With Her Fist Raised

by Laura L. Lovett

  Kelly Giles and Kaniqua Robinson have kept me going with their enthusiasm for the project. My daughter, Lydia Lovett-Dietrich, brought her architectural love of precision to her mother’s often rambling prose, especially at key moments in time. Arlena Lovett-Dietrich has lived and traveled with this project. I am grateful for her keen understanding of its political importance. Most importantly, I am grateful for my partner’s support; Michael Dietrich, thanks for the soup, and so much more.

  NOTES

  PREFACE

  1. Rotskoff and Lovett, eds., When We Were Free to Be. See Marlo Thomas, Free to Be . . . You and Me (New York: Free to Be Foundation, 1974).

  2. Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History, Smith College Libraries, accessed December 29, 2019.

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” See, also, hooks, Black Looks.

  2. Heilbrun, The Education of a Woman, 125; “Gloria Steinem: In Her Own Words,” transcript, CNN.com, http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1302/03/se.01.html, accessed April 2, 2019.

  3. Fleming, Soon We Will Not Cry.

  4. Judy Klemesrud, “It Was Ladies Day at Party Meeting,” New York Amsterdam News, December 14, 1970, 62.

  5. Laura L. Lovett interview with Dorothy Pitman Hughes, March 17, 2014.

  6. Leonard Levitt, “She: The Awesome Power of Gloria Steinem,” Esquire, October 1971, 87–89, 198–203; photo, 88.

  7. Schuman, Ain’t I a Woman, Too?; Hughes, Wake Up and Smell the Dollars!; and Hughes, I’m Just Saying.

  8. Zinsser, “Feminist Biography,” 43–50.

  9. Perkins, Autobiography as Activism, 8.

  10. Kessler-Harris, “Why Biography?”

  11. They are the Third World Women’s Alliance (1968–1979), the National Black Feminist Organization (1973–1975), the National Alliance of Black Feminists (1976–1980), the Combahee River Collective (1975–1980), and Black Women Organized for Action (1973–1980). See Gore, Theoharis, and Woodard, Want to Start a Revolution?; and Jones, Eubanks, and Smith, Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around.

  12. Giddings, When and Where I Enter; and Springer, Living for the Revolution.

  13. Randolph, Florynce “Flo” Kennedy.

  14. Laura L. Lovett telephone interview with Dorothy Pitman Hughes, October 18, 2011; Hughes, “Free to Be on West 80th Street,” in Rotskoff and Lovett, When We Were Free to Be, 229–33.

  15. Hughes, “Free to Be on West 80th Street.”

  16. Steinem, “The City Politic: Room at the Bottom, Boredom at the Top,” 10–11; Rowe, “All Kinds of Love—in a Chinese Restaurant.”

  17. Steinem, “The City Politic: A Racial Walking Tour,” 6–7; Steinem, “The City Politic: Room at the Bottom, Boredom at the Top.”

  18. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals.

  19. Benita Roth argues that some early historians did not write about Black feminists because they did not join white women’s organizations, instead forming their own. Roth, “Second Wave Black Feminism in the African Diaspora,” 46–58. Roth supports her claim by citing histories such as Carden, The New Feminist Movement; Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation; and Hole and Levine, Rebirth of Feminism.

  CHAPTER 1: THE RIDLEYS

  1. Laura L. Lovett interview with Dorothy Pitman Hughes, March 16, 2014.

  2. Lovett interview with Hughes, March 16, 2014.

  3. Story quoted from Hughes, Wake Up and Smell the Dollars!, 1–3.

  4. Sociologist Charles S. Johnson illuminated the practice of excluding African Americans from using the front entrances to homes. In his massive study on race in America, Gunnar Myrdal further clarifies that this practice defined and maintained social differences in such a way to assure that one race was clearly assigned the superior position and the other, an inferior one. In this instance, a poor white woman, unable to feed her own family with “real food” or afford curtains to cover her windows tried to mark her superiority not only by requiring the Black child to go to the back door but also by insisting on the physical separation of not even allowing her to hand the plate to her. The kind of rebellion and the clarity with which she knew the racial dynamic of the time is reflected in the way Dorothy told her mother the truth. Johnson, Growing Up in the Black Belt; Myrdal, An American Dilemma.

  5. Robert Sutherland, preface to Johnson, Growing Up in the Black Belt, xi and 320.

  6. Grant, The South the Way It Was.

  7. “Negro Girl’s Attacker Slain by Georgia Mob,” Atlanta Constitution, October 24, 1933, 10.

  8. “Slayer of E. W. Brightwell Lynched as Scene of Crime Near Richland Sunday,” Columbus Daily Enquirer, December 22, 1919.

  9. Delethia Ridley-Marvin interview with Dorothy Pitman Hughes, Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library, Tampa, FL, April 8, 2014, http://digitalcollections.hcplc.org/digital/collection/p16054coll5/id/192, accessed May 30, 2019.

  10. Susan Hartman, “After Years Underground, a Subway Singer Gets the Spotlight,” New York Times, September 16, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/nyregion/alice-tan-ridley-subway-singer-gets-the-spotlight-after-years-underground.html.

  11. Cristin Wilson, “Q & A with Author and Activist Dorothy Pitman Hughes,” Florida Times Union, January 27, 2011, https://www.jacksonville.com/article/20110127/NEWS/801258412, accessed September 2, 2017.

  12. Matt Soergel, “Something Still Stirs inside This Activist; Dorothy Pitman Hughes Has Plans for Her Next 75 Years,” Florida Times Union, September 30, 2013, https://www.questia.com/read/1G1–344605913/something-still-stirs-inside-this-activist-dorothy, accessed October 1, 2019.

  13. Ridley-Marvin interview with Hughes, April 8, 2014.

  14. Johnson, Growing Up in the Black Belt.

  15. Mother Lessie Ridley and the Ridley Family, “God Laid the Foundation,” on The Ridley Family Tree, recorded 1983.

  16. Laura L. Lovett interview with Mildred Dent, January 24, 2019.

  17. Collier-Thomas, Jesus, Jobs and Justice.

  18. Lovett interview with Dent, January 24, 2019.

  19. 1940 Federal Census Forms, Ancestry.com, accessed June 20, 2016.

  20. Shaw and Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers, 182.

  21. Jones, The Tribe of Black Ulysses, 5.

  22. Personal communication with Delethia Ridley-Martin, Dorothy Pitman Hughes, and Mildred Dent, October 10, 2019.

  23. Personal communication with Ridley-Martin, Hughes, and Dent.

  24. Personal communication with Ridley-Martin, Hughes, and Dent.

  CHAPTER 2: FINDING HER VOICE

  1. The Bedingfield Inn, built in 1836, operates now as a museum run by the Stewart County Historical Commission. Fussell, “Touring West Central Georgia,” 390–422, 416; on soil erosion, see Sutter, Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies.

  2. Thomas Jefferson Flanagan, “The Steel Cage of a Sunny Soul,” Atlanta Daily World, April 7, 1934, 6.

  3. Laura L. Lovett interviews with Dorothy Pitman Hughes, March 15, 2016, and January 25, 2019.

  4. Chalifoux, “‘America’s Wickedest City,’” 44.

  5. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street, 27fn85. One such rumor reported that a white military police officer had beaten the wife of a Black soldier on a Georgia military base.

  6. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street.

  7. Laura L. Lovett interview with Dorothy Pitman Hughes, March 5, 2016.

  8. Lovett interview with Hughes, March 5, 2016.

  9. Omolade, The Rising Song of African American Women, 47. Omolade describes the history of employment agencies and even the organization of the White Rose Industrial Association by Victoria Earle Matthews, a former slave, to protect African Americans who were deceived by unscrupulous employment agents playing on their desire to move North. As Omolade describes it, this organization eventually became part of the New York League for the Protection of Colored Women after the publication in 1905 of Frances Kellor’s Out to Work, which detailed the problems of Black migrants.

  10. Quoted in McDuffie, “Esther V
. Cooper’s ‘The Negro Woman Domestic Worker in Relation to Trade Unionism,’” 206.

  11. Lovett interview with Hughes, March 5, 2016.

  12. Omolade, The Rising Song of African American Women, 47. As Omolade notes, this facilitated the history of Black women organizing: “Away from their white families, Black domestics joined other Black women and men in the myriad of Black political social movements and organizations. Black women made the crucial link between the ideas of Black men and their implementation by funding and supporting their actions, programs, and deeds. Black maids were socialists and Marxist. . . . Black women dreamed of a return to Africa, armed struggle against white racists, and redistribution of the wealth.”

  13. Lovett interview with Hughes, March 5, 2016.

  14. Lovett interview with Hughes, March 5, 2016.

  15. Bryan Miller, “Maxwell’s Plum, a ’60s Symbol Closes,” New York Times, July 11, 1988.

  16. Eric Asimov, “Warner Leroy, Restaurant Impresario, Is Dead at 65,” New York Times, February 24, 2001.

  17. Laura L. Lovett interview with Patrice Quinn, February 19, 2015.

  18. Purnell, Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings; Frazier, Harambee City; Meier and Rudwick, CORE.

  19. CORE, “Membership Department Work Priorities,” Series 2: Reel 6, Congress of Racial Equality Papers.

  20. Fujiwara, The World and Its Double, 143–47.

  21. Congress of Racial Equality, This Is Core, pamphlet, p. 2, Dorothy Pitman Hughes Papers.

  22. Frazier, Harambee City; Meier and Rudwick, CORE.

  23. John Oliver Killens and Loften Mitchell, Ballad of the Winter Soldiers (1964), John Randolph Papers, Series III: Box 5: Folder 18.

  24. Killens and Mitchell, Ballad of the Winter Soldiers.

  25. Killens and Mitchell, Ballad of the Winter Soldiers.

  26. Killens and Mitchell, Ballad of the Winter Soldiers.

  27. Cathy White, “CORE Raises $20,000 at Benefit Ballad,” New York Amsterdam News, October 3, 1964, 17.

  28. “Set Musical Tribute for CORE Benefit,” New York Amsterdam News, July 25, 1964, 17; “Open House Boosts CORE Benefit Show,” New York Amsterdam News, August 8, 1964, 47.

  29. This represents my efforts to tally up expenditures and income sheets from CORE based on the organization’s papers. While some of the information may be incorrect, the total that I came up with approximates CORE’s tally of $17,477. This is certainly out of line with the $800,000 that Dorothy claimed was generated by the event. Congress of Racial Equality Papers. The fundraiser generated $20,000. White, “CORE Raises $20,000 at Benefit Ballad,” 17; “Gregory Benefits Raise Over $50,000 for CORE,” Jet, October 22, 1964, 6.

  30. Dorothy Pitman Hughes interview with Laura Lovett, March 3, 2016.

  31. “Gregory Benefits Raise Over $50,000 for CORE,” Jet, October 22, 1964, 6.

  32. “CORE, Fund-Raiser Split After Dispute” New York Amsterdam News, October 24, 1964, 30.

  33. “CORE, Fund-Raiser Split After Dispute.”

  34. CORE, Ballad of the Winter Soldiers Publicity, September 28, 1964, Congress of Racial Equality Papers.

  35. CORE, Ballad of the Winter Soldiers Publicity.

  36. Mitchell, Black Drama, 202.

  37. Mitchell, Black Drama, 202.

  38. Mitchell, “On the ‘Emerging’ Playwright,” 135.

  39. Killens, Black Man’s Burden.

  40. Killens, Black Man’s Burden, 26.

  41. Keith Gilyard attributes an even more popular project to Killens, the popular treatise, not associated with Killens, called “A Statement of Basic Aims and Objectives of the Organization of Afro-American Unity,” a document made public by Malcolm X on June 18, 1964. Malcolm X had founded the OAAU after his trip to Africa, which followed his break from Nation of Islam in 1964. OAAU would be a secular and more popular entity to push Black empowerment. Here, Gilyard is using George Breitman’s analysis. Breitman argues that this is a phase in which Malcolm X’s rhetoric becomes more global and anti-capitalist and seems to imagine a space for white allies, in the final phase. Breitman, The Last Year of Malcolm X. Gilyard, Liberation Memories, 59, 61.

  42. Laura L. Lovett interview with Patrice Quinn, February 19, 2015.

  43. Author’s personal communication with Dorothy Pitman Hughes, October 19, 2019.

  44. Malcolm X and Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

  45. Malcolm X and Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

  46. On the appeal of Malcolm X for Black women, see Griffin, “‘Ironies of the Saint.’”

  47. Randolph, Florynce “Flo” Kennedy, 60–64.

  48. “Mass Rally, Sat., April 2,” flyer for Bill Epton, Dorothy Pitman Hughes Papers.

  49. John Roberts, “Overthrow Whites, 60 Told at Lincoln University,” New Journal (Wilmington, DE), November 20, 1965, 22.

  50. Laura L. Lovett interview with Dorothy Pitman Hughes, September 13, 2019.

  51. Bill Pitman, “National March of Conscience,” letter, September 19, 1966, and John Brown Memorial Pilgrimage, October 18, 1965, Dorothy Pitman Hughes Papers.

  52. Congressional Record, 112, Part 20, October 18, 1966, 27340.

  53. Van Matre, “The Congress of Racial Equality and the Re-Emergence of the Civil Rights Movement,” 143.

  54. Van Matre, “The Congress of Racial Equality and the Re-Emergence of the Civil Rights Movement,” 168.

  55. Van Matre, “The Congress of Racial Equality and the Re-Emergence of the Civil Rights Movement.”

  56. Hartman, “After Years Underground, a Subway Singer Gets the Spotlight”; Lovett interview with Hughes, March 16, 2014.

  57. Goudsouzian, Down to the Crossroads; Hill, The Deacons for Defense, 245–47.

  58. Van Matre, “The Congress of Racial Equality and the Re-Emergence of the Civil Rights Movement,” 171.

  59. Van Matre, “The Congress of Racial Equality and the Re-Emergence of the Civil Rights Movement,” 172.

  60. Van Matre, “The Congress of Racial Equality and the Re-Emergence of the Civil Rights Movement,” 171.

  CHAPTER 3: CHILDCARE, COMMUNITY CARE

  1. Hughes, “Free to Be on West 80th Street.”

  2. Grace Thorne Allen, Maxine Davis, and Warner Olivier, “Eight-Hour Orphans,” Saturday Evening Post, October 10, 1941, 21–22, 105–6. This article is supplemented with extensive governmental research throughout the country, including a survey of a war plant parking lot in which one social worker found forty-five children locked in workers’ cars. Fousekis, Demanding Child Care, 22.

  3. Nan Ickeringill, “Story of a Day Care Center: Venture of Faith Born of Desperation,” New York Times, February 5, 1969, 50.

  4. Ickeringill, “Story of a Day Care Center.” Before the war, day nurseries were handled as local projects by African American community groups, or nationally, as a part of the Works Progress Administration’s emergency nursery schools, set up between 1933 and 1943. These WPA day nurseries were envisioned as a means for creating employment and required that 90 percent of nursery workers be taken from relief rolls as a way to create work as teachers, teacher’s aides, cooks, and custodians. After 1935, an average of 1,900 WPA nursery schools cared for children each year across the US. Though initially intended to create employment during the Great Depression, these schools had the effect of “promulgating what reformers regarded as modern values, whether vocational, social or cultural.” When the crisis of World War II created a new call for childcare, limited government funding meant that any new program would come at the expense of the older WPA program. When President Franklin Roosevelt ended the WPA employment program, because of massive war work opportunities in July 1943, he was able to justifiably cut the WPA nurseries, because one of their rationales had been to create employment during the Depression. See Michel, Children’s Interests/Mothers’ Rights; William Tuttle, “Rosie the Riveter and Her Latchkey Children: What Americans Can Learn about Child Day Care from the Second World War,” Child Welfare 74, no. 1 (1995): 92–114. />
  5. Tuttle, “Rosie the Riveter and Her Latchkey Children.”

  6. Lovett interview with Hughes, March 17, 2014.

  7. MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough.

  8. MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough.

  9. Ickeringill, “Story of a Day Care Center.”

  10. Ickeringill, “Story of a Day Care Center.”

  11. Ickeringill, “Story of a Day Care Center.”

  12. Ickeringill, “Story of a Day Care Center.”

  13. Rowe, “All Kinds of Love—in a Chinese Restaurant.”

  14. Rowe, “All Kinds of Love—in a Chinese Restaurant.”

  15. John Danton, “After 4 Hotel Slayings, Fear Stalks All Rooms,” New York Times, November 20, 1972, 74.

  16. David K. Shipler, “Single Room Tenants Are Losing Out,” New York Times, November 17, 1968, 1.

  17. Quinn, “A Free Perspective.”

  18. Max Siegel, “City Starts Crime Building Inspections,” New York Times, December 1, 1972, 32; Ickeringill, “Story of a Day Care Center.”

  19. The Neighborhood Youth Corps was an employment program created by the 1964 Office of Economic Opportunity Act, which provided employment and remedial education to low-income young people from 16 to 21. See Kent B. Germany, “The Politics of Poverty and History: Racial Inequality and the Long Prelude to Katrina,” Journal of American History 94, no. 3 (2007): 743–51.

  20. Ickeringill, “Story of a Day Care Center.”

  21. Ickeringill, “Story of a Day Care Center.”

  22. Steinem, “The City Politic: A Racial Walking Tour.”

  23. Steinem, “The City Politic: A Racial Walking Tour.”

  24. Steinem, “The City Politic: Room at the Bottom, Boredom at the Top.”

  25. Rowe, “All Kinds of Love—in a Chinese Restaurant.”

  26. Michael T. Kaufman, “50 City Day Care Centers Fight Income Limits,” New York Times, January 6, 1972, 39.

  27. Ickeringill, “Story of a Day Care Center.”