By Brooklyn White· Updated December 11, 2022
“I’m speaking about sexism and racism and I think that it’s needed,” said Dorothy Pitman Hughes, Black feminist thought leader, during a 1971 interview. Pitman Hughes was well known for her work centering children and women’s equality. She was also recognized for co-founding the Women’s Action Alliance and inspiring the launch of Ms. magazine.
A community organizer at her core, she advocated for the most vulnerable populations for more than 40 years.
Pitman Hughes died on December 1, a source confirmed to ESSENCE. She was 84 years old.
Pitman Hughes was born Dorothy Jean Ridley in Lumpkin, Georgia in 1938. When she was a child, her father, Melton Lee Ridley, was brutally beaten by the Ku Klux Klan and left for dead on her family’s porch. The girl prayed that if her father lived, she would devote herself to “making the world a better place.”
Upon dropping out of high school, Hughes moved to New York City to pursue a career in music. According to Dr. Laura L. Lovett, the author of With Her Fist Raised: Dorothy Pitman Hughes and the Transformative Power of Black Community Activism, Hughes worked as a nightclub singer at Maxwell’s Plum, a Manhattan bar. During her days at home, she noticed children were taking care of their homes while their parents worked, and decided to transform her home into a daycare center.
“For her, it was really important that everyone have a part in the childcare center. So she had a limit on how much they could charge and a really democratic perspective that everyone would have a role in running it,” Dr. Lovett tells ESSENCE.“There was a study that was done of childcare centers. It was ranked as one of the hundred best in the country.”
Pitman Hughes gave birth to her first child, a daughter named Delethia, in 1960.
By the late 1960s, Harlem was ravaged by poverty, substance abuse, and mental health issues for many of those who had served in the Vietnam War. Gordon Parks’ heart wrenching 1967 photographs of one destitute family illustrates the immense strain Harlem’s families were under. For decades, Pitman Hughes poured into the community that became an epicenter of Black cultural expression
The post Feminist Trailblazer Dorothy Pitman Hughes Dies At 84 appeared first on Essence.
