Dorothy Pitman Hughes is a civil rights feminist activist and child-welfare advocate who worked with Gloria Steinem during the feminist movement in the early 70s.
Hughes was born in Lumpkin, Georgia in 1938. She grew up in the segregated south where she faced the violence of racism as her father was assaulted by men, who were assumed to be members of the Ku Klux Klan by her family. She later moved to New York in the 1950s.
She was a small business owner in New York and often supported other African American people to start their own small businesses. Hughes’ activism started with raising bail money for arrested civil rights protestors, organizing the first shelter for battered women in New York City, and founding a multiracial cooperative daycare center, the West 80th Community Childcare Center. Hughes believed that too many women were being forced to leave their children by themselves as they had to work to support their families. The West 80th Community Childcare Center would eventually be covered in a New York magazine story by Steinem.
Steinem and Hughes formed a friendship that would lead them to tour the U.S. for two years speaking to the public about the women’s movement. The two of them even founded the Women’s Action Alliance, an information center that focused on nonsexist, multiracial children’s education, in 1971. Hughes and Steinem took their iconic black and white photo with their fists raised in feminist solidarity, in 1971 by photographer Dan Wynn for Esquire Magazine. Later in 2013, Hughes commissioned photographer, Dan Bagan, to reenact their iconic photo for Steinem’s 80th birthday.
In 1992, Hughes would co-found the Charles Junction Historic Preservation Society in Jacksonville, Florida. According to the Charles Junction Historic Preservation Society Facebook page, “Charles Junction is a community garden project whose vision is to bring agricultural and economic independence to urban communities in Jacksonville.”
Hughes would later join the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone as a part of the research team. The UMEZ was established during the Clinton Administration in 1994 with hopes for economic development in Harlem. As a part of the research team, they created the Business Resource and Investment Service Center which focused on developing small, locally owned businesses in Harlem. Hughes would later be disappointed when national chains started developing in Harlem rather than locally owned businesses.