Daycare Business Supports Activism
She opened a childcare business to improve her community. Cashflow from her various businesses enabled her to pursue her passion to advocate for equal opportunities for women, especially Black women.
FAMILY BACKGROUND
DPH was one of 9 children born to her Black parents in the rural South in the late 1930s. Her father owned a pig farm and a small trucking business. Her mother was a maid.
CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES
DPH experienced the violent face of racism early on. On Saturday nights, drunken white men from the other side of town would drive through her neighborhood, shooting into houses while children like her huddled under their beds. When she was 10, white men nearly beat her father to death in retribution for his involvement in local civil rights work.
In happier times, DPH’s family enjoyed music together. As a teenager, along with some of her sisters, she sang in a group which toured local military bases and small towns in the South.
EDUCATION
DPH graduated from high school.
FIRST ADULT JOBS
Following high school, DPH moved to New York City to pursue a singing career, finding work in nightclubs but also took side jobs as a salesperson and housecleaner.
CAREER PATH MOTIVATED BY NEED TO IMPROVE HER COMMUNITY
As an adult resident of a very large city, DPH had the opportunity to observe the family and living conditions of many of her fellow residents. She believed that child-care challenges were deeply entangled with issues of racial discrimination, poverty, drug use, substandard housing, welfare hotels and job training.
Focusing on what she could do to tackle her concern for the welfare of working-class mothers and caregivers and in the often-overlooked experiences of women of color, DPH decided to open a business offering child daycare. But her business model was like no other: parents ran the board of directors, and the needs of the community determined the center’s priorities.
The success of DPH’s child daycare business became well known within her local area, news of which soon spread more widely throughout the city. A white, early feminist, Gloria Steinem, (founder of ‘Ms’ magazine) heard about DPH and decided to write an article about her daycare business for ‘Ms’, a magazine of national circulation. This led to a meeting between the two women, who could not have been more different on the surface: Ms. Steinem was White, and college educated. DPH was Black, a high school graduate.
Despite their apparent differences, the two women shared a common passion to improve the lives of women. With Ms. Steinem covering all expenses, the two women decided to ‘hit the road’ for a campus speaking tour, for which Ms. Steinem was the celebrity who attracted the audiences, while DPH shared equal time to present her perspectives, which were not always 100% aligned with her new friend.
In one notable speech at the U.S. Naval Academy, DPH, as usual following Ms. Steinem, said: “In most of the audiences that we speak to, I don’t see many friends or sisters because white women have not yet learned or come to the conclusion to change for themselves how much they have been part of my oppression as a Black woman and only until that is changed can we have a sisterhood.”
Following her days of speaking at colleges, DPH organized protests against New York State’s attempt to impose income restrictions on child-care benefits, leading a 150 day child-care workers sit-in at the City’s Department of Social Services.
She was on the frontlines of the struggle between grassroots, community-organized services, like her daycare center, and the attempt, across all levels of government (local, state, and federal) to impose regulations on community-based services and make them part of the welfare system. She won many of those battles but eventually lost her war when new rules required day-care operators to have college degrees and government licenses, neither of which she possessed so she closed her center. (Editor – Pandemics and worker shortages may have since led to changes in such regulations, which may vary from area to area.)
SHIFTING FROM ONE BUSINESS TO ANOTHER TO CONTINUE TO ENABLE HER ACTIVISM
After closing her daycare business, DPH recognized the need for a place where Black activists could print fliers and pamphlets. So, she opened a copy shop, which she later expanded to sell office supplies to city agencies and Black-owned businesses in the area.
At one point, unable to find additional bank financing, she sold shares in her business, at $1.00 each, to the local community, as a way to build wealth within New York City’s most well-known Black community, ‘Harlem.’ But that business came under financial pressure when the federal government created an “Opportunity Zone” for Harlem, that incentivized major businesses to locate in ‘underserved’ (economically poor) areas, to hire local workers. DPH’s store closed soon after a Staples office supply store opened almost directly across the street.
(Editor’s note – Government programs can often be motivated with good intentions, but implementation may hurt some people and businesses intended to be helped. An example of good intentions but impacts both good and bad is the internet: all kinds of information can be spread widely but, information may be inaccurate, sometimes intentionally, causing or at least contributing to confusion and unrest involving such issues as politics and vaccines.)
CAREER SATISFACTION
Before DPH started her business, child daycare for working parents did not exist in her area. But she didn’t limit the activities of her center to taking care of children during the day; she shared management ideas with the involved parents and together as partners, they tackled many social problems within the city.
An admirer of DPH said: “She wasn’t about following or leading. She did what was needed to be done.”
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This career story is based on an obituary for Dorothy Pitman Hughes, written by Clay Risen, published in The New York Times on 12/18/22.
