EPILOGUE

HOME AGAIN

In 1991, every Black family in Dorothy’s Georgia hometown of Charles Junction received a letter saying they had one month to leave.¹ The land that was home to seventy African American families had been sold to the Mead Corporation, once called the Papermakers to America. After struggling in the 1970s, the forest products company, with an interest in 1.4 million acres of timberland worldwide and the capacity to turn those trees into 2 million tons of pulp, set its sights on the timberlands near Lumpkin, Georgia.² Dorothy feared that the stand of Georgia pines that tied her and her siblings to a way of life would be turned into pulpwood. She decided to fight the land sale and turned to her friends for support.

Dorothy’s network of contacts from New York City came through, even in rural Georgia. Gloria Steinem used her influence to help Dorothy secure an attorney, who then persuaded the legal counsel representing the paper company to meet Dorothy a few miles from Charles Junction, in Columbus. From that meeting, Dorothy realized that further negotiations with Mead would require a formalization of the community’s relationship to the land, an accounting of its history.

In 1992, Dorothy founded the Charles Junction Historic Preservation Society as a nonprofit organization to fundraise and advocate for her home community. As she pressed her case for Charles Junction, she told the story of African American families who had lived there for generations and helped build a community. It must have been clear to the behemoth wood processor that the contest for this land would be hard-fought. In 1999, Mead agreed to sell Dorothy and her siblings the twenty-three acres that the Black families had been living on, including the two acres that Dorothy’s family lived on. It took until 2012 to pay off the loan that made Dorothy and her family the official owners of the family homestead.³

In the meantime, still fighting for her business in Harlem and paying off the Charles Junction plot, Dorothy moved to Jacksonville, Florida. Her youngest daughter, Angela, had moved there with her son, Devon, and seemed to need help at the very moment that her mother was in search of new opportunities. Dorothy had begun making overtures toward Edward Waters College in Jacksonville about opening a bookstore in the 1990s. This was part of Dorothy’s plan to expand Harlem Office Supply nationally in historically Black colleges and universities. In 2003, she sold her brownstone in Harlem, packed up her things, and returned to the South to live for the first time since she had given birth to her eldest daughter, nearly forty years before.

Believing that a historically Black college would benefit from a Black-owned business, Dorothy moved Harlem Office Supply to Edward Waters College. The move to Jacksonville allowed her to share her connections to publishers such as Yvonne Rose and to advance her vision for African American economic empowerment. Edward Waters College is the oldest historically Black college in Florida. It was founded by the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first independent Protestant denomination organized by Black people, in 1816. Fifty years after the church’s birth, it organized an educational institution in Florida for the newly freed African Americans, an institution organized by Blacks for Blacks. Renamed in 1892 to honor the third bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Reverend Edward Waters, the small institution experienced rapid growth in the late 1990s, and Dorothy thought it opportune to become a part of it.

Unfortunately, she quickly found herself caught up in a struggle with the college administration. Under the leadership of Dr. Jimmy Jenkins, the school had grown from a student body of 300 in 1997 to 1,300 in 2005. The college administration struggled to keep up, and in 2005, just two years after Dorothy arrived on campus, the college was involved in an accreditation scandal.⁴ Carlton Jones, a trustee for the college, impressed with Dorothy’s integrity, offered her the opportunity to open an independent bookstore at Gateway Town Center, a shopping mall that he owned.⁵ Dorothy’s Gateway Books, a small shop set in a corner of the mall, felt a long way from 125th Street in Harlem.

Gateway Town Center, like Edward Waters College, was in North Jacksonville, a historically Black neighborhood of the city. In the decades following World War II, Jacksonville had the largest concentration of African Americans in Florida.⁶ By the closing decades of the twentieth century, African Americans made up the majority of the city population but not of the metro region, which included its white suburbs. According to a 2005 study, 25 percent of Black families in Jacksonville lived below the poverty line in 1990 and tended to live clustered in the core areas of the city. While the poverty rate for Black families decreased to 22 percent in the 2000 US Census, the poverty rate for the core areas of the city was 30 percent.⁷

The poverty and hunger that Dorothy witnessed in Jacksonville shocked her when she first visited.⁸ Inspired by First Lady Michelle Obama and her White House garden in 2009, Dorothy looked back at her rural upbringing and realized that community gardens could have a powerful, transformative effect in the North Jacksonville food desert. In Dorothy’s words, “without economic empowerment, there will be no social or political freedom.” Dorothy envisioned a “comprehensive approach to developing long-term solutions to ensure availability of healthy food products affordable to families that are economically challenged.”⁹ Dorothy recognized in community gardens a project that would provide not just something the community needed but jobs and a sense of empowerment for both children and adults. That desire for community empowerment tempered the role Dorothy sought for herself. In her words, “For me, it’s not about coming into the community and running the community. It’s about me coming into the community and helping the community to run itself—to help the people own and work for what they want.”¹⁰

To get started, Dorothy needed a bit of land, some partners to help get things organized, and a lot of helping hands. Clara McLaughlin, owner and editor of the Florida Star newspaper, stepped in to help her friend with garden sites, one near a middle school.¹¹ Episcopal Children’s Services offered a third space for a garden at its Head Start center.¹² Dorothy hoped her partners in North Jacksonville would build connections with unemployed residents who could train to run the garden projects. Teachers could develop curricula for their students so that they “learn to value their connection to the earth and the healthy food they grow.”¹³ Even with the land secured, Dorothy’s Jacksonville Community Garden Projects still needed funding, so she turned to old friends and her tried-and-true methods. In 2011, Dorothy persuaded Gloria Steinem to join her in Florida for a fundraising event to benefit both the garden project and the Women’s Center of Jacksonville. Called the “Lift, Don’t Separate” forum, the event at the University of North Florida emphasized the “Power of Partnership” and was celebrated on the front page of McLaughlin’s Florida Star.¹⁴

Dorothy’s fundraising officially ran through her nonprofit that had begun in Charles Junction. More than 250 miles separated her old home and North Jacksonville, but Dorothy’s vision for the two places was very similar. She wanted to build something to help create jobs, especially for young people. She hoped the model of community empowerment grounded in community gardens could work for both places.

Gloria joined her friend Dorothy again in 2017 to raise funds. This time, the two decided to restage their iconic photograph. Dan Bagan, a St. Augustine, Florida, photographer, captured the two women with fists raised. Gloria was eighty-two. Dorothy was seventy-nine. Forty-five years had passed since the original image.¹⁵ That year the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery added both images to its collection. For Dorothy, “The symbolism of a Black and white woman standing together, demonstrating the Black Power salute is as important now as it was in the ’70s.” Reflecting on a lifetime of activism, Dorothy remained hopeful that, together, Black women and white women could eliminate “racism, classism, and sexism,” but not until “we acknowledge and resolve the racism problem that stands between us.”¹⁶ Dorothy’s life is a testament to the power of partnerships, the impact of community action, and the ability to confront and overcome racism at a personal level. Her photographs with Gloria can be read as symbols both of hope and of how much remains to be done.