With Her Fist Raised

by Laura L. Lovett

  The “damage” implied in this appeal for funding couches the problem with childcare in terms of poverty and need. This perception of “damage” was exacerbated by Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report, The Negro Family: The Case for Action. Written while Moynihan was assistant secretary of labor under President Lyndon B. Johnson as part of the War on Poverty program, the report infamously described the Black community as a “tangle of pathology” with the “deterioration of the Negro family” at the heart of community “deterioration.”33 Whether cast in terms of impoverished mothers forced to work or in terms of a culture of poverty itself, the need-driven vision of childcare framed childcare negatively, as a last resort, rather than something positive for parents or children. As Guggenheimer herself explained in response to Dorothy’s struggle to fund her center, “The city should be saying: ‘Bravo. You are trying to do something,’ instead of just yelling.”34 Dorothy’s vision for her center offered a positive take on what such funding would mean. After all, the interaction of children of different ethnicities and races seemed to create a positive space in an urban setting with race riots in 1964, and again in 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

  Dorothy’s diverse clientele reflected federal policies that determined who was eligible for childcare support. Deep ambivalence about working mothers meant mothers eligible for childcare subsidies had to be seen as needing it. Anxiety over government subsidies, and especially over women’s dependence on welfare benefits, led to a 1962 commitment to extend state subsidies to pay for childcare only for women on welfare, despite John F. Kennedy’s apparent commitment to more generally available childcare in 1960. The Public Welfare Amendments of 1962 actually sought to mandate work or job training for individuals on relief, and forcing women of young children to work meant their children needed places to go. As a result, the move from universal childcare for all workers, a remote possibility during World War II, became associated with childcare funding linked to welfare and need.

  The association was extended in 1965, when President Johnson’s Office of Economic Opportunity sought to extend preschool to one million children through Head Start programs.35 First Lady “Lady Bird” Johnson, the honorary chair of Head Start, declared that the program would end poverty: “For almost a million American children today, this important step, if it succeeds, can start to break their ties with poverty.”36 As suggested by the Head Start teacher-training film, the intervention was about moving these young children from being “apathetic, fearful, hesitant, shy, speechless, upset, frustrated to the point of rage or despair, or just too unsure of themselves to be able to speak or even look up,” to becoming “self-confident.”37 The subsequent success of Head Start programs and the recognition that half of the country’s youngsters under six were regularly cared for outside of their homes, meant that the tension between universal childcare and childcare as a form of welfare framed public dialogue.38 This link between childcare and poverty framed how Dorothy’s center functioned and reinforced her faith in community control as a means of countering demeaning attitudes toward poverty and welfare.

  A profound influence on Dorothy’s thinking at this time came from the Black Panthers. Founded in Oakland, California, in 1966, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense used community-based protests and militant self-defense to advocate for economic, social, and political equality. The Black Panthers arrived in New York City in 1966; branch offices were formed in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968. Dorothy very quickly became involved in the Harlem office. The Black Panthers’ principles of community development and self-determination resonated deeply with Dorothy’s own values and activities. One of the first actions of the Harlem branch of the Black Panthers was to shut down Harlem schools to protest against inequities in education and hiring. This focus on youth extended to the Black Panther Athletic Club, which instituted in 1969 a Free Breakfast for School Children Program similar to one first created in Oakland. In the late 1960s, Dorothy remembers, she worked “every day” with the Black Panther Party in Harlem. After Malcolm X’s murder, the Black Panthers became a model of political activism for Dorothy and inspired her to care for her community and transform it for the better.

  In 1969, Dorothy organized the Committee for Community-Controlled Day Care, to bring together 150 community groups interested in childcare.39 That same year, Mayor John Lindsay created the Early Childhood Development Task Force, to which Dorothy was appointed, to propose recommendations about how day-care services should be funded and administered in New York City.

  In 1970, the task force issued The Children Are Waiting, a report calling for the creation of a Department of Early Childhood Services to bring together input from the four different city departments that addressed day-care centers at the time. While the report advocated some measures that Dorothy’s center opposed, such as a sliding scale for fees, they “wholeheartedly endorse[d] the philosophy that mandates parent and community involvement in every aspect of early childhood services.” In concrete terms, the report called for the creation of an Early Childhood Commission, filled with a majority of parents. It called for parent involvement at all levels, “classroom, center, and City agencies.” That said, the task force could not agree on the extent of parental involvement. This disagreement isn’t surprising given the number of city officials on the task force. As noted in the report, the call for community control came from “frustration with large bureaucracies and an increasing distrust of government and its abilities to respond to their needs.” The task force acknowledged their plan constituted reforms that went beyond what city officials had ever proposed, and clearly some members of the task force were still not ready to allow parents too much say over the care of their own children.40

  In 1970, as Congress considered the Comprehensive Child Care Act, the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) ordered a study of the best childcare centers in the country. Abt Associates, a social science research firm, was tasked with finding those centers and determining what made them flourish. With input from government agencies and a range of civic organizations around the country, Abt Associates composed a list of 132 centers nationwide worthy of further investigation. That list was then winnowed down to only twenty “among the better centers of their kind in the country.”41 Abt Associates trained childcare providers to help them with site visits.42 Dorothy’s West 80th Street Day Care Center was among the top twenty.

  So, what made the West 80th Street Day Care Center one of the best in the country? The key lay in the way in which the center signaled the possibility of social change through community control. In contrast to typical day-care centers run according to government regulations, this center was described as flaunting protocol by “doing as much for the community as it is for the kids—ignoring the ‘guidelines’ it is supposed to follow . . . bowling along, getting things done, making a difference.”43 The report’s authors were also impressed with Dorothy’s focus on utilizing every resource in her power to improve the lives of her community. “Her full-time organizing and fundraising efforts have initiated dozens of other childcare projects, improved state laws, launched many self-help projects in her own community and the city.” Dorothy’s presence and commitment could not be overlooked: “indefatigable, militant, and highly effective: tall, impressive, with beautiful carriage and a warm wonderful face.”44 The report’s authors were deeply impressed by the extent of community control embodied in the center.

  After the OEO report, the West 80th Street Day Care Center became known as a model for community control. In 1971, Congress considered comprehensive day-care legislation that would make day care widely available again in the United States. The Comprehensive Child Development Act was approved by both houses in 1971 but vetoed by President Richard Nixon. The major divide over this legislation was once again the issue of community control. Liberals argued for community control, as exemplified in Head Start programs, while conservatives cast the measure as the “Sovietization of Our You
th.”45 Despite Nixon’s veto, on April 12, 1972, the Senate held an ad hoc children’s hearing to oppose what they saw as regressive features of Nixon’s welfare bill that tied welfare and childcare together in terms of need. As a leading advocate of community-controlled day care, Dorothy was called to testify. She brought with her six children from the West 80th Street Day Care Center to answer the senator’s questions. A photograph from the event shows the children in their Sunday best with Dorothy in a white dress. The children’s moods, ranging from boisterous to bored, did not deter Dorothy from speaking her mind.

  Dorothy let the senators know that she viewed the welfare bill as a “plan for implementing total fascism” because the work requirements it would implement would force families into a system of government surveillance. The senators were impressed by the children, who each answered questions about the center, and agreed with Dorothy about the need for community day care.46

  Even as the city planned to redevelop the West Side by closing city-owned buildings to poor tenants and moving in higher rent tenants, the parents and children of the center made plans to stay. Conditions at the Endicott had worsened. In April 1969, a three-by-five-foot section of plaster ceiling fell in a classroom; it barely missed ten of the two- to three-year-olds in the room but sent a twenty-three-year-old assistant teacher to the hospital.47

  Fundraising efforts, though, were beginning to work. By June 1969, the New York Foundation had granted the center $7,500, and Barbara Wilcox had donated $20,000.48 Elinor Guggenheimer held a breakfast fundraiser at her house for seven women who each gave $1,000.49 Just before Christmas, the center threw a party at Mr. and Mrs. Ronald Green’s “palatial East Side townhouse.” Ninety guests each paid $100 to attend, and many contributed much more. Isaac Stern’s partner, Vera, had donated kitchen cabinets and a stove after they had their apartment refinished. Most significantly, Polly King Dodge, a West Side “homemaker,” had already donated $125,000 for the center’s new building and $75,000 for its renovation. When a reporter from the New York Times asked her why she had donated, Dodge responded, “I guess I just believe in what this center is trying to do. I can see it and be a part of it. That’s what a community project is about.”50

  Support from the New York City Department of Social Services and personal donations raised the funds to give the community a center that they hoped would be worthy of its endeavors. They bought a 1926 three-story building at 223 West 80th Street. What had been a Chinese restaurant would become a center to serve more than one hundred children.

  Wallace Kaminsky of Kaminsky and Shiffer Architects designed the renovation, which included applying stucco over a brick facade, recessing the windows, and creating an irregular and animated roof-line. The renovated space included four classrooms, a roof play deck, a kitchen, and a nursery. A 1972 New York magazine article said it “makes most of the midtown boutiques look tacky by comparison.”51 The playful red-and-blue scheme, complete with yellow plastic tubes running from the first floor to the third, formed play spaces inside. The tubes were meant to reference the space program, but the architect described the facade as reminiscent of a structure built by children out of colored blocks.

  The biggest challenge was not paying for the new space or its renovations, however. Dorothy wanted the community to understand that “the Center is their building.”52 She feared that a “big and beautiful” new building would be viewed as a “White Establishment,” and people wouldn’t go in. As she articulated, “I want everybody to know that it’s theirs, to know they own it, and to walk in with pride.” Although the center had incorporated as it prepared to move, Dorothy insisted meetings remained open to all. The meetings, like everything at the center, were opportunities to educate—opportunities to learn “the legalities of owning property” and “the responsibility of making decisions [and] allotting funds.”53

  While Dorothy primarily identified as a childcare activist at this time of her life, her activism was not narrow. She also worked to create community-controlled resources that provided job training, adult education, a youth action corps, housing assistance, and food resources on the West Side.54 Like other organizers, Dorothy understood that the need for childcare was not independent of issues of needs for housing, employment, and welfare support. The renamed West Side Community Alliance addressed these issues as deeply interrelated problems that could not be effectively resolved in isolation.

  Housing, for instance, became a major issue on the West Side in the 1960s. Redevelopment in the West Side had been in the works since the end of World War II, but the large-scale projects that allowed private developers to redevelop housing for middle- and upper-income residents, from 87th to 97th Street, from Amsterdam to Central Park West, began in the 1950s.55 The city condemned buildings, took the titles under the guise of “slum clearance,” and then sold the buildings at reduced rates to private developers.56 The reduction in housing units meant that neighborhoods like Harlem, Morningside Heights, and the West Side suffered from declining regulation and increased demand for affordable housing, as tenants were pushed out for high-priced, redeveloped apartment buildings or for civic projects.

  Dorothy remembers passing by a welfare hotel at 2 a.m. on her way home from singing in a club and seeing children sitting outside on the stoop. She asked them, “Why aren’t you inside? Why aren’t you in bed?” And one of the children said, “We have to wait until . . . my uncle gets up out of the bed, or my cousin, or someone else [gets] out of the bed.” Incidents like these, Dorothy says, “put us on notice that we had to do something about housing.”57 Dorothy worked with other activists in the city to shut down eight welfare hotels unfit for habitation. At the same time, she joined the squatter movement that emerged on the West Side in 1970. To Dorothy, working-class families were paying—with their taxes and blood—for the Vietnam War and a space program while the city colluded with developers to leave them homeless.58 The day after seeing the kids on the stoop at night, she returned to talk to their grandmother and came up with a plan. She borrowed a truck from a friend and moved them to “a really beautiful apartment on about 88th Street and Columbus Avenue and set them up.” The apartment was standing empty as the building was slated for redevelopment. As she saw it, “All I was doing was taking apartments that seemed to be free. Open.”59

  In 1970, Dorothy’s commitment to community control was tested by new state standards that raised education requirements for day-care staff, required more invasive intake procedures to determine eligibility, and limited enrollment by income. A reporter for the New York Times noted that the center’s parents, used to exercising some power, “have become politicized and militant now that they have the center to give them a political base and a focus for action.” In response to the new Department of Social Service policies, they demanded that “the D.S.S. fund their center without requiring the usual state accreditation for head teachers or the minimum two years of college for assistant teachers.” As Dorothy framed the issue, “What does a credential or a degree tell you about how good a teacher is? . . . All they ever teach children is white, middle-class values that tell Black children they are second-class and that stifle curiosity.”60

  On January 26, 1970, Dorothy led more than 150 people from 30 day-care centers in a sit-in at the DSS Division of Day Care on Lafayette Street. Dorothy wanted the city to side with them against the state regulations, and within four hours, had secured a meeting with the commissioner.61 This form of direct action became a favorite tactic for Dorothy. In her words, “I organized those parents who had the children and we would pick a day and a place to take over, to protest, and to sit in, and tie ourselves to the desks and just to make sure that it was going to be known what the poverty situation is and what the needs of the families are.”62 From watching civil rights demonstrations in the South, Dorothy understood that they had to be ready to stay for extended periods of time, so she would “buy loads of bread, and jars of peanut butter, and jelly, and water. I mean, these big gallons of water.”
When they occupied the Human Resources Administration, where Jule Sugarman was the director under Mayor Lindsay, they had seventy-five to one hundred families from day-care centers across the city.63 Dorothy assigned “every family a room, until we used up all the offices, and then we would double up.” The message to the city was they were there to stay until something got done.

  The mayor and his wife, Mary, came to the sit-ins, and Mary helped take care of the kids during the occupation.64 Lindsay was a supporter of city childcare and had created the Early Childhood Development Task Force, but the sit-ins targeted new rules from the city and the federal government that defied community control and associated day-care support with welfare and poverty.

  Working on the Early Childhood Development Task Force meant a great deal to Dorothy. Yet, barely two months after the city’s new Division of Day Care director, Georgia McMurray, was sworn in, Dorothy publicly defied her, and her funding resources. Dorothy objected to new requirements forcing parents on welfare who were “physically fit” to place their children in day-care centers and work in “city agencies” to receive benefits. This plan, which Dorothy labeled the “work free labor plan” would have replaced low income families in state-supported day-care centers with welfare recipients who would be forced to work. She vehemently decried this proposal, arguing that “no more can workers allow themselves to be used in a class war in order for the Nixon, Rockefeller, Reagan plan for free labor to be implemented.” Linking this plan to the welfare reform bill initially put forward in 1971 under California governor Ronald Reagan and adopted by New York governor Nelson Rockefeller in July 1971, she called for clear rejection of what she called “a psychological Attica for day care.”65

  Drawing on the rising women’s movement, Dorothy noted, “It must be realized by all those parents and women in the women’s liberation movement, who are screaming for childcare centers that day care as an organization is being used as a class war.” She pointed out that “eight thousand secretaries have lost their comfortable positions to welfare families who are working for welfare checks, 600 of them are working in the Community Development agency, another larger number in the Sanitation Department, Addiction Service Agency, Department of Social Service and the Human Resources Administration.”66 Female employment requirements were being used to rationalize forced labor of welfare recipients, and the effect was to force out lower income working families, who were charged almost twice as much for day care as anyone earning less than $8,500.