With Her Fist Raised

by Laura L. Lovett

  Dorothy and Bill named their new daughter after Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence leader whose efforts to transform the former Belgian colony into an independent republic led to a US- and Belgian-supported assassination of him in 1961. Dorothy hoped to instill in her daughters pride and a sense of self-worth but sometimes there were obstacles. She and Bill worked different hours. She lived far away from her family networks. It was challenging to manage work, family, and political organizing.

  As a mother with two young daughters, Dorothy always had childcare on her mind. She started to notice how many children were left at home while their mothers worked. She still worked nights singing in clubs and was startled to find during the day “often children were taking care of children; twelve-year-olds were taking care of four-year-olds. Twelve-year-olds were doing the cooking, cleaning, and clothes washing: the things a full-grown person would do.”1 Dorothy worried about the safety of having “children taking care of babies.” Relentlessly proactive, Dorothy opened her home to the children she saw on her street. It started her down a trailblazing path toward founding a wholly new childcare center that would address other community needs, from job training to housing.

  What Dorothy observed on the West Side in 1965 was not radically different from the situation twenty years earlier, when children of war workers roamed city parks or streets all day. One woman on a graveyard shift at a war factory parked her car close to the plant’s windows while her four children slept inside; preschoolers were often left in the care of preadolescent siblings.2 Government responses to the issue were very different in the 1940s and in the 1960s, however. Because the need for childcare was driven by the needs of World War II, in the 1940s, the United States began a national program of childcare for working women.3 Women’s employment in defense industries produced an estimated need for two million childcare slots during World War II.4 Nevertheless, some critics of the day-care program recommended that working women place their children in foster care rather than group care. The War Manpower Commission suggested that “no woman responsible for the care of young children should be encouraged or compelled to seek employment which deprives her children of her essential care until after all other sources of labor supply have been exhausted.”5 Protests for childcare overwhelmed the critics, leading the Federal Works Agency to interpret the provisions for social services in the 1941 Lanham Act as a means of supporting childcare centers. It was the first time the United States funded national childcare centers for working families as an entitlement, though it was almost entirely dismantled immediately after the war by President Harry S. Truman, in 1945.

  Dorothy was also operating in the context of an American war, but this war was one that affected the American people more unevenly. “The reason that we got involved,” she explains, was “the father was in Vietnam fighting, and his children didn’t have a bed to sleep in.”6 The draft for Vietnam drew a higher proportion of enlistees from poorer, Black communities like the “poverty pocket” on the West Side of New York City, where Dorothy lived.7 Working Black parents were more likely to be piecing together work, as Dorothy was, in undervalued service sectors. Employment discrimination, a legal practice until the passage of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, meant that job segregation based on race and sex framed the employment opportunities for Dorothy and her neighbors. That the Civil Rights Act only passed after an almost unprecedented 534-hour filibuster was an indication that change, when it came, would happen slowly.8

  In the meantime, the children on West 80th Street needed care. Drawing on a tradition of African American women organizing around childcare, Dorothy recruited parents up and down the street to meet and discuss their needs. She framed interest in opening up a center in terms of her own experience. As she told a reporter, founding the center was “a venture of faith born of desperation.”9 Before she began organizing in 1965, Dorothy had once left Delethia in the care of a woman who so physically abused her daughter Dorothy had to take her to the hospital for her anxiety. This difficult and painful experience drove home the many challenges faced by people living lives of scarcity. Dorothy observed, “People hung up in poverty are sometimes not even nice to their own children because they don’t know how to escape. And I don’t blame anyone for being frustrated.”10 Nevertheless, Dorothy knew she had to find a better way to care for her children. Shortly after Patrice was born, she offered to open her small apartment for home childcare. Dorothy was now doubly concerned about leaving her children in the care of others she could not trust: “I refused to be put into that kind of situation. I knew other people were in a similar situation, with children being treated just as cruelly.” Going door-to-door, she gathered parents who were forced to make do with arrangements or depended on their own children to help them. As a series of reports on New York City childcare would suggest, the area from 72nd to 114th Streets from Central Park West to the Hudson River was filled with “countless women in need of day care in order to get off welfare, or supplement a husband’s salary by working.”11 Dorothy had no experience running a day-care center, but she was resolved to make it work since, in her words, “when one has to do something, one does it.”12

  Her childcare business rapidly outgrew her small apartment and the apartments of the other women who volunteered. With federal funding from a community development grant at the Office of Economic Opportunity in the summer of 1967, Dorothy moved her center into two ground-floor rooms in the Endicott Hotel on West 80th Street near Columbus Avenue. Though today gentrified as part of the elite Upper West Side, in 1967, the hotel, constructed in 1889, represented a very different kind of location. A 1970 report on the center pulls no punches when it describes its location as a “west side ghetto” in Manhattan, “where people fight rats and roaches in their homes and stay off the streets at night.” While the center was “close to fashionable Central Park West,” the report also notes that it was possible “to make a drug connection on the corner.” In short, “not a nice place for a kid to grow up.”13 The building itself was described as “terrible.” According to the report, “toilets and plumbing are ancient and make a lot of complaining noises. The peeling walls and uneven, splintered floors are a graphic history of floods, rats and roaches. Grease, soot and dust clog corners and crevices.” Threadbare scraps of carpet were used for children’s circle time, and play equipment was “worn like a well-used salt lick.”14

  The Endicott Hotel in the 1960s had become a welfare hotel, with approximately half of the residents on support.15 Welfare hotels, or single room occupancy buildings (SROs), were a fiscally viable alternative to public housing. As one critique of the continuing use of SROs made clear, the poor were warehoused to the fiscal benefit of the city. City officials noted that “even public housing would cost more than the $110 to $150 a month allotted for housing” for the 2,500 welfare recipients in places like the Endicott.

  Still, many of its residents suggested that the Endicott was “one of the area’s better welfare hotels” and they “resented the Endicott’s ‘welfare hotel’ stereotype.” This view was shared by residents who pointed out that many of the occupants of the hotel’s four hundred rooms were couples and working people, including police officers and “incognito entertainers.” A 1968 report noted that hotel management had converted two storage rooms into recreation rooms, made repairs, and brought in social workers to organize rummage sales, dances, trips, and a food cooperative that sold canned goods at wholesale prices.16

  Dorothy’s own recollection of the street in front of the center was that it was a fairly rough area, though one that would make way for children. When she spoke to the “winos” outside the center in the morning and asked them to clean up the stoop for the children, they did. A crucial component of Dorothy’s community outreach involved creating a safe space in a building connected to a string of murders in the early 1970s. Dorothy’s daughter Patrice remembers growing up in a community “up against every kind of difficulty.” In order to catch a cab, she recall
s her mother bringing Coke bottles from her apartment. “When we were passed by on the freezing, slushy sidewalk by a driver exercising his ‘right’ to refuse us service (there were no female drivers) we threw the bottles at his back bumper!”17

  The Endicott Hotel owners, Sol Fedder (also spelled Fader) and Howard Felder, who seemed well liked by the residents, did not subsidize Dorothy’s childcare center.18 Rent for the center’s two rooms was $350 a month, and maintenance was $40. The center charged parents of the thirty-five children only about $5 a week. The rest of their funding came from the Office of Equal Opportunity and New York City social services grants. Dorothy herself earned $150 per week, the educational director earned $192.31 per week, and each of the three teachers earned $135 per week. With a perpetually strained budget, Dorothy had to figure out how to build something out of nothing, and she did. Donated furniture, teenaged volunteers from the Neighborhood Youth Corps, lots of fundraising, and grants allowed her to create a community-based day-care center.19

  That said, the conditions in the building were a serious challenge, and the center could easily have been closed. Poor conditions also meant the center was not licensed and therefore could not be incorporated, making it ineligible for long-term funding. Financial stability would have made it possible to get a mortgage for a better space and then to be licensed. It was clear to Dorothy the center needed further support, and she began reaching out to the press to make the case for its future.20

  In the center’s first major piece of publicity, Nan Ickeringill, a reporter for the New York Times, described it as a “squalid haven” for integrated childcare: “A tiny white girl held a little Black boy’s hand and tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade him to stay by her side. A blue-eyed, blond boy told [an Asian appearing] girl . . . that he was wearing a Japanese hat because he was Japanese. A Puerto Rican boy finally persuaded a Haitian boy to remove his earmuffs.” Ickeringill juxtaposed the happy playfulness of the center’s thirty-five children with what she saw as the “dismal” conditions and grim prospects for its future. The Endicott Hotel had just been sold, and without a lease, Dorothy feared that they could be kicked out any day. Dorothy had her eye on a nearby property that would allow them to expand to two hundred children, but she had no way to buy it or get a mortgage. The article ends with Dorothy as a bulwark against despair: “I think I can get to the point of losing all faith in this country by working the way I am now and getting nowhere. . . . [But] I believe this center could make the difference between my children’s growing up to pack guns or growing up to pack picnics.”21

  At around the same time, Dorothy connected with the New York Action Corps. They sent Bob Gangi, a former organizer with the Robert F. Kennedy Action Corps, which became the New York Action Corps after the senator’s death in 1968. Gangi offered fundraising experience and a number of new contacts around the city. Shortly after Robert Kennedy’s assassination, Gangi had been interviewed for a New York magazine article about the work of the Action Corps. Seeing a chance to promote the center, Gangi suggested to the reporter who had interviewed him that she come down and see what they were doing.22 The up-and-coming reporter with her own New York column, The City Politic, was Gloria Steinem. Steinem’s article on the center appeared just a few days after Ickeringill’s piece in the Times. Steinem wrote that in the space strewn with books, toys, and finger painting, each child’s coat was “hung neatly in separate nooks improvised from orange crates.” To her mind, it was “obviously a happy place.”

  Even on this first visit, Steinem recognized the transformative nature of the West 80th Street Day Care Center. More than a thoughtfully run childcare center, it provided job training for volunteer mothers who got off welfare and enrolled in college courses in early childhood education and summer jobs for local teens, among other initiatives. Dorothy recruited teens to survey local food costs, only to discover that prices went up just before welfare checks were issued. A neighborhood campaign run out of the center brought that practice to an end. Dorothy did not want a day-care center that was only for poor children, as city-run centers were. She shared her vision with Gloria saying, “We want to have Black and white and Puerto Rican, welfare and middle-class parents all together, just the way this neighborhood is. The parents work together, and they learn about each other, too. The middle-class ones aren’t afraid to walk on 80th Street anymore. And the kids—well, they’re going to grow up different from us. I don’t think they’ll fear each other anymore.”23

  When Steinem returned a few months later in June, she attended a community meeting at the center, which she now understood to be a “neighborhood-changing, life-changing” place, and praised Dorothy for “her natural gift for organizing.”24 Through these initial encounters, Dorothy and Gloria developed a friendship and powerful partnership that took them on the road together speaking about the emerging women’s movement, always informed by Dorothy’s work at the West 80th Street Center.

  Both Ickeringill and Steinem highlighted community control as a defining feature of the center. Dorothy resisted the idea of giving government agencies the last word in exchange for funding. For instance, shortly before Dorothy opened her center, the New York City Department of Social Services, as a matter of policy, would not allow parents to serve on the board of directors for any childcare center their child attended. By contrast, the West 80th Street Center had a governing board only composed of parents. This governing board interviewed, hired, and fired staff and also set center policies and fees. They rejected a sliding scale of fees based on income levels “because this system, in ranking the socio-economic status of families, imposed racial and class differences.” Instead, they adopted a five dollar per week per family policy, a strategy that created “a sense of community and mutual assistance.”25 Dorothy noted that “if some people pay more, they have a tendency to think their voice is more important.”26 With the flat fee and a sense of equal investment, the West 80th Street Center had been able to create “economically and racially integrated classes.”

  Other centers with city funding had “found themselves without the right to hire and fire, or to select the social service worker who admits children, or to accept children without going into embarrassing financial and family details [including marital status].” In Dorothy’s words, “If you have got a child, what does it matter whether you are married or not?” Dorothy wanted the center to be staffed by members of the community. Even the social service worker would come from the community and share a concern for the community and “what’s happening with people’s lives.”27 The resulting center staff was almost entirely composed of paraprofessionals, including community residents without formal training. These community co-teachers built their own curriculum and materials relevant to their experiences and needs.

  From the moment one entered the West 80th Street Center, the program was clear. As one observer explained: “You enter through doors bearing a Black solidarity poster, into a lobby plastered with community self-help information and portraits of famous Blacks. Dominating all is a gigantic picture of a drug addict’s arm and needle. It’s clear from the minute you get inside that the children of this community have a choice in life: constructive self-help is in, self-corrosion is out.”28 Drug education was part of the curriculum, because parents had requested it. Pointing to the photos on the wall, a teacher explains to her students, “See this guy on the street? See what’s in his hand? Yeah, a sugar cube. If some guy tries to give you a sugar cube, you take off.”29 At this time, LSD was sold on sugar cubes. While the center also had more typical educational materials, it was a shared tenet that “education cannot be isolated from the social system in which it takes place. ‘School’ and ‘real life’ need not, and in fact should not, be separate realms of experience.” Community-developed curriculum was reinforced with concrete experiences. Visits to various facilities and bus trips “were followed by related stories, music and artwork about those aspects of community life.”30 This level of involvement from parents and t
heir growing sense of community made the West 80th Street Day Care Center into a true community center.

  Nationally, attitudes toward day care were notoriously divided between those who saw it as a universal right for all women and those who saw it as a form of welfare provided only to those in need. While most of the United States had dropped state-funded day care after World War II, New York City was a notable exception. City day-care funding after the war was almost exclusively tied to needs. There seemed to be the possibility of a European-style citizenship right to childcare, in the same way education is considered a citizen’s right, but when funding became an issue, a needs-based paradigm always won out.

  Elinor Guggenheimer, who founded the New York City Day Care Council to advocate for childcare in 1948, had initially argued for childcare as a universal right. She claimed, “As citizens of a free country, we have the right and obligation to insure that health, welfare and education services are available for all who need or are entitled to them.” She wound up making an appeal to its role in social reform of the poorer classes.31 However, when President-elect John F. Kennedy, at Guggenheimer’s insistence, seemed to invite the childcare movement to be a part of his administration, it was clearly only as a means for addressing a so-called culture of poverty. As Kennedy’s letter, read by Guggenheimer at the 1960 National Conference on Day Care for Children, noted, “We must have provision for day care centers for children whose mothers are unavailable during the day. Without adequate day time care during their most formative years, the children of the nation risk permanent damage to their emotional and moral character.”32