Dorothy took it upon herself to help prepare the approximately twenty-five contestants who had signed up to compete. Her daughters recall almost every night at least one room in the West 80th Street Day Care Center was used to teach young women to walk like fashion models on stage, fit into the expectations of a beauty pageant contestant, and answer contest questions in a manner that correlated with their political perspectives without provoking the standards of the program. But these activities did not focus solely on accepting the national pageant standards. One pre-contest evening event took place at Regine’s Discotheque, supervised by Photo 44 Production Studio, at which Veronica Pazge consulted, using her “new line of cosmetics for the dark-toned woman.” The event’s purpose was to promote another idea of the history of beauty, noting the “earthy tones of Egyptian Foundation” celebrated an earlier version of womanhood. As the newspaper article that covered the pageant preparations noted, “Historians have found research that the Egyptians were of Black African origin.” As Pazge explained, “Ancient beauty is what my customers will achieve [like] their lovely ancestors did centuries ago.” The message, from Dorothy’s perspective, was to encourage participants to stand up to the standards of beauty implicit in the race of finalists in the national contest.21
Dorothy and Delethia drew on their experience as semiprofessional singers to help the contestants project the kind of confidence and stage presence that Dorothy had shown during her public speaking with Gloria. For those who chose to sing, Dorothy relied not only on her experience but her contacts. She lined up professionals such as Phyllis Hyman, whose 1979 R&B hit “You Know How to Love Me” had just reached the Top 20, to help coach the contestants to be as competitive for the national stage as possible.22
For some, though, it was not enough. Dorothy’s twenty-five contestants came from all over the city. As one of her daughters noted, “They looked like the United Nations; they were all races, ethnicities, and backgrounds.”23 A promotional photograph of some of the finalists with baseball player Reggie Jackson shows four African American or Hispanic women—Pamela Applewright, Betty Jean Verdigo, Iliana Guibert, and Andrewa Trooper—smiling and happy.
One unhappy contestant was a white singer by the name of Christine Soli. According to the Amsterdam News, she felt the list of finalists was problematic, that it had to have been a fraudulent contest since they were all women of color. The story was retracted the week after, labeled “Oops! Sorry!,” with a promised feature story about the contest and its director, Dorothy Pitman Hughes, to follow. As the article reported, Soli and Photo 44 Production Studio declared the setup flawed. Perhaps the focus on African-based beauty caught her unprepared. Whatever the rationale for Soli’s comment, the quick retraction by the Amsterdam News confirmed Dorothy’s control of the situation. The Amsterdam News not only regretted publication of the information supplied by Soli but promised that the “next week’s edition will profile the Miss America Beauty Contest and its Director Dorothy Pitman Hughes.”24
This incident would not be the first difficulty that Dorothy encountered. As she completed the local aspect of the contest, she understood she would face increasing opposition. To help her in the endeavor to change the program from within, Dorothy reached out to someone she admired for her ability to challenge prejudice and biased ideas of beauty standards in her own role as Miss America: Bess Myerson. In 1945, Myerson became the first Jewish Miss America, and she faced significant anti-Semitism. By the early 1970s Mayor Lindsay had appointed Myerson commissioner of the city’s Department of Consumer Affairs.25 Myerson met with Dorothy and gave her tips on organizing her pageant. She also met with the two runners-up in Dorothy’s pageant to help them prepare for the state pageant. For Dorothy, Myerson was an invaluable source for the ins and outs of the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City. The ins and outs, unfortunately, included anticipating racist challenges from the organization throughout her tenure as a pageant manager.
As a franchise owner, Dorothy was invited to bring her finalists to a national organization celebration in Atlantic City. Pageant owners, former contestants, host Bert Parks in his twenty-fifth and final year emceeing the Miss America pageant, and even journalist Tom Snyder attended the event. Dorothy elected to bring her middle daughter, Patrice, while Delethia stayed in New York to help manage the day-care center. Patrice was fifteen at the time. Always an independent child, she had found various ways to challenge Dorothy’s protective parenting, including sometimes leaving home to stay with her mother’s close friends, such as Joan Hamilton.26 Her mother’s role in various groups allowed Patrice to draw on a village of other mothers, including Gloria Steinem, who helped her discover her strengths.
In 1979, Patrice wanted nothing more than to follow a trajectory of public performance and participate in a beauty pageant. Indeed, her intense interest in Miss America was one factor that drove her mother to take on the pageant franchise. As Patrice planned her debut at the evening’s welcome event, she took so long at the hotel that her mother left her cab fare, the address, and instructions to arrive within the hour. As Patrice remembered it, she donned a “sick pink chiffon dress with pink fingernails to match” and took a taxi to the event. Exiting the cab, she started to feel unwell and unwelcome. The gala, themed as a night in the Old South, included a line of men dressed as Confederate soldiers who presented each guest with an Arch of Swords to enter the event.27 Dorothy saw Patrice as she entered, and left the room to walk the child out, explaining her daughter’s response to a “hurtful” place. The Confederate theme affected Dorothy, accompanied by her Miss Greater New York City finalist of Caribbean descent, as it did Patrice. Having to enter beneath a line of swords raised by costumed Confederate soldiers clearly conveyed that they could never represent the country—that the Miss America Pageant was not open to women who looked like them.
Patrice’s visceral reaction to the Confederate-themed event galvanized Dorothy’s sense of mission. At the Atlantic City gathering, she pointed out the very practices that assured Miss America would remain white, highlighting a range of racism, some indirect, some more explicit, in the form of dismissive comments about nonwhite contestants that she heard. She was intent on changing the pageant and going public, if need be, to push back on the racism in the organization.
Sheri Linley won the Miss Greater New York City crown that year. She competed as the only African American contestant at the state pageant. She did not win, but with Dorothy, she set a precedent for a more racially diverse New York pageant. Unfortunately, Dorothy would not get a second chance to run the Miss Greater New York City pageant.
Dorothy’s public stance against racism probably contributed to the abrupt withdrawal of her franchise from the 1980 Miss Greater New York City scholarship pageant. Even though the rights to the greater New York City contest had been available since 1972, with no competing claimant in sight, the Miss America organization would not allow Dorothy to continue her ownership.28 Dorothy had already begun preparations for the 1980 contest, building on what she had learned from the 1979 competition. Instead of running a pageant, however, she filed a lawsuit.
Dorothy sued for $5 million in damages for racial discrimination and “humiliation and distress” against the Miss New York State scholarship pageant as a franchise of the Miss America pageant. Dorothy’s attorney, Vernita Nuey, based the claim of illegal discrimination in employment law. However, the court ruled that there was no employer-employee relationship. Dorothy worked for the West Side Community Alliance, which owned the Miss Greater New York City pageant as a franchise of the New York State organization, which was in turn a franchise of the Miss America organization. As Dorothy was never an employee of the Miss New York State scholarship pageant, she had no standing to file suit. Moreover, her contract with the state pageant was only for one year; it expired on July 21, 1980. Dorothy expected a renewal, but her contract did not guarantee anything beyond that first year.29
The suit was underway in 1980, when Lencola Sullivan, Miss Ar
kansas, became the first African American to make it into the top five of the pageant finalists. Only three years later in 1983, the first African American Miss New York State, Vanessa Williams, was crowned Miss America.30 The news coverage of Williams’s win heralded an important first. Congressional representative Shirley Chisholm imagined that the selection of Williams as the pinnacle of American Beauty could indicate that “the inherent racism in American must be diluting itself.” NAACP director Benjamin Hooks compared Williams’s victory to “Jackie Robinson’s breaking the color barrier in major league baseball.” The moment seemed to present an opportunity to assess what it meant to select an African American as the winner in a national contest that had entirely excluded Blacks for forty years.31
This victory was short-lived, however, as Vanessa Williams was caught in scandal the next year after Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione announced nude photographs of her would appear in the July 1984 edition of the magazine. Pageant director Al Marks said he would strip Williams of her title if she did not resign. Williams eventually conceded to Suzette Charles, who was also Black.32 The following year, the pageant winner was Sharlene Wells, a Mormon from Utah. As the press noted, Wells held conservative views and was “squeaky clean.”33
The Vanessa Williams situation brought Dorothy back to the pageant, this time as a protester. Dorothy joined Flo Kennedy, one of the original protesters of Miss America, to form the Ad Hoc Committee Against Penthouse magazine and the Miss America Pageant. This committee, along with Kate Millett and other leading New York City feminists, filed an injunction in August 1984 to stop publication of images of Williams in Penthouse. The injunction failed, and Penthouse ran the Williams photos in its September issue.34
Dorothy’s willingness to join this protest should not be read as sour grapes or the ironic reversal of a past pageant organizer. Dorothy’s motivation to direct a beauty pageant was rooted in her desire to empower Black women and demonstrate to her daughters the value of Black women’s beauty even in a racially divided country. Vanessa Williams’s triumph vindicated Dorothy’s own efforts, and Dorothy saw Penthouse’s actions as an especially ugly manifestation of how racism and sexism could combine to degrade Black women.
CHAPTER 6
WHOSE EMPOWERMENT?
Black Women’s Business and the Politics of Gentrification
In the same way she had used her childcare center to create a series of community resources or had thought of a beauty pageant as a site for community activism, Dorothy took stock of what Harlem needed in the early 1980s. She realized that a copy center and office supply store would support local businesses and provide some of the resources needed for community organizing. As she went into business, Dorothy recast her role as a community leader in explicitly economic terms: first fighting against gentrification, then promoting Black businesses and speaking out against new Empowerment Zone plans, which she did not believe empowered Black business owners. In the process of advancing her own model of economic empowerment, she ran up against some of the most powerful people in New York City, including Charles Rangel and Eliot Spitzer.
Dorothy moved to Harlem in 1972, a couple of years after she learned of a plan for its gentrification, which she decided to oppose.1 While working to transform Intermediate School 201 in Harlem into a community-controlled school in the late 1960s, she remembers discovering a three-hundred-page plan to convert the community into an entertainment mecca at the expense of the people who considered it their neighborhood.2
I.S. 201 in Harlem had been a site of contention since 1966 when African American parents met with the superintendent six times to demand an African American principal for the school, given the predominately Black student body. The white principal had resigned, but his interim replacement, a white woman, refused to step aside, which led to picketing outside the school and teachers voting not to staff classrooms.3 When Stokely Carmichael, chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, joined protests in September 1966, I.S. 201 became a rallying site for the fight for Black Power in Harlem.4 In the late 1960s, Dorothy joined a group of people seeking ways to secure the local control of the school.5
Urban education scholar Marilyn Gittell credited the struggle over I.S. 201 with reconfiguring access to education. As she put it, community control was essential to countering biases in school administration: “So long as the schools in the ghetto were controlled by people removed from the needs of minority children (and often by those who viewed lower-class children as uneducable) quality education would not or could not be achieved. It was a concept born in I.S. 201, in New York City, among a group of parent activists who had struggled hard and long for an integrated school.”6 She characterized their vision succinctly, “If they were to be denied integration, they should at least control their own schools and develop the means to quality education.”7 Dorothy would have certainly agreed with Gittell.
Dorothy’s children attended the Children’s Community Workshop School, which their mother had helped to found, along with Manhattan borough president Ruth Messinger, a teacher and politician who worked to transform New York Public Schools. To Dorothy, the I.S. 201 fight was a way to extend the benefits of a locally controlled, culturally responsive school, one that had nurtured rather than stigmatized her own children. She considered the fight for control over I.S. 201 as an extension of her community activism. What she learned in the process of helping to organize the fight for I.S. 201 changed her life.
In 1970, with four other people active in the I.S. 201 fight, Dorothy enrolled in a business program taught by a Harvard professor in the affluent community of Andover, Massachusetts. A few days into the course, their group demanded that the instructor, in her words, teach “something that was more relevant to our situation. We explained that we wanted to take over I.S. 201 and requested we be taught a course on ‘power.’”8 When the professor refused, the group walked out of the classroom and headed to the library, the well-stocked resource for Phillips Academy in Andover, one of the oldest secondary schools in the United States. Ironically, it was in this library for the wealthy sons of the American elite that the group of activists discovered the plan for the gentrification of their Harlem neighborhood.
The report that Dorothy found in Andover was probably the Plan for New York City, from 1969.9 Created by the New York City Planning Department, the multivolume report detailed a new master plan for the city. Although the plan had been in development for almost thirty years, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1965 required the city to create a master plan in order to receive federal funding. A significant portion of the plan was reportedly intended to “elevate the city’s poor, most of them Black or Puerto Rican, into the middle class.”10
What struck Dorothy about this plan was its goal to turn Harlem into an “entertainment mecca” and relocate its current occupants, sometimes through very inventive means. One such tool, she noted, involved supporting cultural resources in other boroughs to “lure” residents to Brooklyn. Under this plan, Dorothy recalled, a “one-day West Indian parade in Brooklyn” would be funded and built up to become a “week-long event” that would “attract the many West Indians who owned brownstones in Harlem at that time to Brooklyn.”11 Indeed, the early 1970s saw the extension of the West Indian Labor Day parade from a one-day event to a four-day series of events, headquartered in Brooklyn, but taking place throughout the five boroughs.12
Other means for relocating residents during the early 1970s took a page directly out of the playbook of New York City’s “master builder” Robert Moses: proposing to redevelop housing and offering removed residents the “first crack” at the new units, although there may not have been interim housing for the displaced residents, who were unlikely to return. While Moses often overpromised the same new units to multiple groups of relocated residents, according to his biographer Robert Caro, this plan seemed more rooted in a vision of remaking Harlem.13 To Dorothy, these kinds of plans were the opposite of empowering Harlem resid
ents; they were a tool of gentrification. Coined in 1965 by British sociologist Ruth Glass, the term gentrification referred to a plan to lure or force working-class homeowners out of desired areas and replace them with middle- or upper-class occupants.14
Dorothy sought to counteract these gentrification plans any way she could, embarking “on a mostly unsuccessful campaign to persuade Black owners of Harlem brownstones not to sell, and to persuade other Black people to buy buildings in Harlem.”15 Dorothy bought a brownstone and moved her family to Harlem. In doing so, she joined a community actively involved in its own self-determination.
As the civil rights movement grew in the 1960s, Harlem residents increasingly questioned top-down ideas of urban renewal and began forcefully advocating for community control of Harlem’s built environment.16 This desire for self-determination fostered a community development approach by new organizations such as the Architects’ Renewal Committee in Harlem (ARCH). In response, the state of New York created the more moderate Harlem Urban Development Corporation (HUDC) as a vehicle for community-based development. As ARCH became associated with “radical” efforts for community control, including protests of major redevelopment projects, HUDC reframed community development in terms of the commercialization of Harlem’s main streets, such as 125th Street.17
At the same time, the kind of squatter movement that Dorothy supported on the West Side came to Harlem as well. Accompanying it was an urban homesteader movement that bought and rehabilitated Harlem’s brownstone buildings, just as Dorothy had done.18 The spirit of this homestead movement was rooted in the same desire for self-determination and community control that Dorothy and others espoused in education and community development. Of course, not everyone in Harlem shared this vision of community, but for Dorothy, Harlem in the early 1970s was being transformed by people coming from the same place she was.
With Her Fist Raised Page 11