With Her Fist Raised: Dorothy Pitman Hughes and the Transformative Power of Black Community Activism

The 1971 photo is famous: Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes stare unsmilingly at the camera, suffering exactly no fools, while giving the Black Power salute. In With Her Fist Raised, Laura L. Lovett writes of the less famous of the two women, a take-charge force for change and a harbinger of the intersectional feminism to come.

Born in 1938, Hughes was raised in a sprawling, loving household in Charles Junction, Ga. Knowing that her horizons were limited in the South, Hughes moved to New York in 1958. She sang in nightclubs, augmented her earnings with domestic work and still managed to clock hours for the Congress of Racial Equality. It was at CORE that she had a feminist awakening: "I established funding contracts, opened up a store, organized a benefit at the Lincoln Center... yet I never received an ounce of credit for this work and my salary was a fraction of my male co-workers'."

Lovett, an associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, interviewed her subject for the book, and charts Hughes's decades of activism, which influenced her business ventures: she founded a community-oriented childcare center, briefly owned the Miss Black America pageant ("I had as many nationalities as I could get in that pageant") and ran a copy shop in Harlem. As Lovett puts it, "When a community need was identified, Dorothy sought to create a resource." With Her Fist Raised ends rather abruptly and is somewhat omissive (for one thing, there's no mention that Hughes's niece is the celebrated actress Gabourey Sidibe), but it's a vigorous, vivifying portrait nonetheless. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

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