Taking the Lead: Dorothy Williams, NAACP Youth Councils, and Civil Rights Protests in Pittsburgh, 1961-1964

Abstract

Born of humble circumstances on Independence Day, 1927, Dorothy Williams went on to help ignite a movement to free her people, African Americans, from racial discrimination in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A career elementary school teacher in Pittsburgh's public schools, her bold leadership as adult advisor to the youth division of the Pittsburgh National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) heralded the beginning of a sustained period of militant, direct action protest by African Americans in Pittsburgh--a movement that continued for years after Williams's premature withdrawal from civil rights activity. An effective organizer of young people, she also astutely captured the political mood of a large segment of the African American community by choosing the right issue around which to mobilize--job discrimination--and utilizing the direct action tactics that had been successful for African Americans in other parts of the country. Born and raised Dorothy Kendrick in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, for most of her life, she would be known by the last name of her second husband, Robert Williams, even though the marriage only lasted about five years. The Kendricks moved to Pittsburgh's Hill District when Dorothy, the youngest of five daughters, was twelve years old. The future Dorothy Williams would develop a love affair with the Hill that would last a lifetime; other than the time she spent at college, Williams only lived outside of Pittsburgh's Hill District for one year. (1) Her parents Allen and Martha Kendrick had originally migrated from rural Georgia, where Dorothy's father farmed while his wife in a one-room school, grades one through eight, outside of Macon. Martha did not teach school in Pennsylvania, but she decided that her youngest daughter would. Teaching was a practical profession; it would allow Dorothy to make enough money to be her own woman, as Mrs. Kendrick used to say. In addition to steering her toward a teaching career, Williams credits her mother for the intense drive and fighting spirit--the will to win--that served her so well as a youth organizer and civil rights activist in the early 1960s. Less than one month after Dorothy left Pittsburgh to attend Cheyney State Teachers College, a historically black school outside of Philadelphia, her mother died. (2) Williams graduated from Cheyney in 1950 with a bachelor's degree in elementary education and returned to Pittsburgh to care for her father, who had become ill. In 1953 she accepted a teaching position at A. Leo Weil Elementary School in the Hill. Williams loved Weil, where she stayed until retiring from teaching in 1994. During her entire teaching career she spent only one year at another school, Letsche, which was also located in the Hill. (3) SEGREGATION AND DISCRIMINATION IN PITTSBURGH African Americans in post-World War II Pittsburgh where Dorothy Williams grew up and taught experienced severe racial discrimination in virtually every aspect of life. Between 1930 and 1960, Pittsburgh's black population increased by more than 45,000 to 100,000. During that same period, the number of majority black census tracts rose from six to twenty-three, thanks to racially inspired residential segregation. (4) Segregated housing led to segregated public schools. The problem was compounded by white flight to parochial schools in neighborhoods with a high or increasing concentration of black students. (5) By the end of the 1950s, African Americans made up about 15 percent of the city's population, but accounted for almost one-third of students enrolled in Pittsburgh's public schools. One-half of all black students attended schools with 80 percent or higher black enrollment. (6) Segregated schools led to unequal education. In 1959 the Pittsburgh Commission on Human Relations found the overwhelming majority of the city's classes for slow learning and retarded children to be located in schools with 80 percent or higher black enrollment. …