A Conversation with Dorothy Pitman Hughes, the Founding Mother of the Women’s Action Alliance, and the First Black-White Woman’s Empowerment Zone

One of the most prominent feminist magazines’ co- founder, Dorothy Pitman Hughes, has died, according to her friend and colleague Gloria Steinem.

Maurice Sconiers of the Sconiers Funeral Home said that Hughes died at the home of her daughter and son-in-law in Florida. Her daughter, Delethia Ridley Malmsten, said the cause was old age.

Hughes and Steinem also cofounded “the Women’s Action Alliance, a pioneering national information center that specialized in nonsexist, multiracial children’s education, in 1971,” the obituary said.

In one of the most famous images of the era, taken in October 1971, the two raised their right arms in the Black Power salute. The photo is now in the National Portrait Gallery.

The multiracial daycare center was founded by Hughes in the late 1960s and got the attention of Steinem, who wrote about it in New York Magazine.

She took families off the street and gave them jobs, and that’s what her mother’s most important work was, according to her daughter.

She was a nightclub singer and house cleaner in New York City when she moved there in the late 1950s. By the 1960s she had become involved in the civil rights movement and other causes, working with Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and others.

“Dorothy’s style was to call out the racism she saw in the white women’s movement,” Lovett said in Ms. “She frequently took to the stage to articulate the way in which white women’s privilege oppressed Black women but also offered her friendship with Gloria as proof this obstacle could be overcome.”

By the 1980s, Hughes was becoming an entrepreneur. She had moved to Harlem and opened an office supply business, Harlem Office Supply, the rare stationery store at the time that was run by a Black woman. But she was forced to sell the store when a Staples opened nearby, part of President Bill Clinton’s Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone program.

She would remember some of her experiences in the 2000 book, “Wake Up and Smell the Dollars! This isWhose Inner-City Is This Anyway! Sexism, Classism, Racism, and the Empowerment Zone are some of the issues one woman is fighting against.

Gloria Hughes Walks the World: A Memories of Dorothy Steinem, a Lifelong Co-Conspirator and An Inspiration for Ms Magazine

Hughes was born in Lumpkin, Georgia, in 1938, and eventually moved to New York at the age of 19 where she began working several jobs including house cleaner and nightclub singer, the funeral home said.

Steinem remembered her friend in a verified Instagram post this week. “I have been lucky to call Dorothy a friend and lifelong co-conspirator,” Steinem wrote. She encouraged me to speak in public, and we spent years traveling across the country. She left the world in a better place because of her devotion to children’s welfare, racial justice and economic liberation.

Gloria found a female-operated media source, Ms Magazine, because she was inspired byDorothy, who motivated her to do tours that got much media buzz.