Pioneering black feminist Dorothy Pitman Hughes dies at 84

Pioneering black feminist Dorothy Pitman Hughes has died at the age of 84.

The child welfare advocate and lifelong community activist toured the country speaking with Gloria Steinem in the 1970s and appears with her in one of the most famous photos of the second-wave feminist movement.

Hughes died on December 1 in Tampa, Florida, at the home of her daughter and son-in-law, said Maurice Sconiers, of the Sconiers Funeral Home in Columbus, Georgia. Her daughter, Delethia Ridley Malmsten, said the cause was old age.

Although they came to feminism from different places – Hughes from community activism and Steinem from journalism – the two forged a powerful speaking partnership in the early 1970s, touring the country at a time when feminism was seen as predominantly white and middle-class, a divide dating back to the origins of the American women’s 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 women raised their right arms in the Black Power salute. The photo is now in the National Portrait Gallery.

But she was perhaps best known for her work helping countless families through the community centre she established on Manhattan’s West Side, offering day care, job training, advocacy training and more.

Her daughter, reflecting on what she felt was her mother’s most important work, told the Associated Press on Sunday: “She took families off the street and gave them jobs.”

Steinem also paid tribute to Hughes’ community work.

“My friend Dorothy Pitman Hughes ran a pioneering neighbourhood childcare centre on the west side of Manhattan,” she said in an email. “We met in the Seventies when I wrote about that childcare centre, and we became speaking partners and lifetime friends. She will be missed, but if we keep telling her story, she will keep inspiring us all.”

Laura L Lovett, whose biography of Hughes, With Her Fist Raised, was published last year, said in Ms magazine (of which Pitman was a co-founder along with Steinem) that Hughes “defined herself as a feminist, but rooted her feminism in her experience and in more fundamental needs for safety, food, shelter and childcare”.

When she was 10, it said, her father was nearly beaten to death and left on the family’s doorstep. The family believed he had been attacked by the Ku Klux Klan, and Hughes decided to dedicate herself to helping others through activism.

She moved to New York City in the late 1950s when she was nearly 20 and worked as a salesperson, nightclub singer and house cleaner. 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 set up her West 80th Street community centre, providing care for children and also support for their parents.

“She realised that childcare challenges were deeply entangled with issues of racial discrimination, poverty, drug use, sub-standard housing, welfare hotels, job training and even the Vietnam War,” Lovett wrote last year.

Hughes “recognised that the strongest anchor for local community action centred on children and worked to fix the roots of inequality in her community”.

It was at the centre that she met Steinem, then a journalist writing a story for New York Magazine. They became friends and, from 1969 to 1973, spoke across the country at college campuses, community centres and other venues on 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. “She frequently took to the stage to articulate the way in which white women’s privilege oppressed black women but also offered her friendship with Gloria as proof this obstacle could be overcome.”

By the 1980s, Hughes was becoming an entrepreneur. She had moved to Harlem and opened an office supply business, Harlem Office Supply, the rare stationery store at the time that was run by a black woman. But she was forced to sell it when a Staples opened nearby, part of president Bill Clinton’s Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone programme.

She would remember some of her experiences in the 2000 book, 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.

Hughes was portrayed in The Glorias, the 2020 film about Steinem, by actor Janelle Monaw.

She is survived by three daughters – Ms Malmsten, Patrice Quinn and Angela Hughes.