Dorothy Pitman Hughes, Black activist who co-founded Ms. Magazine, dead at 84

Dorothy Pitman Hughes, a Black feminist, child welfare advocate and lifelong activist who co-founded Ms. Magazine with Gloria Steinem, died Dec. 1. She was 84.

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Hughes died in Tampa, Florida, at the home of her daughter and son-in-law, Maurice Sconiers of the Sconiers Funeral Home in Columbus, Georgia, told The Associated Press. Her daughter, Delethia Ridley Malmsten, said the cause of death was old age.

Hughes toured the country with Steinem on speaking tours during the 1970s, according to the news organization. The pair appear in one of the most iconic photos of the second-wave feminist movement, with both women raising their right fists in the Black Power salute. The photo, taken in October 1971, is now in the National Portrait Gallery, according to the AP.

Dorothy Jean Ridley was born Oct. 2, 1938, in Lumpkin, Georgia, according to her obituary. When she was 10 years old, her father was beaten and left for dead on the family’s doorstep. The family believed he was attacked by the Ku Klux Klan, and Hughes decided to dedicate herself to helping others through activism.

She moved to New York City in 1957 and began her activism career by raising bail money for civil rights protesters, according to her obituary. By the 1960s she had become involved in the civil rights movement and other causes, working with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, according to the AP.

Hughes organized the first shelter for battered women in New York City and co-founded the New York City Agency for Child Development, the AP reported. She was best known for helping families through the community center she established on Manhattan’s West Side.

“She took families off the street and gave them jobs,” Malmsten told the AP on Sunday.

It was at the center that she met Steinem, who was a journalist writing a story for New York Magazine. They later became friends and co-founded Ms. Magazine. The magazine was launched as a “one-shot” sample insert in New York Magazine in December 1971, according to a history of the publication.

Ms. ran as a monthly publication until 1987 when it became a quarterly, according to Smithsonian magazine.

Steinem paid tribute to Hughes’ community work in an email to the news organization.

“My friend Dorothy Pitman Hughes ran a pioneering neighborhood childcare center on the west side of Manhattan,” Steinem said. “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.”

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