invitation to a potluck at their apartment, with their address and phone number provided on the flyer.52
In 1965, Dorothy and Bill also hosted a group from the Deacons for Defense and Justice visiting New York City. The group included four African Americans from Mississippi and Louisiana and two young white men. One of the white men, Jim Van Matre, stayed with Dorothy and Bill. With the help of Florida civil rights activists Patricia and John Due, Dorothy convinced Van Matre to enroll as the first white undergraduate at Florida A&M University, a historically Black college. Opponents of desegregation were critical of all-Black institutions in the wake of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They threatened to close historically Black colleges if they did not admit white undergraduates. These institutions had helped inaugurate the direct-action campaigns of the civil rights movement, including efforts by students, faculty, and staff at Florida A&M.
Van Matre, who began his college career as a sixteen-year-old at the University of Florida in Gainesville in 1962, had been inspired first by his roommate, Jesse Dean, who was one of the university’s first Black undergraduates. As Van Matre put it, “I picketed, I marched, I knocked on doors. I was arrested.” Finding Gainesville “too tame,” Van Matre moved to Tallahassee, where activists were picketing theaters, motels, restaurants, and pools in May 1963, then to New York, and then to Mississippi and Louisiana, where he worked with CORE during the Freedom Summer of 1964.53 Having witnessed the violence that met the civil rights movement in the South, Van Matre increasingly agreed with civil rights organizers who determined to meet violence with violence. Within CORE, some insisted on absolutely no violence, while others felt the need to protect themselves. As he noted of his own experience, “Generally, in the more remote or hardcore areas, this conflict was resolved with a compromise. Those working in the field officially for CORE were to remain nonviolent. But at living quarters those who felt so inclined could protect themselves. (On more than one occasion fellow workers ran into my sleeping alcove in Monroe, Louisiana, shouting, ‘Jim, get the shotgun!!’).”54 This kind of experience was fairly widespread in CORE but not widely publicized.
The Deacons for Defense and Justice were more public about how they determined to protect themselves: “They decided to post armed guards during the hours of darkness. After the raiders received some return fire from the guards one night the number of raids decreased considerably.”55 Historian Lance Hill notes the Deacons, officially named in January 1965, received their first national news attention when the New York Times published an article on their approach, appearing coincidentally on the very day that Malcolm X was killed.
The sentiments that helped form the Deacons for Defense and Justice were familiar to Dorothy. Indeed, she later carried guns—wisely broken into pieces for transit—to her family’s home in Lumpkin, Georgia, when racial tensions got hot. Her mother had pushed for one of Dorothy’s younger siblings to become one of the first schoolchildren to integrate the Lumpkin high school, and hooded white men had made their displeasure with the Ridleys known.56 Dorothy’s support for the Deacons for Defense and Justice on their trip to New York reinforced the value of self-defense. Jim Van Matre had also become part of the family, marrying Dorothy’s older sister, Julia, after his visit to New York.
The Deacons for Defense and Justice provided protection for the James Meredith march in 1966, which inspired the codification of the phrase “Black Power” by Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture).57 In Van Matre’s recounting of the turn to Black Power, young civil rights activists increasingly called for white activists to organize themselves rather than to come South to “help.” “Out of the ranks of the defecting [white] civil rights workers,” according to Van Matre, “two new movements took shape—the women’s liberation movement and the antiwar movement.”58 This route from civil rights to women’s rights was the same he ascribed to Dorothy. Retrospectively describing her as a “longtime Black Feminist,” he recounted an interview with Dorothy in which she described her growing gender awareness:
Here I was working as a fundraiser out of the national office of CORE. I established funding contracts, opened up a store, organized a benefit at the Lincoln Center, with proceeds all going to CORE, yet I never received an ounce of credit for this work and my salary was a fraction of my male co-workers’. My initial feelings were that this was racism since the other fundraisers were white males, but I slowly began to realize that their gender was the major factor (personal communication).59
After her break with CORE, Dorothy continued to work amicably with its Black leaders. Floyd McKissick stayed with her in Georgia when she returned for part of the summer and he happened to be passing through. Yet, even in 1965, Dorothy was developing a feminist consciousness. Winter Soldiers included almost as many female heroines as males, and her direct mentor, Shelley Winters, modeled ways to insist on being taken seriously as a woman. Her break with CORE was the result of treatment by her immediate supervisors—two white men. As Van Matre notes, what Dorothy did after leaving CORE was establish the West Side Community Alliance in New York, “which among other things, was to become a major force in the movement for child day-care.”60 What Dorothy did was become a community-based Black feminist.
CHAPTER 3
CHILDCARE, COMMUNITY CARE
Activism in New York City
It was 1965. The World’s Fair had come to New York the year before, only to be met by a massive protest led by CORE of the discriminatory hiring practices at the event that called for “Peace through Understanding.” The city that never sleeps had been the center of the largest civil rights action in the United States in February 1964, when half the children in the country’s biggest school system stayed home to protest segregation in their schools. Kitty Genovese had been murdered outside her Queens apartment building with nearly forty auditory witnesses who didn’t bother to call the police. For Dorothy, the year 1965, including the city wide blackout and the murder of Malcolm X, would be as memorable as getting married and giving birth to her second child the year before.