NEW YORK (AP) — Dorothy Pitman Hughes, a pioneering black feminist, child welfare advocate and lifelong community activist who traveled the country speaking with Gloria Steinem in the 1970s and appears with her in the one of the most iconic photos of the second-wave feminist movement, has died. She was 84 years old.
Hughes died Dec. 1 in Tampa, Fla., at the home of her daughter and son-in-law, said Maurice Sconiers of Sconiers Funeral Home in Columbus, Georgia. His daughter, Delethia Ridley Malmsten, said the cause was old age.
Although they came to their feminist activism from different perspectives – Hughes from her community work and Steinem from journalism – the two forged a powerful speaking partnership in the early 1970s, traveling the country at a time when feminism was seen as predominantly white and middle class, a divide that dates back to the origins of the American feminist movement. Steinem credited Hughes with helping her become comfortable speaking in public.
In one of the most famous images of the era, taken in October 1971, the two men raised their right arms in the Black Power Salute. The photo is now in the National Portrait Gallery.
Hughes, her work still rooted in community activism, organized the first shelter for battered women in New York and co-founded the New York City Agency for Child Development to expand child care of children in the city. But she was perhaps best known for her work helping countless families through the community center she established on Manhattan’s West Side, providing daycare, job training, advocacy training and more. .
“She took families off the streets and gave them jobs,” her daughter Malmsten told The Associated Press on Sunday, reflecting on what she considered her mother’s most important job.
Steinem also paid tribute to Hughes’ community work. “My friend Dorothy Pitman Hughes ran a pioneering neighborhood daycare center in West Manhattan,” Steinem said in an email. “We met in the 70s when I wrote about this daycare, and we became talking partners and lifelong friends. She will be missed, but if we continue to tell her story, she will continue to inspire us all.
Laura L. Lovett, whose biography of Hughes, “With Her Fist Raised,” came out last year, told Ms. Magazine that Hughes “defined herself as a feminist, but rooted her feminism in her experience and in more basic needs of security, food, shelter and childcare.
Born Dorothy Jean Ridley on October 2, 1938 in Lumpkin, Georgia, Hughes was involved in activism from a young age, according to an obituary written by her family. When she was 10, he says, her father was almost beaten to death and left at the family’s doorstep. The family believed he had been attacked by the Ku Klux Klan and Hughes decided to devote himself to helping others through activism.
She moved to New York in the late 1950s when she was nearly 20 and worked as a saleswoman, nightclub singer, and housekeeper. By the 1960s, she had become involved in the civil rights movement and other causes, working with Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and others.
In the late 1960s, she established her West 80th St. Childcare Center, providing daycare and also parenting support.
“She realized that childcare issues were deeply intertwined with issues of racial discrimination, poverty, drug abuse, poor housing, social hotels, job training and even the war in Vietnam,” Lovett said. wrote last year.
It was at the center that Hughes met Steinem, then a journalist writing an article for New York Magazine. They became friends and, from 1969 to 1973, spoke across the country on college campuses, community centers and other venues about gender and race issues.
“Dorothy’s style was to call out the racism she saw in the white women’s movement,” Lovett said in Ms. Proof That Obstacle Could Be Overcome.
In the early 1970s, Hughes also helped found, with Steinem, the Women’s Action Alliance, a broad network of feminist activists to coordinate resources and push for equality on a national level. Although it has often been said that Hughes also co-founded Ms. Magazine with Steinem around the same time and biographer Lovett says she helped inspire the idea, she did not play an official role in the magazine.
“It’s our difference in experience that has made us good conference partners,” Steinem noted. She also remembers collaborating with Hughes to protest so-called “social hotels” in New York for poor families in the 1970s. “Dorothy was key to exposing the living conditions there,” said Steinem. “She was truly a great community activist.”
By the 1980s, Hughes had moved to Harlem and opened an office supply business, Harlem Office Supply, the then rare stationery store run by a black woman. But she was forced to sell the store when a Staples opened nearby, as part of President Bill Clinton’s Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone program.
She would recall some of her experiences in the 2000 book, “Wake Up and Smell the Dollars!” Who owns this downtown anyway! : One woman’s struggle against sexism, classism, racism, gentrification and the empowerment zone. »
Hughes was portrayed in “The Glorias”, the 2020 film about Steinem, by actor Janelle Monaé.
She is survived by three daughters: Malmsten, Patrice Quinn and Angela Hughes.
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This story has been updated to correct that while Hughes was often cited as a co-founder of Ms. Magazine, she actually had no official role in the publication.
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AP National Writer Hillel Italy contributed to this report.
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