With Her Fist Raised

by Laura L. Lovett

  During this time, the West 80th Street Day Care Center was in full swing, and Dorothy was deeply involved in the fight for community-controlled childcare in the city and the nation. As president, Richard Nixon had promised to veto all the Great Society Programs and appointed Donald Rumsfeld to direct the War on Poverty programs of Nixon’s predecessor, Lyndon Johnson. Nixon’s determination to defund Office of Economic Opportunity grants made clear that the community development role of Dorothy’s childcare center soon would lose federal support. Dorothy was no stranger to fighting with city, state, and national governments on behalf of the West 80th Street Center, but the turn to the political right in the late 1970s created systematic obstacles that eventually led Dorothy to look for new opportunities.

  Dorothy’s daughter Delethia suggested they open a copy center in Harlem. Dorothy noted that Harlem lacked some of the services that she was accustomed to on the West Side. If she needed photocopies, she had to go to an office in the Hotel Theresa and pay twenty-four cents a page. Delethia and Dorothy started researching how much money Harlem businesses were probably spending on office supplies, including paper. By their calculations, about $1 million per month was leaving Harlem for basic office supplies and services. Dorothy thought that “if some of that money could be captured within the community to fund jobs and create new businesses, the Harlem community could begin to get on its feet economically.”19

  In the days before social media and email, copy centers were the space where community organizing started and ended. To get the word out, and if using the office mimeograph after hours, borrowing the school machine, or using the church facilities was not possible, people produced flyers, letters, and statements of action at their local copy stores. For this reason, copy stores were often founded by collectives in activist sites, like Berkeley.20

  For Dorothy, Harlem Copy, Printing and Stationery Co. would not only be a space for producing organizing materials; it would also use its space to sell African American literature.21 The entire time that she ran the store, she stocked it with books that might be hard to find in mainstream bookstores, such as Malcolm X’s autobiography, Margaret Busby’s anthology Daughters of Africa, or even the records of Louis Armstrong.22 Harlem had a long history of bookstores as sites of activism. From 1932 to 1974, Lewis Michaux’s National Memorial African Bookstore, also called the “House of Common Sense and Home of Proper Propaganda,” had been the intellectual center of Harlem. Located on West 125th Street, half a block from where Dorothy opened her own copy center and bookstore, Michaux’s bookstore was a hub for the civil rights movement. Indeed, Amiri Baraka noted that “Malcolm had spoken in front of the store often and there was a sign in front of the store ringed by Pan-African leaders from everywhere in the Black world.”23 Like Una Mulzac’s Liberation Bookstore on 131st Street, which opened in 1967, Dorothy’s copy shop did more than sell copies and books.24

  Dorothy’s plan hit immediate obstacles. Despite running day-care centers with more than a dozen staff members, she could get no bank to give her a business loan. In 1983, it was almost impossible for an African American woman in Harlem to secure a business loan, regardless of their record of success. Nearly a decade before Dorothy sought to open her store, Congresswoman Lindy Boggs had “slipped” the terms sex and marital status into a bill before the Congressional Banking Committee. She not only added the provision to the draft of the bill, she photocopied the new version of the bill and distributed it to the committee saying, “Knowing the members composing this committee as well as I do, I’m sure it was just an oversight that we didn’t have ‘sex’ or ‘marital status’ included. I’ve taken care of that, and I trust it meets with the committee’s approval.”25 The resulting Equal Credit Opportunity Act made it easier for women to get a credit card but did little to help them get business loans, which can even today be difficult to secure.26

  Dorothy knew what she was up against. Paying her mortgage on her brownstone late, she used her savings on hand to rent a storefront a few blocks from 125th Street. She had also been setting aside money in order to be able to buy stock with cashier’s checks.27 In the summer of 1985, Dorothy opened the first copy center in Harlem on Lenox Avenue between 124th and 125th Streets.28 She offered copying, typing, and printing services, as well as tutoring.29 Her emphasis on community education and outreach stayed with her, even as she managed her store. She thought she had arrived as a businesswoman, but she had not left community organizing behind.

  As a store owner, Dorothy set to work trying to secure contracts from Harlem-based businesses in order to provide jobs for Harlem residents. Despite interest from many local companies, her copy shop was sidelined for contracts with local enterprises, like the Harlem Community Hospital. In one case, she was being used by a local school district to meet diversity requirements, even though they did not give her any real business. The school district placed a standing order for a single case of toilet paper. Dorothy was told by a disgruntled employee years after this connection had begun that she had offered the lowest bid for the contract, but that the actual business was given to “someone’s son” and the order from her business for the single case of toilet paper was just used to get her business invoices. The organization used these invoices to demonstrate that they did business with a company owned by an African American female supplier to meet diversity requirements for the district. The employee who finally confided in Dorothy had feared that she would be fired if she had told her earlier.30 Stories like these infuriated Dorothy, who sought a sense of economic solidarity for the Harlem community. She quickly adopted Reverend Dennis Dillon’s admonition: “Where we spend our money is where we give our power!”31

  Even more shocking to her was why she consistently lost the contract to print up tests for the City University of New York, despite making sure she offered the lowest possible bid. The City University, Dorothy discovered, was using prison labor. It seemed patently problematic to Dorothy. As she noted, “Brothers and sisters could not get jobs printing when they were in their communities but now had jobs printing in prison, at a pay rate of between $12 and $15 a week.”32 Her understanding of the continuing impact of this systematic exploitation and its linkage to devastating the opportunities of future generations was prescient: “To add further insult, their prison jobs are blocking their children from getting jobs now—putting them on track to end up in the same place.”33 Dorothy was baffled that the community in Harlem would accept spending against their children’s future.34 Putting profits before people just seemed to perpetuate the problems that Dorothy believed her business and other locally owned businesses could help solve.

  Dorothy’s copy shop became a hub for locals from Harlem interested in creating their own businesses. Dorothy soon talked the owner of the Cotton Club into hosting her business network sessions on the first Thursday of the month to provide a forum for “struggling entrepreneurs.”35 Recognizing the need to support African American entrepreneurs was neither original nor isolated. Others had noted rents in Harlem were prohibitive, along with suspicious narratives about why, including rumors later reported in the Amsterdam News that “the reason there were only white-owned stores along Harlem’s most commercially successful street was that white merchants had a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ to prevent Black people from owning businesses.”36 Given this reality, Black entrepreneurs set up stalls and pushcarts along Lenox Avenue to sell goods without the overhead of a storefront.

  Dorothy got behind the effort to create a space for new entrepreneurs. From the early 1970s, advocates for more African American store owners in Harlem had pushed for the creation of a mall for vendors.37 Mart 125 was a $2.5 million facility located opposite the Apollo Theater on 125th Street.38 It offered stalls to street vendors in an effort to expand Black entrepreneurial opportunities. Celebrated by Mayor Ed Koch, Congressman Charles Rangel, and Manhatten borough president David Dinkins, the opening of Mart 125, funded by the HUDC, was heralded as a “visible sign of the community’s rebirth
.”39

  Dorothy decided to operate a satellite extension of her copy shop at the new facility.40 She touted it for providing services that extended the impact of her business as well as allowing her to offer additional employment opportunities for young people. Other merchants at Mart 125 hoped they would learn how to be more successful and benefit from recommendations about how “to decorate their stalls, advertise, learn how to get involved with marketing, establish a commercial line of credit and open a checking account.”41 Dorothy obliged by offering advice on what she had learned from her years as a businesswoman.

  Within a few months, though, problems emerged. Mart 125 opened in October, but by February of the next year, the merchants inside the enclave reported that moving their stalls from their Lenox Avenue sites had made them invisible to foot traffic. They also saw that the HUDC did very little to advertise the new mall. A group of thirty to forty merchants employed an attorney to express their concerns, but the development assistance promised by the HUDC did not materialize.42

  When a community need was identified, Dorothy sought to create a resource. In 1987, she organized DPH Marketing Network to develop what she called “a support system and information base for African-American entrepreneurs.” In her words, “the sexism, classism and racism that had always worked against us had reached such proportions that most Black-owned establishments were on the brink of closing down.”43 Part of the campaign included what she called the Entrepreneur to Entrepreneur Business Tour, which provided an annually updated directory and tour of businesses. As she advertised this, the tour gave “entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs-to-be the opportunity to see, on a first-hand basis, the services and products offered by their associates.”44 Dorothy put herself in the center of networking, including offering the kind of development seminars for potential entrepreneurs that the HUDC did not.

  During the late 1970s, Clarence and Dorothy began spending more time in Albany, New York, where Clarence’s mother lived. She needed their care, so they found a place in Albany, and Clarence began working in the area. They enrolled the children in the Albany schools and Dorothy began dividing her time between Albany and Harlem. She never made the adjustment to Albany, though, and after three or four years of commuting, she moved back to Harlem with her three daughters. Dorothy always felt she had a link with Clarence, even when they lived apart from each other. This is not to say that they did not have their differences. Clarence was just not as political as Dorothy. He worried about her safety at demonstrations and in situations he sometimes found extreme.45

  Clarence also didn’t always want to come home to a house filled with people discussing politics. And Dorothy’s daughters remember there always seemed to be somebody stopping by. Since she had been opening her house to guests for years, in the late 1980s, Dorothy began to think about running a bed-and-breakfast. In 1989, she applied for a small business loan to create the Sojourner Bed and Breakfast on Harlem’s Fifth Avenue.

  The 1980s and 1990s saw a developing interest in the United States in what were considered European-style bed-and-breakfasts. Though they had operated in the United States as short-term boarding houses, usually called guest houses after the Guest signs displayed by the roadway, during the Great Depression, they were replaced by the newly invented motor hotels, or motels, in the postwar area, as America embraced remaking itself for the automobile. For African American travelers, earlier informal boarding arrangements continued because of segregation, noted in The Negro Motorist Green Book as “tourist houses,” even as late as 1967, three years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 should have made them unnecessary.46

  Although the Green Book originated in New York City as a national resource, by the time Dorothy applied for a business permit, she would be operating Harlem’s first ever bed-and-breakfast. She applied for a low-interest loan through the New York Landmark Conservancy and the Small Business Association. The 1976 Tax Reform Act, which gave economic incentives for the restoration and reuse of historic structures, along with increased postwar European travel, helped many Americans begin such ventures. Dorothy’s use of celebrity connections to help publicize her new venture led a newspaper to misreport her as creating a time-share when, in fact, she offered her friend and novelist Alice Walker a free night’s stay in exchange for the work she had put in endorsing the bed-and-breakfast. The story as reported in the newspaper, though, made its way to the bank, and the loan officer interpreted this as a change of business and requested information on her new “time-share” venture. Intent on not complicating the loan process, Dorothy and her friend Gloria Steinem worked to get an affidavit from the reporter acknowledging the mistake. Even though she produced notarized affidavits from the reporter and herself about the misinformation, Dorothy was denied the loan.47

  Despite these obstacles, Dorothy made enough money to move her business to 125th Street in Harlem after seven years. In 1990, she opened a rechristened Harlem Office Supply, fulfilling her dream of a full-service office supply store.48 Having moved her store to the main street through Harlem and expanded to include office supplies, equipment, furniture, printing, typesetting, and word processing, she had no doubts about her role in the community. By this time, she employed seventeen people, some of whom were “removed from their dependency on welfare.” As she noted, “There are few people in the community who would not know my name or my business.” More importantly, Dorothy knew it was community support that kept her in business, noting that her store was “largely supported by ‘walk-in’ business.”49 Her business plan made clear that her new locale, in its “high-profile location” was the key to her “market penetration.”

  Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Dorothy remained active in politics and her church, throwing fundraising events for Charles Rangel, Jesse Jackson, and Bill Clinton. Her connection to the latter led her to hope his Empowerment Zone project would mean true economic empowerment for the African American community. From her earliest days in the semiautonomous community of Charles Junction, Dorothy Pitman Hughes believed in the importance of self-support for the Black community. While she worked to make racial integration work, in her day-care centers and in her outreach with Gloria, she believed entirely in Malcolm X’s recommendations to assure self-empowerment.

  After Clinton was elected president, one of his first initiatives was a program modeled on the Arkansas Delta communities that he had turned around as governor. Clinton had succeeded in making Arkansas an investment-friendly destination for businesses through a combination of tax breaks and what he later called Empowerment Zones.

  Empowerment or Enterprise Zones, or EZs, which originated in England in the mid-1970s, were brought to the US in the 1980s. Republicans were main proponents of EZs, which called for capital gains tax relief and reduced regulation to spur investment in poorer communities. Clinton’s variation offered emphasis on wage credits, block grants, and grassroots planning.50 As president, he introduced a program to establish ten model Empowerment Zones. These model communities, ranging from rural to urban, would have to pull together to make a proposal about what was valuable about their community. In exchange, if selected, they would receive federal support for establishing an EZ.

  The Rodney King riots in Los Angeles allowed Clinton to create a federal role for coordinating resources in targeted neighborhoods. Eight months before Clinton took office, four police officers were videotaped beating Rodney King, a construction worker who fled in a Hyundai Excel from police out of fear of how a conviction for driving after drinking might affect his parole. Dragged from the car, he was brutally attacked in an incident that was filmed and released to television stations. The subsequent acquittal of the police for use of excessive force proved to be the breaking point for South Central Los Angeles. Two days of civil unrest resulted in sixty-three deaths and more than two thousand injuries.51

  In the wake of this shocking event, President Clinton was able to forge a federal program designed to “reduce unemployment and generate economic growth in selec
ted Census tracts.” These tracts included areas particularly at risk but capable of collaborative economic partnering, or at least as Clinton and Vice President Al Gore presented it at the broadcasted announcement of the nine districts designated Enterprise Zones, or Renewal Communities.52

  Among these locations was Harlem, the home district for Charles Rangel, rebranded under the name Upper Manhattan Enterprise Zone. Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone, or UMEZ as it would come to be called, was the most capitalized of the nine EZs created. Rangel took the original $100 million federal government grant, designed to encourage economic growth in the community through tax concessions, infrastructure incentives, and decreased regulations, and leveraged it to secure matching grants from state and city government for a total of $300 million. Of these monies, $50 million went, through a prior agreement, to the Bronx, leaving almost $250 million for a mixture of public and private investment in Harlem.

  Rangel had a special relationship to HUDC and made sure that the corporation would be able to nominate projects as a way of steering funds to Harlem. Ever since its inception, the HUDC had emphasized commercial development that would bring employment and services with it.53 While small Black-owned businesses were not excluded from this kind of development, large-scale commercial development garnered much more attention and resources. UMEZ famously supported the development of major commercial retail projects, such as Harlem USA or the East River Plaza, two shopping centers that proposed to bring in national chain stores like Old Navy, CVS, Target, and Marshall’s. These large national retailers spoke to the vision of a revitalized Harlem, which would make the historical neighborhood more similar to other neighborhoods throughout America.