December 12, 2022
Trailblazing Black Small Business Owner Dorothy Pitman Hughes Dies at 84
Dorothy Pitman Hughes, who created empowering means to amplify children’s welfare, racial justice, and economic liberation, has died at age 84.
According to Associated Press, the Sconiers Funeral Home in Columbus, GA. confirmed that the trailblazing feminist “passed away peacefully” December 1 in Tampa, FL. She was at the home of her daughter and son-in-law, Delethia and Jonas Malmsten.
AP reported that Hughes died of natural causes.
Hughes, an activist, public speaker, author, and small business owner, was born October 2, 1938 in Lumpkin, GA. She devoted her life to activism at an early age and wanted nothing more but to improve people’s lives.
During the 1960s, Hughes lived in New York and worked as a salesperson, house cleaner, and nightclub singer. She also split her time attending community meetings and began raising bail money for civil rights protesters, according to her obituary.
In the late 1960s, Hughes organized a multiracial cooperative daycare center, the West 80th Street Community Childcare Center, which was profiled by New York magazine columnist, Gloria Steinem. The pair forged a relationship that encouraged Steinem to speak publicly about the Women’s Movement.
“My friend Dorothy Pitman Hughes ran a pioneering neighborhood childcare center on the west side of Manhattan,” Steinem told the ap.
“We met in the seventies when I wrote about that childcare center, and we became speaking partners and lifetime friends. She will be missed, but if we keep telling her story, she will keep inspiring us all.”
Hughes and Steinem went on to tour together across the country speaking about race, class, and gender throughout the 1970s. By then, the duo had already co-founded a female-operated media outlet, Ms. Magazine, and the Women’s Action Alliance, a national information center that specialized in nonsexist, multiracial children’s education.
“Dorothy Pitman Hughes’ time was too short,” Steinem wrote in a tribute on Instagram. “I have been lucky to call Dorothy a friend and lifelong co-conspirator. She encouraged me to speak in public, and we spent years traveling across the country.”
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With community-based action, Hughes organized the first shelter for battered women in New York City and co-founded the New York City Agency for Child Development. She also co-founded the Charles Junction Historic Preservation Society in Jacksonville, FL, with the intention to combat poverty through community gardening and food production.
A pioneering entrepreneur, Hughes was the first African-American woman to own an office supply/copy center, Harlem Office Supply (HOS), Inc.
Dorothy is survived by three daughters, two grandsons, and five siblings.