With Her Fist Raised

by Laura L. Lovett

  At this time, in 1997, Dorothy felt her neighbors on 125th Street were under attack. Georgie’s Bakery and Donut Shop, for instance, which had been in business for thirty-five years, received no support from the Empowerment Zone, while Krispy Kreme Donuts landed resources for its effort to create jobs in the area. Calvin Copeland, owner of Copeland’s Country Kitchen on 125th Street, saw his rent rise to $22,000 a month after his landlord, McDonald’s Corporation, which had originally planned on a store there, determined that the spot was worth more than it had charged Copeland, forcing him to close. Just two years before, Copeland had made considerable structural improvements, based on the popularity of his smothered chicken, collard greens, and jambalaya, to his cafeteria-style eatery. Copeland’s sixty employees depending on the expansion were as distraught as the regular customers, who were described as “shocked and angry” at the closure.94

  It turned out that raising the rent was the same ploy used to target Dorothy’s 125th Street location. Her rent increased from $4.221 to $7,000 per month. As the ADC and UMEZ sought to create the Harlem Center, Harlem Office Supply was “considered to be an obstacle.”95 In 1999, Dorothy relocated her store from West 125th Street to East 125th Street. After turning over her keys to her landlord, the city, she vented her anger in local newspapers claiming that “you don’t need to go to Bosnia to see ethnic cleansing. This strip is becoming more ethnically and economically cleansed of local, Black-owned businesses.”96

  Her troubles did not end with the relocation, however. One day, because she owed back taxes, she came to her store and found it padlocked.97 Calls from friends Percy Sutton, co-owner of Inner City Broadcasting, and Susan Taylor from Essence magazine, ensured that the locks were removed the next day. Then, in November 1999, Claude Tims from the State Attorney General’s Office asked to meet with Dorothy regarding complaints from a shareholder. When they met, Tims explained a shareholder wanted a refund on his shares and arranged to transmit a cashier’s check through his office. During that visit, an assistant attorney general, Lauren Razor, questioned Dorothy about her stock offering and asked for copies of her shareholder list and bank statements. Dorothy balked at the request and wisely decided to consult an attorney. Over the next year, Dorothy retained legal counsel to fight the Office of the Attorney General’s attempt to force her to rescind the sale of her stock and to refrain from engaging in other stock offerings. Repaying her stockholders, on top of the fines and legal fees, would have bankrupted Dorothy and driven her out of business. Dorothy’s attorney, Peter Eikenberry, could not get the Attorney General’s Office to budge until he filed a complaint in US District Court in December 2000.98 The attorney general agreed to discuss a settlement if the complaint was dropped. They did not hear from the Attorney General’s Office after that, and by May 2001, assumed the investigation was over.99

  That May, Dorothy decided to merge her business with Hand Brand Distribution, a publisher and distributor of nutritional supplements.100 She informed her stockholders and was excited about the prospect of working with a company that shared her vision of economic empowerment.101 However, just after they had agreed to merge, the Attorney General’s Office sent John Taggart, president of Hand Brand, a fax claiming, “Dorothy Hughes and Harlem Office Supply are under investigation for securities fraud.” Hand Brand terminated the merger. To make matters worse, in July, Eliot Spitzer, the state attorney general, announced an investigation of the merger. The investigation cleared Dorothy of any wrongdoing but not before tarnishing her reputation with stockholders and racking up yet more legal fees.102 The legal expenses forced her to sell her houses. She could no longer afford to keep Harlem Office Supply open; the price of doing business in Harlem was just too high.

  Dorothy was never one to shy away from speaking truth to power; the anger and betrayal she had been feeling for years had to be expressed. In 2000, Dorothy wrote an autobiographical narrative called Wake Up and Smell the Dollars! Whose Inner City Is This Anyway! One Woman’s Struggle against Sexism, Classism, Racism, Gentrification, and the Empowerment Zone. It was published by Amber Books, owned by her friend Yvonne Rose, and billed as the largest African American book packager for self-publishers. It allowed Dorothy to tell her story to a wider audience. While she traces her life story from Georgia to New York, Dorothy also invites readers to share her indignation and rage at the forces working against Black empowerment. Importantly, it ends with details on how to do what she had done: create a stock offering, invest in economic empowerment through Black-owned businesses, and teach the value of economic self-empowerment. Dorothy still believed in that possibility for herself and others in Harlem. When she returned to her story a dozen years later in a second book, I’m Just Saying . . . It Looks Like Ethnic Cleansing: The Gentrification of Harlem, Dorothy was even more critical of the politics of economic development in Harlem, which undercut her business, harassed her with legal actions, and discouraged Black ownership in favor of corporate commercialization and gentrification. Gone is the advice about economic empowerment, replaced by a sharp assessment of the impact of Harlem’s gentrification. It speaks to the depths of Dorothy’s disappointment and pain from this time of her life that she returned to it twice in print, even after being away from New York City for years.

  In 2003, Dorothy decided to leave Harlem and head back South, this time to Jacksonville, Florida. She was sixty-five, an age when many people might think of retirement, but Dorothy was far from done.

  EPILOGUE

  HOME AGAIN

  In 1991, every Black family in Dorothy’s Georgia hometown of Charles Junction received a letter saying they had one month to leave.1 The land that was home to seventy African American families had been sold to the Mead Corporation, once called the Papermakers to America. After struggling in the 1970s, the forest products company, with an interest in 1.4 million acres of timberland worldwide and the capacity to turn those trees into 2 million tons of pulp, set its sights on the timberlands near Lumpkin, Georgia.2 Dorothy feared that the stand of Georgia pines that tied her and her siblings to a way of life would be turned into pulpwood. She decided to fight the land sale and turned to her friends for support.

  Dorothy’s network of contacts from New York City came through, even in rural Georgia. Gloria Steinem used her influence to help Dorothy secure an attorney, who then persuaded the legal counsel representing the paper company to meet Dorothy a few miles from Charles Junction, in Columbus. From that meeting, Dorothy realized that further negotiations with Mead would require a formalization of the community’s relationship to the land, an accounting of its history.

  In 1992, Dorothy founded the Charles Junction Historic Preservation Society as a nonprofit organization to fundraise and advocate for her home community. As she pressed her case for Charles Junction, she told the story of African American families who had lived there for generations and helped build a community. It must have been clear to the behemoth wood processor that the contest for this land would be hard-fought. In 1999, Mead agreed to sell Dorothy and her siblings the twenty-three acres that the Black families had been living on, including the two acres that Dorothy’s family lived on. It took until 2012 to pay off the loan that made Dorothy and her family the official owners of the family homestead.3

  In the meantime, still fighting for her business in Harlem and paying off the Charles Junction plot, Dorothy moved to Jacksonville, Florida. Her youngest daughter, Angela, had moved there with her son, Devon, and seemed to need help at the very moment that her mother was in search of new opportunities. Dorothy had begun making overtures toward Edward Waters College in Jacksonville about opening a bookstore in the 1990s. This was part of Dorothy’s plan to expand Harlem Office Supply nationally in historically Black colleges and universities. In 2003, she sold her brownstone in Harlem, packed up her things, and returned to the South to live for the first time since she had given birth to her eldest daughter, nearly forty years before.

  Believing that a historically Black college would benefit
from a Black-owned business, Dorothy moved Harlem Office Supply to Edward Waters College. The move to Jacksonville allowed her to share her connections to publishers such as Yvonne Rose and to advance her vision for African American economic empowerment. Edward Waters College is the oldest historically Black college in Florida. It was founded by the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first independent Protestant denomination organized by Black people, in 1816. Fifty years after the church’s birth, it organized an educational institution in Florida for the newly freed African Americans, an institution organized by Blacks for Blacks. Renamed in 1892 to honor the third bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Reverend Edward Waters, the small institution experienced rapid growth in the late 1990s, and Dorothy thought it opportune to become a part of it.

  Unfortunately, she quickly found herself caught up in a struggle with the college administration. Under the leadership of Dr. Jimmy Jenkins, the school had grown from a student body of 300 in 1997 to 1,300 in 2005. The college administration struggled to keep up, and in 2005, just two years after Dorothy arrived on campus, the college was involved in an accreditation scandal.4 Carlton Jones, a trustee for the college, impressed with Dorothy’s integrity, offered her the opportunity to open an independent bookstore at Gateway Town Center, a shopping mall that he owned.5 Dorothy’s Gateway Books, a small shop set in a corner of the mall, felt a long way from 125th Street in Harlem.

  Gateway Town Center, like Edward Waters College, was in North Jacksonville, a historically Black neighborhood of the city. In the decades following World War II, Jacksonville had the largest concentration of African Americans in Florida.6 By the closing decades of the twentieth century, African Americans made up the majority of the city population but not of the metro region, which included its white suburbs. According to a 2005 study, 25 percent of Black families in Jacksonville lived below the poverty line in 1990 and tended to live clustered in the core areas of the city. While the poverty rate for Black families decreased to 22 percent in the 2000 US Census, the poverty rate for the core areas of the city was 30 percent.7

  The poverty and hunger that Dorothy witnessed in Jacksonville shocked her when she first visited.8 Inspired by First Lady Michelle Obama and her White House garden in 2009, Dorothy looked back at her rural upbringing and realized that community gardens could have a powerful, transformative effect in the North Jacksonville food desert. In Dorothy’s words, “without economic empowerment, there will be no social or political freedom.” Dorothy envisioned a “comprehensive approach to developing long-term solutions to ensure availability of healthy food products affordable to families that are economically challenged.”9 Dorothy recognized in community gardens a project that would provide not just something the community needed but jobs and a sense of empowerment for both children and adults. That desire for community empowerment tempered the role Dorothy sought for herself. In her words, “For me, it’s not about coming into the community and running the community. It’s about me coming into the community and helping the community to run itself—to help the people own and work for what they want.”10

  To get started, Dorothy needed a bit of land, some partners to help get things organized, and a lot of helping hands. Clara McLaughlin, owner and editor of the Florida Star newspaper, stepped in to help her friend with garden sites, one near a middle school.11 Episcopal Children’s Services offered a third space for a garden at its Head Start center.12 Dorothy hoped her partners in North Jacksonville would build connections with unemployed residents who could train to run the garden projects. Teachers could develop curricula for their students so that they “learn to value their connection to the earth and the healthy food they grow.”13 Even with the land secured, Dorothy’s Jacksonville Community Garden Projects still needed funding, so she turned to old friends and her tried-and-true methods. In 2011, Dorothy persuaded Gloria Steinem to join her in Florida for a fundraising event to benefit both the garden project and the Women’s Center of Jacksonville. Called the “Lift, Don’t Separate” forum, the event at the University of North Florida emphasized the “Power of Partnership” and was celebrated on the front page of McLaughlin’s Florida Star.14

  Dorothy’s fundraising officially ran through her nonprofit that had begun in Charles Junction. More than 250 miles separated her old home and North Jacksonville, but Dorothy’s vision for the two places was very similar. She wanted to build something to help create jobs, especially for young people. She hoped the model of community empowerment grounded in community gardens could work for both places.

  Gloria joined her friend Dorothy again in 2017 to raise funds. This time, the two decided to restage their iconic photograph. Dan Bagan, a St. Augustine, Florida, photographer, captured the two women with fists raised. Gloria was eighty-two. Dorothy was seventy-nine. Forty-five years had passed since the original image.15 That year the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery added both images to its collection. For Dorothy, “The symbolism of a Black and white woman standing together, demonstrating the Black Power salute is as important now as it was in the ’70s.” Reflecting on a lifetime of activism, Dorothy remained hopeful that, together, Black women and white women could eliminate “racism, classism, and sexism,” but not until “we acknowledge and resolve the racism problem that stands between us.”16 Dorothy’s life is a testament to the power of partnerships, the impact of community action, and the ability to confront and overcome racism at a personal level. Her photographs with Gloria can be read as symbols both of hope and of how much remains to be done.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am deeply indebted to Dorothy and her daughters, Delethia, Patrice, and Angela. The proceeds from this book go to Dorothy Pitman Hughes. Dorothy has been incredibly generous with her time. She and her family welcomed me into their lives, shared their memories, letters, special locales, and photographs. I appreciate their trust and their support for this project over the past seven years.

  This book relies heavily on oral histories and interviews. Dorothy Pitman Hughes, Delethia Ridley-Malmsten, Patrice Quinn, Angela Hughes, and Mildred Dent were all gracious with their time and very patient with my persistent questions. Conversations with Gloria Steinem, Marlo Thomas, Bob Gangi, Alice Tan Ridley, Gabourey Sidibe, Ruth Messinger, Tommie Dent, Gina Dent, Yvonne Rose, Devon Baptiste, and Sean Ridley helped me to understand how to develop this narrative. So, too, were Kaylene Peoples, Lencola Sullivan Verseveldt, Josh Kobrin, and Susan Yohn, who shared their expertise.

  Destiney Linker, a wonderful historian in her own right, accompanied me on my visit to Dorothy’s home in Lumpkin, Georgia, and expertly transcribed our recorded conversations, as well as being an incredible research assistant and critic.

  I am very grateful to Dan Bagan for allowing me to reprint his photo of Dorothy and Gloria from 2017. Dorothy and her family also generously scanned many images from their family albums for this book.

  Karen Kuklik, Kathleen Nutter, and the staff at the Sophia Smith Collection, always so welcoming to me and my students, truly went beyond the call to help me during my visits and even when I couldn’t be at the archives in person. I am especially grateful that Elizabeth Myers at the Sophia Smith Collection agreed to accept Dorothy’s papers and add them to the record of women’s history. Rob Cox, Danielle Kovacs, and Anne Moore of the Archives and Special Collections at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, were some of the best friends a researcher could wish for.

  The staff at Beacon has been wonderful. I appreciate the editorial support and careful feedback from Gayatri Patnaik, as well as Maya Fernandez and Susan Lumenello. Emily Dolbear’s copyediting was superb. Cecelia Cancellero’s editorial assistance was invaluable in helping me to write for a nonspecialist public.

  As I worked on this book, I presented parts to various academic audiences. I appreciate the useful comments and suggestions from the audiences at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the University of Pittsb
urgh Department of History, and the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, Agnes Scott College.

  I have been fortunate to receive research and writing support from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Dartmouth College; and the University of Pittsburgh.

  Annelise Orleck, Colleen Boggs, and Alexis Jetter provided insightful feedback as I conceptualized and researched this project. Fellow writers and researchers have helped all the way through, offering the kind of support and what my advisor called “rescue reads,” helping when I was stuck or unsure. Mary Renda, Manisha Sinha, Françoise Hamlin, and Mari Webel: I have been able to keep going because of your generosity. At the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Banu Subramaniam, Alice Nash, Laura Briggs, Jennifer Hamilton, Diana Sierra Becerra, Joye Bowman, John Higginson, Joyce Berkman, Brian Ogilvie, Jennifer Heuer, Marla Miller, Priyanka Srivastava, Miliann Kang, Joya Misra, Joel Wolfe, Elizabeth Armstrong, Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, Holly Hanson, David Glassberg, Crystal Webster, Johanna Ortner, Susan Tracy, and Lynda Morgan gave me timely and helpful feedback on specific chapters or on particular ideas.

  At the University of Pittsburgh, Irina Livezeanu, Ruth Mostern, Gregor Thum, Laurence Glasco, Keisha Blain, Michel Gobat, Alaina Roberts, Alexandra Finley, Alissa Klots, Chelsey Smith, Krysta Beam, and Lara Putnam offered engaged and encouraging questions that helped me finish this book. I am also deeply appreciative of Sandy Mitchell’s support and friendship.

  Robin Morris saw fit to include Dorothy in an important conference on Women and Politics, and the critique I received on the presentation from Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Nishani Frazier, Leah Wright-Rigueur, Marisa Chappell, and others expanded how I understood her context.