CHAPTER 2
FINDING HER VOICE
Fighting racism was a cherished goal for Dorothy Pitman Hughes. But challenging the structures of racial inequity introduced her to other structures of power. At the tender age of eleven, Dorothy decided to join the regional NAACP chapter in nearby Lumpkin, a good hour’s walk away from her neighborhood in Charles Junction. When she met the regional organizer, Dorothy remembers being told of the need for a “gown” to attend the group’s annual gala. Her young mind wondered why she would need a nightgown to fight white supremacy. When Dorothy questioned the necessity for a particular kind of dress, the woman’s laughter made clear Dorothy’s precocious dedication to political organizing came with another hard lesson: the “gown” she would need was an evening gown for a social gathering, a fancy acquisition that was far out of reach for the near-adolescent and her family. The NAACP organizer might have been gently trying to discourage a child from membership in a political organization that was considered dangerous to belong to in 1949, but the message that young Dorothy took away was that structures of class, as well as race, were integral in efforts to remake power.
The fact that the regional NAACP was housed in Lumpkin, and not in the independent unincorporated African American settlement in which Dorothy lived, marked a further difference in both status and opportunity. Lumpkin, named for the governor who had championed the removal of the Creek and the Cherokee from Georgia, held on to a past that made it a good place to leave. Bypassed by market changes, the region was described in the 1930s as the poster child for soil erosion turned to timber. Later, the old Black Belt plantation borough became the first small town in Georgia to turn to historic preservation as a way to hold on to its feeling of significance.1 The St. Marks AME Church, out of which the regional NAACP was organized, stood near the intersection of Cotton and Pine Streets, on the periphery of the small town, near the reservoir and the cemetery. The location was far enough from the wealthy white historic uptown to remind congregants that, while the backbreaking labor of African Americans built the town, they were not a central part of it. This distance, though, had the benefit of giving them some relief from the constant surveillance of their white employers.
Having learned her lesson about limited opportunities in small, stultifying towns, Dorothy decided to travel as far as she could. The lack of resources for rural African American children in Georgia meant she attended school with only a single teacher from “primer grade,” or kindergarten, to fifth grade in the basement of the Charles Trinity AME Church before attending high school in Lumpkin. Stewart County native Thomas Jefferson Flanagan, one of Georgia’s renowned African American poets and an Atlanta World editor, had returned to Lumpkin Public Schools as principal two decades before Dorothy attended. Remembering his “crude start,” he sought to improve things but was unable to get the necessary resources to elevate the region’s Black schools to a satisfactory level.2 Dorothy says that her high school diploma gave her the academic skills equivalent to the seventh-grade education of whites in her state. When she graduated in 1956, two years after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, Dorothy knew little would be done to improve her school. Indeed, two years after her graduation, the state of Georgia passed a state law that mandated shutting down any school district that integrated. She felt keenly the frustration of limited opportunities that her discriminatory education codified.
The decision to leave had been cemented for Dorothy, as for many African Americans, with the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, when she was sixteen years old. The coverage in Jet magazine of the open-casket funeral of the Chicago teenager, sent to live with relatives in Money, Mississippi, and brutally murdered at the age of fourteen, was unforgettable. The courage of Till’s mother in displaying her son’s body inspired Dorothy to leave the South and its dangers for African American youth. Whether it was Philadelphia, where her father’s sister lived or elsewhere, she knew her future lay in the North. She had to start by leaving Lumpkin.
Dorothy took her first salaried job working for whites at Fort Benning, forty miles away, just outside of Columbus. She cleaned houses on the military base. To get there, she took an informal bus—a pickup truck with a cab on the back—driven by her uncle, from Lumpkin to the outskirts of Columbus, where she would catch a bus to the fort, at a roundtrip cost of seventy-five cents. A day spent scrubbing red Georgia mud from floors, windows, and clothes earned her three dollars. After paying twenty-five cents to her family for the household “kitty,” she was able to save two dollars a week for her future.3
Cleaning for white households at Fort Benning offered little encouragement to teenaged Dorothy. Nighttime opportunities seemed more compelling. Her older sister, Julia, had paved the way by moving to Columbus to work. Dorothy was captivated by the prospect of moonlighting as a singer in the nightclubs that surrounded the base. She and her sisters already had some local fame, singing at almost every African American event from Americus to Columbus, often remaking school auditorium concerts into popular happenings. Being able to stay nearby with her sister would free her to sing in Columbus on the weekends without having to commute or part with a quarter of her pay.
Fort Benning was established as a US Army training camp during World War I. With the advent of a permanent infantry school in 1920, the fort eventually replaced mills on the Chattahoochee River and even timber and agriculture as the area’s primary source of employment. The locations around the base did not have a good reputation, however. Just across the river from Columbus and Fort Benning, Phenix City, Alabama, was known at the time as Sin City. During World War II, Secretary of War Henry Stimson called it “the wickedest city in America.” Efforts to clean up the city began in the mid-1950s, but it remained notorious.4 Rumors of rape and violence circulated in the Black press in the 1940s and made working safely as a nightclub performer a real concern.5 As historian Danielle McGuire notes, “As a kind of cultural narrative, rumors of rape and sexualized violence had enormous symbolic power and political potency. Whites used outrageous racial rumors and rape scares to justify strengthening segregation and white supremacy.”6 If Dorothy was concerned, it did not deter her, and with her parents’ permission, she began performing on weekends.
Singing in Columbus exposed the beautiful young woman to opportunities that fed her desire to leave. Eventually a local talent agent offered to help manage her and move her north. To Dorothy, this prospect seemed to satisfy her mother’s requirements. Lessie Ridley had insisted her daughter have a proposal that demonstrated “respect [for] her plan for me. Being very careful and [to] not be sexually abused.”7
Dorothy had spent years begging her mother for the chance to escape the stifling atmosphere of the South. She happily presented her plan for moving north with a legitimate manager, a talent agent who offered “to be her Berry Gordy,” the famous founder of Motown, and promised to book her in bigger nightclubs in New York. Lessie agreed to meet him. As Dorothy explains, they arranged to visit the manager in his home office in Columbus, driving to the city in the afternoon. The hour spent in the car was followed by a twenty-minute interview, cut short by her mother. She came into his office, began listening, and then said, “Okay, sir, thank you. Let’s go.”
The brief encounter told Mrs. Ridley all she needed to know. “Did you see those iron prints on his pants?” her mother asked. In the days of cotton fabric, hot irons were a necessary part of dressing properly. Indeed, the man offering to take Dorothy to New York could clearly not afford to hire help for his ironing as there were marks where the hot metal had touched the fabric.
“Why do you think he can do for you when he cannot do for himself?” Lessie asked her daughter. Her message was clear: this man would take advantage of Dorothy Jean, leaving her vulnerable, without family to protect her.
“I still needed to give her a plan of what I was going to do for myself and how I was going to take care of myself,” Dorothy later explained. More importantly, the way Lessie had evaluated the situation conveyed a lasting lesson to her daughter: “Iron prints made me see details. Whenever I was going to be interviewed, I interviewed them silently.”8 Examining the details and learning to assess dangers and inconsistencies in the tiniest unspoken messages became a way of life for the young Dorothy Jean.
Taking her mother’s message to heart, Dorothy decided she would get to New York City, the nightclub capital, in a way that she could support herself. An ad in the local newspaper for a live-in maid seemed to offer the answer. Domestic service agencies often reached into the South to lure what seemed to be a docile workforce west or north, depending on the historical moment. Dorothy saw her chance. Taking the ad to her mother, she insisted that she would be able to support herself, have a place to stay, and even be reimbursed for the journey. For years, the strong daughter and stronger mother had clashed over her future. This plan seemed to meet Mrs. Ridley’s requirements. The push of violence and discrimination in Georgia—and the pull of opportunity in New York—were irresistible.
In 1958, Dorothy Jean Ridley packed her bags and took the train north. Arriving in New York, in Rockville, Long Island, where the domestic service agency was headquartered, she applied her mother’s lesson to her first job interview.9 Maid candidates were picked up by bus, brought to the agency, given numbers, and interviewed right away. Their tickets needed to be repaid and a quick placement and contract with an employer was the most efficient way of doing so. In her thesis on the topic, in 1940, Esther Cooper Jackson identified the practice of hiring Black live-in domestics as one of the most exploitative employment situations of the time. What she called the Bronx Slave Market was “one of the worst types of human exploitation . . . found in New York City and one of the ugliest aspects is the way in which girls are shipped up by the car loads from the South to stand on corners waiting for work for 25 to 35 cents per hour.”10 The situation had not vastly improved by the 1950s.
When Dorothy’s number was called, she was interviewed simultaneously by the agency owner and a woman with a young child. The woman seemed friendly. She asked questions, along with the agency owner: What was her experience? Had she worked with children? Where was she from?
“The woman they’d picked out for me was nice. I liked her. The kid was cute. The man gave us papers. I signed mine and she signed hers,” Dorothy explained later. While her immediate future seemed secure, the next transaction provided the kind of detail that caused her to reflect on her worth. The agency owner gave Dorothy’s new employer one hundred Green Stamps as a gift for employing the young woman. These were trading stamps that could be redeemed for goods from a catalogue. This gesture, more than anything else about that day, affected Dorothy: “I put it in my head that I was very angry that I was only worth one hundred Green Stamps. That stayed with me all of the time I was in domestic work. That taught me to have a different kind of value to myself.”11
The new environment and the household labor took a toll on Dorothy. She was learning what it meant to be a “sleep-in maid,” working long hours, with occasional verbal abuse. She stayed in touch with some of the agency’s other employees and was soon making connections on the regular Thursday nights out that live-in employees were allowed.12 This guaranteed domestic service for white employers for the weekends.
One day, her “nice” employer asked Dorothy Jean to walk the dog in the rain. To a Georgian like Dorothy, who was always cold in the new climate, this seemed absurd: “In Lumpkin, dogs walked themselves, did their number, and came back.” The woman insisted that her maid take the animal out on the wet day, threatening to fire her if she did not. In Dorothy’s words, the measure of her worth and the woman’s disregard for the “kind of value” that she should have as a human came to a head. “I said, Okay,” and with that, Dorothy Jean Ridley left.
By this time, the nouveau transplant had established a network. She had met a Black policeman on Long Island and, after packing her things, went to the police station to find him. Naive about the process of getting around, she asked him to show her how to get to Harlem so she could find a cousin who had also fled the South. Waiting at the station for the policeman to get off work, Dorothy realized that she needed a new plan.
After leaving her things with her cousin in Harlem, Dorothy returned to the domestic service agency on Long Island. Her second placement taught her more. The agent assigned her a family named Moskowitz in Rockville Center, but she had also begun to make political friends and to identify what was important to her.
The Moskowitz home seemed to offer a different kind of experience. Taking charge of her own well-being also helped make Dorothy a different kind of person. She moved in with the Moskowitz family, continuing to connect with friends who worked in service and went out on “Thursday nights off” together. The Apollo Theater became a regular destination.
One night, Dorothy clicked with a young man she met at the theater. He returned on another Thursday night looking for her. This time, he had had his hair done, “straightened, bleached, and curled’ in the style popular in the 1950s. When she saw him outside the theater, Dorothy reached out and touched his hair, uttering something like, “Oh, so cute.” The man slapped her so hard that her head flew. As she noted, “I was from Georgia—I was not a timid little girl who was going to accept getting hit.” Dorothy reciprocated by “beating the hell out of him,” so much so that she had to call his mother to pick him up. For Dorothy, the message was to be wary of whom she befriended, electing to seek out “people in the movement” after this unfortunate encounter.
Her new employers, like her new political friends, respected her choices. Mrs. Moskowitz knew that Dorothy had hopes of singing and helped by lending her clothes, fixing her up, telling her which clubs to try, and offering her some Saturday nights off in addition to Thursdays. Within a short time, Dorothy Jean, who gave herself the stage name Jean Myers, was making enough money singing and doing domestic work that she could afford to move out of the Moskowitz home and rent an apartment in the Black section of Rockville, above a barbershop on Bank Street.
Dorothy continued to juggle domestic work with nightclub singing and, for a while, things worked very well as she booked evening events in Freeport, just a few miles from Rockville Center. Singing at the Freeport Club and Guy Lombardo’s East Point House allowed Dorothy to build her reputation. She eventually moved into the club scene in New York City, starting with the Piano Bar in Greenwich Village and then the Central Ballroom, the Celebrity Club, the Showman’s Club, and even the famed Cotton Club in Harlem once in a while.
As she grew more secure, and more assured that she could take care of herself, things changed. Dorothy visited a white doctor at the recommendation of a fellow “Thursday-night-out” housekeeper-friend. She had been experiencing abdominal pains and wanted to find out why. Before she had left Georgia, Dorothy had been afraid to tell her mother, knowing that if she brought it up, Aunt Velma would have made a tea out of “grass or weeds” to help her with the pain and her period. When her own daughters had similar struggles, Lessie Ridley sent tea greens to brew. But Dorothy was now in New York, and New York doctors saw patients about such things.
The doctor examined Dorothy and asked when she had had her last period. When she revealed that she had not yet had her period, he gave her medication to bring on menses without pain. When she returned the following Thursday, still in pain, the physician examined her again, and asked whether she had ever had sexual intercourse. Dorothy, who answered that she was still a virgin, was then told by the doctor that she needed to have sex.
Returning yet again, still in pain, the physician gave her an extraordinary piece of advice—not to return to his office without having had sexual relations with a man. This piece of “medical” advice was not accompanied with any recommendation for protection from pregnancy or disease. Coming from a home in Georgia where the sexual education she received from her mother consisted of warnings not to get caught “going out” or “to bed,” Dorothy had no idea how to protect herself.
Under doctor’s orders, Dorothy began plotting to address her pain. At her next singing engagement at the Celebrity Club, she chose her first sexual partner from the crowd based on how he danced. As she put it, she “smoothed up to him and danced with him after I sang.” After making arrangements to have lunch with him the next Thursday, she found she liked him enough in the daytime to continue meeting him for a few weeks, before having sex with him. Her doctor’s appointment, set for the month after her last visit, gave her a few weeks.
Having sex once, as ordered by her doctor, changed her life. Dorothy found out from that same doctor that she was pregnant. She told the father, who urged her to go to his mother’s home, where his mother would take the baby. This was not something the newly pregnant Dorothy could consider: “If I was going to have it, I was going to keep it. It would be my baby.”13 She continued working for a while in New York, after leaving the Moskowitz home, to work in a cardiologist’s office in Brooklyn, prepping EKG patients and cleaning the office to save up money.
A short while later, Dorothy decided to go live with her sister Julia, who had married and moved to Florida. Dorothy took a job in a Palmetto restaurant as she prepared for her baby. Her fears of letting her family down by getting pregnant, after all her mother’s warnings, turned out to be misplaced. Dorothy’s mother reached out to her, saying “It’s a baby, not a sin,” and insisted that her daughter come home. Her mother was pregnant as well.
Reconnecting with her family was affirming. As Dorothy noted, “family attitude was key.” Not only did they embrace her, but her presence turned out to be positive for her mother. The community that Dorothy lived in tended to dress in white gowns almost like “uniforms” to signal that a woman was expecting. The clothes were large, flowing, and practical but not very fun or flattering. With her savings as a maid and singer, Dorothy “bought pretty maternity clothes for Mom and me,” the first real maternity clothing that her mother had owned. As Dorothy reminisced, “Mother enjoyed that pregnancy.”14
Dorothy named her daughter for the angel Delethia. She was born on March 10, 1960, at home with the aid of Dorothy’s aunts, mother, and family friends. The baby and her mother flourished in the family home. For the rest of her life, Dorothy would make regular pilgrimages to Charles Junction with her daughter, staying almost every summer or leaving the kids while she traveled, making sure the connection between Georgia and New York continued for another generation.
Having her baby in the small hamlet did not make the racial politics any more bearable. Dorothy soon yearned to leave again. This time Dorothy left Delethia with her mother and traveled back to New York to sing with her younger brother, Roger, and her sisters Julia and Mary. The foursome billed themselves as Roger and the Ridley Sisters, and they sang in venues from churches to New York City nightclubs. With an easygoing manner, Roger Ridley developed a rapport with the Cotton Club and the Baby Grand, eventually singing at the wedding of Robert F. Kennedy’s son Douglas. His name was featured in the group’s moniker, Roger and the Ridley Sisters, who eventually recorded their own song, “Morning, Noon, I Cry,” in 1966.
A picture taken at the time reveals an elegant foursome. Roger in a double-breasted gray suit with a white shirt, tie, and pocket square stands at the front, smiling with a mustache, a full foot taller than his three sisters. The backup singers—Dorothy, Julia, and Mary—are dressed in elegant fitted outfits with tight sparkled bodices and ankle-length skirts. All three wear pointed shoes with their legs posed on a step and their hands poised, similar but slightly different. Their individuality is apparent through their smiles, hairstyles, and rings. The differences, though, between them and their brother illustrate the relevance of his assorted nicknames, including Buh-Buh, Ajax, and Big Man.
Though successful, the group was not making enough money to support itself in New York. Just as she had promised her mother, though, Dorothy found another way of making enough to support herself. She began to move around the city, relocating to the West Side. Along the way she worked for Warner LeRoy, the owner of Maxwell’s Plum, a restaurant and bar that became synonymous with the sexual revolution.15 As author Peter Benchley described it, Maxwell Plum’s was “one of the true paradoxes of the city’s night life. . . . By being consciously—almost self-consciously—democratic, by avoiding all pretense to exclusivity, it had become one of the most smashingly successful places in the city, attracting everyone from movie stars to restaurateurs to—yes, even the fabled Brooklyn secretary. And contrary to the social imperative, they all seem to coexist in relative bliss.”16 This kind of democratic mash-up also characterized LeRoy’s connection to Dorothy. While working as a live-in maid for a family in the LeRoys’ apartment building, Dorothy had shown concern for Warner’s wife, Gen, who had become ill and would sometimes sit outside the building, where Dorothy saw her on breaks. This kindness to his wife prompted Warner to hire Dorothy to work in the kitchen of his Second Avenue restaurant and occasionally to sing. This opportunity had a remarkable impact on her life.
At a party celebrating a Broadway show that Warner’s father, Melvyn, had directed, Dorothy was hired to accompany a two-piece band. Dorothy’s concern for Gen had evolved into a caretaking relationship in the LeRoy home. It was this relationship that spurred Warner’s sister to complain at the party, “Gen is in there with her arm around the maid. It’s embarrassing.” Dorothy, provoked, leaned into the sister’s husband on a break, saying something that further enraged Warner’s sister. Racism existed, including in the avant-garde theatrical crowd that gathered at Maxwell’s Plum, where interracial intimacies were still startling and provocative.
Such interracial interactions were also jarring to Dorothy. Indeed, it was at the LeRoys’ party that the attractive Georgian met Bill Pitman, a white man from Ireland. Bill Pitman had been seeking Dorothy’s attention that night and tried charming her with stories of his past. He must have been pleased when she told him about the insulting incident with the host’s sister, since it allowed the creative Irish builder to plant himself by her side for the rest of the evening to protect Dorothy from further insult.
Warner’s sister eventually left in outrage. Meeting Bill, who worked redesigning Maxwell’s Plum and would go on to help rebuild Tavern on the Green, intrigued Dorothy. As she shared with her friend Flo Kennedy, an outspoken activist and attorney, Bill Pitman’s politics fascinated her. It didn’t hurt that he was handsome and charming. Pitman, an Irish Nationalist and member of the IRA, had helped steal guns from an armory in Ireland.17 He eventually persuaded Dorothy that because the British colonization of Ireland was similar enough to the colonized position of African Americans in the United States, the two had much in common. Bill was enthralled by Dorothy’s interest in politics, and by her singing, and the two quickly planned for another conversation. Within months, they were married.
On returning to New York from Georgia, Dorothy had made every effort to surround herself with like-minded, left-wing political friends. She had left Georgia for political reasons and had grown to think of her politics as an important part of who she was. In addition to working as a singer and a domestic, Dorothy had begun working at the offices of the Congress of Racial Equality.18 Her initial position at CORE was mostly secretarial and began sometime before May 1963. Through her work in the office, she became acquainted with grassroots organizing on civil rights issues and decided to go further with her vision, which her CORE coworkers did not necessarily consider important.19
At the same party where Dorothy met Bill Pitman, she also met the film director Otto Preminger. Her work for CORE intrigued him. On June 22, 1964, two CORE workers, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, and Queens College student organizer Andrew Goodman, had disappeared in Philadelphia, Mississippi. James Farmer, one of the original CORE student founders and CORE’s national director in 1964, flew to Mississippi from New York to help coordinate the search. In her part-time position at CORE’s national office, Dorothy decided the grassroots organization needed a large fundraiser to raise money to send people to Mississippi to look for the missing Freedom Summer workers. As a rural Georgian, she distrusted the steps being taken in the South and believed that only an externally funded group could find the CORE workers. Preminger was fascinated by Dorothy’s conviction and invited her to discuss the possibility of a New York fundraiser at his office.
Preminger, an Austrian-born filmmaker, shared Dorothy’s politics, not only in terms of race but with other issues too. Ten years earlier, Preminger had decided to challenge what he saw as sexually restrictive morality clauses by premiering his film The Moon Is Blue, which had been denied the Motion Picture Production Code Administration’s seal of approval for its “unacceptably light attitude towards seduction, illicit sex, chastity and virginity.” Indeed, Preminger’s challenging of this constraint would go on to weaken the code, but only after the director had filed lawsuits against theaters in Maryland and Kansas where there were separate showings for men and women. He eventually took the suit to the Supreme Court. When Dorothy met Preminger at his office, he gave her a list of people to contact and maneuvered to reserve the Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center. The nascent event would be a star-studded evening, complete with an original play script and songs, drama and dance. Importantly, Preminger connected Dorothy to his circle of radical artist friends.
Dorothy’s new friends, including writers John Oliver Killens and Loften Mitchell, took to the project.20 The two writers often convened at Dorothy’s house to work on the production’s script over her home cooking. Killens, who had cofounded the Harlem Writers Guild, believed that politics and writing could connect actors to actions. Many of the ideas that would appear in the work to be staged by CORE would also appear the following year in Killens’s book Black Man’s Burden. Loften Mitchell, having just written Tell Pharaoh, a concert drama about the history of Harlem in 1963, helped imagine how to tell the story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney and their commitment as “Winter Soldiers” to the long-standing battle for African American freedom.
This project of raising money with a New York extravaganza tore at the fabric of CORE. By its own definition, CORE was a national civil rights organization created to “erase the color line through direct, nonviolent action.” Modeled on Mahatma Gandhi’s procedures to “free India from foreign domination,” CORE had been an activist organization for twenty years.21 Like Gandhi, CORE’s founders were interracial pacifists and created CORE from the Chicago branch of the Fellowship for Reconciliation in 1942 as an organization fighting for civil rights with nonviolent civil disobedience.22 By the time Dorothy began working for them, the national office coordinated dozens of local branches, orchestrating the famous Freedom Rides and Freedom Summers, as well as sit-ins, the standing-line technique, and other direct forms of protest. CORE was a civil rights organization focused on direct action, so it was not clear that the production of an elaborate stage show, one to be performed at Lincoln Center, fit with the vision of shock troops of change.
Ballad of the Winter Soldiers, described as “a study in music, verse and satire of the magnificent struggle of the American Negro for his dignity and rightful place in society,” was the first joint project for Killens and Mitchell.23 The “lyric-poetic” performance featured an all-star volunteer cast that included Shelley Winters, Dick Gregory, Robert Ryan, Theodore Bikel, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Madeleine Sherwood, Martha Schlamme, Godfrey Cambridge, John Henry Faulk, and Frederick O’Neal. Frank Silvera served as the narrator. The producer was the unknown Mrs. Dorothy Pitman.
The play’s title, which comes from Thomas Paine, reflects the investment in hard times. Beginning with the song “Motherless Child,” the script champions a commitment to “America’s Winter Soldiers” who “came in many garbs, in many shapes and of many races—fighting for the rights and equality of all mankind and especially man’s right to be free of enslavement by his fellow man.”24
The first act tells the story of Rabbi Shneur Zalman, who founded the Hassidic sect of Chabad as he led Jews away from pogroms in Russia. It is followed by a representation of Irish rebels, introduced by words unmistakably written by John Oliver Killens:
Ireland also had her summer soldiers and her sunshine patriots; her “uncle toms,” her “gang dins,” her traitors to the cause of freedom. But, fellow Americans, list to Ireland’s winter soldiers in the dark days of her degradation.25
The list of Winter Soldiers begins with Robert Emmet in 1803, went on to John Brown, the Kansas Liberator, and was followed by accounts of Gabriel Prosser’s slave rebellion, and Harriet Tubman, played by Ruby Dee. Sojourner Truth, played by African American actress Alyce Webb, represents the nexus of racial and gender oppression, while white abolitionist Ernestine Rose introduces Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois. The final individuals named are Wladyslaw Broniewski and the Winter Soldiers of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. A poem by Margaret Walker, “For My People,” was read under a screen projecting film clips of African Americans being attacked by the police in Birmingham, in St. Augustine in Florida, and, finally, in Harlem. As the script put it, “We see now films of the Harlem riots, of policemen standing with their white helmets, some shooting into the air, and we hear the crashing of bottles. We see wounded people outside the Harlem Hospital. Then we see the screaming headlines from Brooklyn, Rochester and Jersey City.” The film concludes with Dick Gregory being asked to “comment on your experiences on the battlefield,” a scene from a North Carolina school integration case, and a speech by CORE national director James Farmer.26
The event was followed by a series of benefit parties, including an after-show party at the home of Dr. Mathilde Krim, an early electron micrography expert. Krim, along with her husband, Arthur Krim, who was head of United Artists at the time, were inveterate fundraisers.27 Their party was preceded by celebrations at the LeRoys’ and an open house at the home of sculptor Bruno Lucchesi in August.28
Winter Soldiers grossed over $34,146 for CORE and cost the organization $17,478 to produce.29 For Dorothy, the most important lesson came from actress Shelley Winters. As producer-cum-file-clerk, Dorothy had a hard time commanding respect since, in her words, “CORE men were trying to take it over” and claim credit. Winters, long used to dealing with sexism in Hollywood and on Broadway, supported Dorothy, protecting her interests. Dorothy reflects that Winters “raised me in that situation,” indicating to everyone that the successful event would still be credited to Dorothy Pitman, and “cursing them really good when they wouldn’t listen” to the producer. Dorothy decided she would imitate Winters in the future. While Floyd McKissick, president of CORE, remained a friend, her immediate CORE supervisor “gave her hell.”30
By October, the New York Amsterdam News reported a split, with Dorothy deciding to sue CORE. She had been removed as the organization’s public relations director for “not taking direction,” according to reporter Marvin Rich. The September 28 production was declared to “not be a financial success.” To put things into perspective, Val Coleman had reported to Jet in October 1964 that Dick Gregory’s month-long, one-night performances raised “an excess of $50,000 for the organization,” quite a bit more than Dorothy’s event.31 The article reporting the break noted, “Mrs. Pitman however charged that her firing was discriminatory and the direct result of clashes with CORE officials from the beginning of her employment with the civil rights agency as a clerical worker.”32 The claim was against Marvin Rich and assistant public relations director Val Coleman. In an effort to get around the struggle with the community relations department, Dorothy had appealed directly to James Farmer, national CORE director, to try to create a separate fundraising department. The steering committee of the National Action Council of CORE, under Farmer, determined that her request was “out of order.”33
An earlier memo to Farmer, copied to Marvin Rich, reflects some tension around her proposed role. Writing two weeks before the show was to be mounted and thirteen days after the CORE president’s fundraising letter went out to subscribers, Dorothy’s letter suggests the lack of organizational support:
Since the benefit at Lincoln Center is a benefit for National CORE and is identified with CORE, I think it would be appropriate if you would lend your support to this project. If calls for tickets are coming into the CORE office, as they should, I think it would be best for you to assign one of the many people in the office just to take these calls.34
While the answer was vague, the appeal to James Farmer follows a memorandum to Dorothy from Marvin Rich dated September 9, 1964, which makes clear that the publicity director disapproved of Dorothy’s role:
Either you or whoever is helping you must be in the office to receive phone calls which are now coming in requesting tickets. We have had several complaints from people who have requested tickets and never received them. Ticket sales are not going so well that we can ignore those who want to buy. Certainly, we cannot antagonize our contributors.35
Dorothy’s duties as office staff did not include producing an event at Lincoln Center, but she remained committed to the project. As noted in Loften Mitchell’s 1969 book, Black Drama, the play was critically well received and slated to move to an off-Broadway playhouse. However, the tensions around the production and the role of the civil rights organization foiled the plan. As Mitchell noted, “The week after its initial showing, the producer and CORE had a devastating battle over policy—a battle that led the producer away from the civil rights organization. And that was the end of Ballad of the Winter Soldiers.”36
While Dorothy’s hopes for a longer run were not realized, the production had lasting ramifications for the writers, as the collaboration influenced their later work. For Mitchell, the role of history was of singular importance. In his words, “The white folks wrote those history books! And they’ve been writing plays about us and getting them on while we have to sweat and strain to be heard!”37 As Mitchell would note, the memory of the power to write and produce plays was tantamount to creating a new world. And forgetting it, by African Americans, was unforgivable. The production created to raise funds to find the three missing CORE workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, informed by a historical accounting of “patriots in true times,” offered a way to chronicle moments erased from collective memories that could inspire contemporary acts of heroism. For Mitchell, memory was important, and its erasure was devastating. As a Black intellectual, Mitchell insisted on the accountability of those known outside of the Black community for educating the nation about the legacy of Black actions. Singer Harry Belafonte, actor Marlon Brando, advertising executive Alfred Lasker, acting instructor Lee Strasberg, United Artists CEO Robert Benjamin, US senator Jacob Javits, and sculptor Bruno Lucchesi were all people to whom James Farmer, as head of CORE, wrote a personal thank-you for supporting the ode to omitted history. Presumably, they either attended or at least contributed to the benefit.38
For Killens, too, the chronicling of history was a lesson in power. In this way, some of the phrases and ideas in the script would feature in his other writings, especially in the 1965 essay collection Black Man’s Burden.39 For Killens, history is the key to unlocking change. Memory is not just the key to the future; the past has to be uncovered to allow for actions. As Killens writes in “The Black Writer Vis-à-Vis His Country”: “A cultural revolution is desperately needed, here and now, to un-brainwash the entire American people, black and white.”40 The essays in Black Man’s Burden were written at about the same time that Killens and John Henrik Clarke were helping to draft a statement for Malcolm X called the “Basic Aims and Objectives of the Organization of Afro-American Unity.” Read by Malcolm X on June 28, 1964, on his return to the United States from Africa, the statement reflected the mutual influence of the writers and activists on each other.41
In July 1964, just a month after Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman disappeared in Mississippi, a New York City police officer shot and killed a fifteen-year-old, James Powell, in front of several witnesses. Ensuing protests grew into riots that spread from Harlem to Bedford-Stuyvesant. CORE organized rallies immediately after the shooting, but the crowds were not satisfied with speeches and confronted the police, who then retaliated over several hot summer days. During the riots, Black Nationalist leaders such as Malcolm X and Bill Epton, as well as CORE and community leaders, spoke out. Dorothy witnessed it all and was drawn deeper into civil rights activism as a result. Like many others in Harlem, Dorothy was drawn to Malcolm X and knew she wanted to work with him after hearing him speak.
Malcolm X had broken with the Nation of Islam in March of 1964 and founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity to advocate Black nationalism. Dorothy volunteered for this new group, handing out flyers, working the door at meetings, and getting to know as many people as possible. Eventually she became known and trusted. It helped that Malcolm X and Bill Pitman loved talking strategies for resistance together—Bill’s experience in the IRA again forged the connection.42 Soon Malcolm’s wife, Betty, asked Dorothy to help babysit their four daughters.43 Dorothy remembers vividly the moment she heard about the firebombing of Malcolm’s house, on February 14, 1965, in the Nation of Islam’s first attempt to kill him. Even after having given birth to her second child only four days earlier, Dorothy felt the need to rush to Malcolm and Betty’s home to help with the children. Indeed, when Malcolm X was murdered a week later at the Audubon Ballroom, Dorothy was immediately flooded by friends who knew she would need support.44
For Dorothy, Malcolm X’s narrative of Black empowerment formed a basic tenet of her identity. Perhaps growing up in an essentially autonomous Black settlement in Georgia and witnessing the control of whites laid the strong foundation for her that the Black community should be self-determined, economically as well as politically. As Malcolm X wrote in his autobiography about his father after being attacked and laid on a streetcar track, “Negroes born in Georgia had to be strong simply to survive.”45 Nationalism made sense to Dorothy.46
By the mid-1960s, Dorothy was also thinking about Black Nationalism in relation to other struggles. The person responsible for that shift was Bill Pitman. Having decided his interest in six hundred years of colonial oppression of the Irish by the English meant he might be able to understand hundreds of years of African American oppression by whites, Dorothy had taken to Bill Pitman almost immediately. Her friend Flo Kennedy, the attorney, persuaded Dorothy that her affection for this white man should not be framed by their differences but by their similarities. Kennedy’s unconventional marriage to a white science-fiction writer, in spite of a bad end to it caused by his drinking problems, encouraged Dorothy to take a risk on someone who supported her.47 Bill was supportive of Dorothy’s political organizing and helped in every way that he could. They wed in 1964.
Although she was not an advocate of racial separation, in 1964, Dorothy was meeting a wide circle of nationalist activists through Malcolm X. One such person in New York at the time was Bill Epton, an outspoken leader of the Harlem Progressive Labor Party and a leading protester of the police murder of James Powell. Epton, arrested for calling for protests while the city was in a declared state of emergency, was charged with criminal anarchy. He was later released on bail. At his trial, held in November and December 1965, he was convicted and sentenced to serve a year in jail.48 The evidence against him was a recording by an undercover police officer in which Epton is heard to say, “We will take our freedom. We will take it by any means necessary. . . . And in the process of smashing the state, we are going to have to kill a lot of these cops, a lot of these judges, and we’ll have to go up against their army. We’ll organize our own militia and our own army.” Epton appealed his sentence on grounds that he was exercising his right to free speech. He lost that appeal, but along the way, his trial became a focal point for activism that drew in Dorothy.
At one of many rallies to “Save Bill Epton,” Dorothy appeared with Ossie Davis, Mae Mallory, and others to “demand that the phony charges against Bill Epton be dropped.” Two days before Epton’s trial began, Dorothy traveled with him to Lincoln University for a conference on Black Nationalism. The Evening Journal, a white newspaper published in Wilmington, Delaware, described both Epton and Dorothy as telling students that “Negroes must fight ‘from within’ to liberate the ‘black man’ in America.” Epton, known to be sympathetic to China’s Mao Zedong, was said to urge students follow Mao’s advice to “have the audacity to seize power.” Dorothy was described as echoing “Epton’s call for violent revolution,” arguing that African Americans must not believe that nonviolence was the only way to “gain the confidence of white people.” Just as Epton had called for unity with oppressed white workers, Dorothy was described as having “no hesitancy about using white men to accomplish the black revolution.”49 Given Dorothy’s marriage to a white, Irish Nationalist, such a claim was more personal to Dorothy than the newspaper conveyed.
Bill Pitman supported Dorothy in many ways both privately and publicly, and she says she needed that support.50 His most public backing came through an organization he headed called the John Brown Coordinating Committee. The committee of white men and women was formed to “stand with our Afro-American brothers and sisters.”51 Bill argued that “Afro-American people” were at the forefront of the fight for “freedom, dignity, and equality.” He called on white people to “put an end to the moth-eaten and self-debasing slanders of white supremacy.” Tellingly, the committee was organized out of Dorothy and Bill’s apartment on West 82nd Street. In fact, the call for one march ended with an open invitation to a potluck at their apartment, with their address and phone number provided on the flyer.52
In 1965, Dorothy and Bill also hosted a group from the Deacons for Defense and Justice visiting New York City. The group included four African Americans from Mississippi and Louisiana and two young white men. One of the white men, Jim Van Matre, stayed with Dorothy and Bill. With the help of Florida civil rights activists Patricia and John Due, Dorothy convinced Van Matre to enroll as the first white undergraduate at Florida A&M University, a historically Black college. Opponents of desegregation were critical of all-Black institutions in the wake of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They threatened to close historically Black colleges if they did not admit white undergraduates. These institutions had helped inaugurate the direct-action campaigns of the civil rights movement, including efforts by students, faculty, and staff at Florida A&M.
Van Matre, who began his college career as a sixteen-year-old at the University of Florida in Gainesville in 1962, had been inspired first by his roommate, Jesse Dean, who was one of the university’s first Black undergraduates. As Van Matre put it, “I picketed, I marched, I knocked on doors. I was arrested.” Finding Gainesville “too tame,” Van Matre moved to Tallahassee, where activists were picketing theaters, motels, restaurants, and pools in May 1963, then to New York, and then to Mississippi and Louisiana, where he worked with CORE during the Freedom Summer of 1964.53 Having witnessed the violence that met the civil rights movement in the South, Van Matre increasingly agreed with civil rights organizers who determined to meet violence with violence. Within CORE, some insisted on absolutely no violence, while others felt the need to protect themselves. As he noted of his own experience, “Generally, in the more remote or hardcore areas, this conflict was resolved with a compromise. Those working in the field officially for CORE were to remain nonviolent. But at living quarters those who felt so inclined could protect themselves. (On more than one occasion fellow workers ran into my sleeping alcove in Monroe, Louisiana, shouting, ‘Jim, get the shotgun!!’).”54 This kind of experience was fairly widespread in CORE but not widely publicized.
The Deacons for Defense and Justice were more public about how they determined to protect themselves: “They decided to post armed guards during the hours of darkness. After the raiders received some return fire from the guards one night the number of raids decreased considerably.”55 Historian Lance Hill notes the Deacons, officially named in January 1965, received their first national news attention when the New York Times published an article on their approach, appearing coincidentally on the very day that Malcolm X was killed.
The sentiments that helped form the Deacons for Defense and Justice were familiar to Dorothy. Indeed, she later carried guns—wisely broken into pieces for transit—to her family’s home in Lumpkin, Georgia, when racial tensions got hot. Her mother had pushed for one of Dorothy’s younger siblings to become one of the first schoolchildren to integrate the Lumpkin high school, and hooded white men had made their displeasure with the Ridleys known.56 Dorothy’s support for the Deacons for Defense and Justice on their trip to New York reinforced the value of self-defense. Jim Van Matre had also become part of the family, marrying Dorothy’s older sister, Julia, after his visit to New York.
The Deacons for Defense and Justice provided protection for the James Meredith march in 1966, which inspired the codification of the phrase “Black Power” by Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture).57 In Van Matre’s recounting of the turn to Black Power, young civil rights activists increasingly called for white activists to organize themselves rather than to come South to “help.” “Out of the ranks of the defecting [white] civil rights workers,” according to Van Matre, “two new movements took shape—the women’s liberation movement and the antiwar movement.”58 This route from civil rights to women’s rights was the same he ascribed to Dorothy. Retrospectively describing her as a “longtime Black Feminist,” he recounted an interview with Dorothy in which she described her growing gender awareness:
Here I was working as a fundraiser out of the national office of CORE. I established funding contracts, opened up a store, organized a benefit at the Lincoln Center, with proceeds all going to CORE, yet I never received an ounce of credit for this work and my salary was a fraction of my male co-workers’. My initial feelings were that this was racism since the other fundraisers were white males, but I slowly began to realize that their gender was the major factor (personal communication).59
After her break with CORE, Dorothy continued to work amicably with its Black leaders. Floyd McKissick stayed with her in Georgia when she returned for part of the summer and he happened to be passing through. Yet, even in 1965, Dorothy was developing a feminist consciousness. Winter Soldiers included almost as many female heroines as males, and her direct mentor, Shelley Winters, modeled ways to insist on being taken seriously as a woman. Her break with CORE was the result of treatment by her immediate supervisors—two white men. As Van Matre notes, what Dorothy did after leaving CORE was establish the West Side Community Alliance in New York, “which among other things, was to become a major force in the movement for child day-care.”60 What Dorothy did was become a community-based Black feminist.