With Her Fist Raised

by Laura L. Lovett

  This was a long way from Dorothy’s vision of Black economic empowerment. Dorothy had promoted Black ownership as a means of promoting employment in Harlem. She had no idea that external funding would aim to replace local Black business owners with giant national franchises. As she put it, “I endeavored to establish a family business that would support my family and teach my daughters about self-determination and empowerment. My determination to find solutions for the entire community hadn’t diminished in my career as an entrepreneur. Although it was a different path from building day care and schools, I was back into my activism role as a community organizer trying to gain economic empowerment for the people.”54 To her mind, the establishment of an Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone would extend resources for employment, development, and community access. It represented the kind of government program she had used to support the West Side Community Alliance.

  Of course, Dorothy also had a feminist perspective on economic empowerment. Beginning in the mid 1980s, Dorothy had been organizing programs to encourage other Black women to become entrepreneurs.55 Together with Beulah Tuten, Ann Wells, Sandra Sam, and Ms. Georgia of Georgia’s Donuts, she formed WISE (Women Initiating Self-Empowerment).56 The purpose of the group was to extend training and employment to the larger community, especially young people.57 As she saw it,

  Women provided jobs for hundreds of community residents, while addressing employment issues unique to this area. We were, and still are a major source of first-time employment for community youth, for which we must also bear the expense of job skills training that our educational system leaves lacking. Collectively, we African-American businesswomen have generated millions of dollars in revenue for this community every year.58

  Dorothy’s interest in female entrepreneurs meant she had done some math on female-owned businesses in Harlem. African American women, who owned one-third of Harlem businesses, never received more than 2 percent of state, city, and federal contracts. Dorothy interpreted this fact to mean it was in the interests of the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone to “economically empower the people who had been systematically left out of the economic mainstream.” To her, this translated into “a specific set-aside or allocation of one-third . . . of the funding for the expansion or improvement of existing female owned businesses . . . as well as for the development of new commercial enterprises to be headed by women.”59

  In 1994, WISE held a press conference to announce support for the Harlem Empowerment Zone and also to suggest the importance of gender concerns in the process. The organization pushed for recognition of the value of supporting African American women in business, not solely based on their financial histories. As Dorothy put it at the news event, the importance of recognizing women’s contributions not only as business owners but in their roles in the community, to highlight “the feasibility of businesses or business plans, and the total benefits to be gained by the community through the development of these businesses.”60 She envisioned rightful reparation for previous wrongs, noting “this specific vision is the result of our experience of being systematically denied loans and contracts in the past.” In response, HUDC invited the women business owners to apply for loans. More significantly, she took WISE’s concerns directly to Congressman Charles Rangel, described by Dorothy as the father of the EZ plan for Harlem.

  After showing up at Rangel’s office with seven businesswomen from his district, many of whom, like Dorothy, had helped fundraise for the congressman, she secured a position on the Economic Development Planning Committee, chaired by George Weldon of the Harlem Business Alliance. She credits this move with helping to create the resources to support small businesses within the plans for redevelopment. The result was the Business Resource and Investment Service Center (BRISC), an organization still in existence.61 BRISC represented a new source of funding to allow small businesses “to coexist with their intended gentrification process.”62 BRISC formally launched in September 1996, as a subsidiary of UMEZ, with Herman Velasquez as its director.

  After BRISC opened, Dorothy submitted to UMEZ a loan proposal to expand her business. Although she had worked with Velasquez to produce the proposal, the head of UMEZ, Deborah Wright, wrote to her on October 4 declining her application for the first round of funding, claiming the proposal was incomplete. Wright referred Dorothy to BRISC for help in developing her proposal further. In her response on October 28, Dorothy noted that she had worked with the BRISC director to develop her proposal and that her call for small business support through Rangel’s office had helped lead to the creation of BRISC. Nevertheless, Dorothy sought to meet with Velasquez to refine her proposal for another round of funding.

  Shortly after receiving this letter, Wright called Dorothy, and they apparently had a heated phone conversation in which Wright accused Dorothy of “trashing” her to reporters. Dorothy claimed she was not trashing Wright but did say that she was talking to reporters and mentioned Wright, as head of the EZ. Dorothy did admit to having a sign on her storefront that read, in capital letters, “The E. Z. has not given any support to us, HOS, Inc., that would allow us to hire the 260 applications for jobs on file. Please come in to find out who was given money, so you can ask them for jobs.”63 Wright seemed to have taken this backhanded way of expressing support as more critical than supportive. In a letter she wrote following their call, Dorothy wondered if opposition to her proposal was based in exercising her “freedom of expression” and voicing disappointment in the EZ, or if it was more personal. Nevertheless, Dorothy still intended to meet with BRISC about her proposal.64

  There may have been a personal dimension to Wright’s run-in with Dorothy, but the more profound difference was in their ideas of what constituted economic empowerment.65 Dorothy, like some other community organizers in Harlem, understood economic empowerment in terms of supporting community-owned and community-controlled businesses. Wright represented a different perspective that saw economic empowerment in terms of commercial development producing stable employment for Harlem’s residents.66 According to historian Brian Goldstein, this top-down approach to commercialization had been articulated by Harvard professor Michael Porter in an influential 1995 essay, “The Competitive Advantage of the Inner City.”67 Porter diagnosed investment in small businesses as one of the problems that led to failed urban development plans. In their place he advocated for large national and international companies to create stable employment. This essay provided New York planners with an intellectual justification to shift toward large-scale chain stores with national and international reach. Deborah Wright had been a student at Harvard, where Porter taught, and Goldstein argues she shared his perspective on the importance of “reuniting [Harlem] with the larger New York City and regional economies.” Sweeping aside the “parochialism” that focused on local businesses or on requirements for minority stakeholders within Harlem, Wright favored reorienting development toward the private sector in a way that could generate long-term prosperity.68

  Dorothy was not the only Harlemite running up against this corporate perspective in UMEZ.69 Preston Wilcox and the Harlem Unity Committee for Social Justice countered Wright’s charge of parochialism in a letter to her expressing their concern that the “continued and accelerated gentrification of Harlem through the seeming beneficence of UMEZ, with more power being asserted and carried forward by market forces” once again promised to “empower everyone but the people.”70 In 1996, while Dorothy, Wilcox, and the Harlem Unity Committee saw this corporate model of empowerment as exclusionary and racist, other Harlem residents welcomed this kind of economic development, happy to see national chain stores in their neighborhood. By 2008, mixed feelings about redevelopment in Harlem and the rezoning of 125th Street were expressed in the New York Times.71 Dorothy and others had seen it coming, but by 2008, it was too late to change anything.72

  If UMEZ was not going to support her, Dorothy had to find a different route. In February 1996, she decided to go to Wall Street and to “take as many Afri
can Americans and poor and disenfranchised people from Harlem with me.” As she inventively wrote for a flyer, she intended to move her community “from Sharecropping to Shareholding.”73

  Reading a copy of Maloyd Ben Wilson’s Black Chronicle, which she sold in her store, she found herself inspired by a reprint of what she called Marcus Garvey’s “Standing Up” speech. Garvey, an inspiration to Dorothy’s grandmother, back in Georgia, framed economic and moral calls for self-determination as a call for unity. She may have been referencing one of the speeches Garvey delivered at nightly meetings of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Liberty Hall on West 138th Street in Harlem. Liberty Hall held up to six thousand people and was also used from 1922 to 1927 by the Abyssinian Baptist Church, which then erected a new grand building next door. The connection for Dorothy was significant. She drew inspiration from someone who was “frequently at odds” with what was described in the 1920s as “one of the bastions of the Harlem establishment,” the largest African American Church in New York City.74 It was prescient that she took her inspiration from Garvey, who was driven from Harlem by a series of charges from a very small number of stock owners in the shipping organization that he founded, the Black Star Line. Dorothy was also coming up against powerful interests in Harlem that would use the legal system against her.75

  Yet just as historian Keisha Blain argues Black Nationalist women, like Amy Jacques Garvey and Irene M. Blackstone, would develop their own structures and initiatives to expand Black nationalism, Dorothy decided to expand Black economic empowerment.76 Wall Street, Dorothy reasoned, had been generating wealth for years on the backs of African Americans. The Empowerment Zone had been funded, “and we were still suffering with poverty, illness, homelessness, bad schools, police brutality, no health care, racism, sexism and classism,” so she would take her inspiration from the UNIA and turn to stocks.77

  Dorothy asked herself, “Why were we not participating in the process of generating and enjoying wealth?” as they did on Wall Street. For Dorothy, this move would take place on fraught terrain. She described herself as “raging inside from having read that Wall Street was named after the city council had instructed a team of slaves to build a wall to separate the area for trading slaves from the scene of the removal of the bodies of those who had died on board the ships on the way from Africa to America.” Describing the long-forgotten history of the New York Municipal Slave Market, which had operated at Wall Street between Pearl and Water Streets from 1711 until 1762, acknowledged by a historical marker only in 2015, she understood that it was a complicated endeavor.78

  She wanted to “learn and teach” what she called Economic Empowerment 101. By this, she meant she wanted to understand how the “amount of capital African Americans spend goes from Wall Street to take care of everyone except us, so I wanted to know how we could become involved.” For her, this would be about children and their parents. As she noted, “If I could understand the stock system myself, I would take thousands of African Americans to Wall Street as shareholders, standing up!”79

  On a Monday in February 1996, she walked into an office building in the financial district and, when she found herself challenged by a receptionist about the purpose for her visit, she asked to use the ladies’ room. The person called to unlock the facility turned out to be Doris Gibson, who only a few months prior had come to Harlem Office Supply to type a complaint about having been “unjustly fired from Harlem Hospital.” Dorothy described their second meeting “as a great sign” and proceeded to tell Doris that she needed someone who could “tell me about Wall Street, and how I could get Harlem families involved.”80

  Doris remembered the support and kindness that Dorothy had shown her months before and within minutes had introduced Dorothy to her son, Vernon Gibson, the CEO of Twenty First Century Currency. Gibson listened to Dorothy’s perspective on economic empowerment and her efforts at Harlem Office Supply. He then offered her the opportunity to learn how stocks and business finance worked by training with his firm. With assistance from Gibson’s firm, Dorothy decided to create a private stock offering. She would sell five hundred thousand shares at one dollar each. This would allow people to invest in Dorothy’s company while she considered expanding her business. More importantly, the stock offering was empowerment through ownership. She would show that anyone could own stock, be a part of Wall Street, and invest in their community.81 By July 1997, her stock offering was registered, filed, and approved. In a matter of months, Dorothy had thousands of stockholders, almost one-third of whom were children. Eventually, she sold her allotted shares to slightly over seven thousand investors.82

  Dorothy was disappointed by UMEZ’s lack of support for Harlem Office Supply and used the stock sale to circumvent them. At the same time, she had not given up on her bed-and-breakfast idea and, in 1996, filed a proposal with UMEZ for funding her Sojourner Guest House. After being denied a loan in 1989, Dorothy turned to fame and friends to try to secure the loan the way she had secured every other business venture—by raising more than the amount of money in advance than would have been required of anyone not African American and female. For instance, in 1992, as New York hosted the Democratic National Convention that would nominate Bill Clinton, she worked again with Steinem in a fundraiser at the National Black Theatre. A newspaper article, likely written by Dorothy, publicizing the reunion on stage, put it this way, “Gloria Steinem, founder of Ms. Magazine and author of the new bestseller Revolution from Within, and Dorothy Pitman Hughes, a Harlem businesswoman, have maintained their friendship and co-support ‘in the struggle’ and are pleased to be able once again to make a united statement.” The cause of their public reunification was what Dorothy called a “Gospelogue production of ‘HerStory in Black.’” To honor the convention, the focus would be on Fannie Lou Hamer. Inspired by her mother, Dorothy developed “HerStory in Black,” she said, “to focus on changing racism, sexism and classism, and as an adversary to ‘History.’” 83 These expansive fundraising efforts at the National Black Theatre had the support of Gloria and friends, including Sam Peabody and the Cotton Club, but in the early 1990s Dorothy still could not secure the leverage to get a loan.

  While Dorothy continued fundraising, the HUDC allocated $50,000 to an entity called the Manhattan Borough Development Corporation (MBDC) to study the prospect of what it called a bed-and-breakfast hotel in Harlem, one described in its publicity sheet as “the Harlem Renaissance Inn.”84 Established by the office of Manhattan borough president David Dinkins, the MBDC had started organizing the kind of small business seminars that resembled Dorothy’s Entrepreneur to Entrepreneur meetings. The not-for-profit corporation also assisted companies in seeking financing and had begun to market what was called an economic development zone in East Harlem.85 Dorothy’s ideas were clearly resonant with other ideas for development in Harlem, but she was being excluded from their implementation.

  Nevertheless, Dorothy was undeterred. She had generated the community support and funding to buy a brownstone for her B and B at 2005 Fifth Avenue. In 1996, she decided to submit a well-done formal proposal to UMEZ and hired a consultant to write the proposal to her specifications. Again, Dorothy’s proposal was denied, but she learned from the EZ newsletter they approved funding for another bed-and-breakfast run by Jane Mendelson at 2007 Fifth Avenue, right next to Dorothy’s proposed site. When Dorothy went to visit her white neighbor, she found out that Mendelson hadn’t even submitted a proposal. UMEZ had contacted Mendelson shortly after she bought the property to ask if she would be interested in operating it as a bed-and-breakfast. As Dorothy recalls her conversation, Mendelson “told them she knew ‘nothing’ about opening or running a guest house, and they responded saying that they ‘already had a proposal’ that they ‘were going to fund it’ and they wanted her to do it.”86 With a grant from BRISC and a loan from UMEZ, the Urban Gem Guest House opened in Harlem in 1998.87 To Dorothy, it felt like a personal attack from an organization clearly aligned against her.88


  At the same time UMEZ was considering her B and B proposal, Congressman Rangel’s office invited Dorothy to meet with representatives of the office supply chain Staples, local politicians, and representatives of the Abyssinian Development Corporation (ADC).89 In the 1980s, federal cutbacks reduced the role of governmental community development and fostered the rise of church-affiliated development corporations, including the ADC, founded in 1989 and associated with the Abyssinian Baptist Church.90 The meeting was called to find a way for Harlem Office Supply and Staples to coexist in Harlem. Three weeks later, Dorothy reports being at a party and being approached by a deacon from the Abyssinian church. According to Dorothy, he said, “We are going to get rid of you, we are working on a deal with Staples.” The national chain, he said, was going to employ Abyssinian church members. Moreover, he told Dorothy that, as a woman, she couldn’t run an office supply company.91

  The meeting in Rangel’s office had been a setup to get Dorothy to divulge plans for her store, which she did. She wanted to expand in Harlem and branch out nationally through historically Black colleges and universities. She had already begun to plan for opening a store at Edward Waters College in Jacksonville, Florida, at the invitation of its president, Jimmy Jenkins.92 What Dorothy did not know at the meeting at Rangel’s office was that the ADC had begun to make plans for a new development called the Harlem Center in 1996. The proposal was motivated by a worry that “the absence of major national retailers, as well as the lack of varied mid-priced retailers, cause[d] many of Harlem’s residents to make their purchases outside of the area.”93 Anchored by the national stores Staples, Marshall’s, H&M, and Dunkin’ Donuts, the Harlem Center was slated for the corner of 125th Street and Lenox Avenue, a location that included Dorothy’s storefront. Dorothy’s plans for expansion were running up against the ADC’s vision for commercialization and employment. Dorothy was angered and upset by this effort to displace her, but she was not giving up without a fight.