Dorothy Pitman Hughes papers

Dorothy Pitman Hughes is a civil rights feminist activist, movement leader and author. Born in Lumpkin, Georgia in 1938, Pitman Hughes grew up in the segregated South, experiencing firsthand the violence of racism where, in 1948 her father was severely beaten by men her family believed to be members of the Ku Klux Klan. In 1957 she moved to New York City and during the 1960s worked as a salesperson, house cleaner, and nightclub singer while raising bail money for jailed civil rights activists. In the late 1960s, needing care for her own children (by 1970, she had three daughters) Pitman Hughes organized a multiracial cooperative day care center on the West Side which would be profiled by New York Magazine columnist, Gloria Steinem. The two women became friends and when Steinem began her public speaking career on behalf of feminism, she asked Pitman Hughes to join her.

In the 1990s, Pitman Hughes became a vocal advocate of African American entrepreneurship, owning several small businesses herself, in both New York City and her more recent home of Jacksonville, Florida. She is the author of "Wake Up and Smell the Dollars! Whose Inner-City is This Any!: One Woman's Struggle Against Sexism, Classism, Racism" (2000); "I'm Just Saying It Looks Like Ethnic Cleansing: The Gentrification of Harlem" (2013); and writing with Ruther Youmans Tyson, "Life is About Choices, Not Excuses: The Life of Ruther Youmans Tyson" (2014).