When We Were Free to Be: Looking Back at a Children’s Classic and the Difference It Made

Free to Be on West 80th Street

229 Free to Be on West 80th Street Dorothy Pitman Hughes During the years when Free to Be . . . You and Me was created, I was living in New York City and working to help bring about social change. I had moved from Georgia to New York in 1957, when I was nineteen years old, just as the civil rights movement was expanding the fight for racial equality, human rights, and social justice. I became involved in many community and political organizations, including the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), where I worked as a fund-raiser. During the 1960s, two new movements were forming in Manhattan: the antiwar movement and the struggle for women’s liberation. I later became involved in these movements as well. In all my work as an activist, I have focused mainly on children. When I saw the toll taken by the Vietnam War, I was concerned not only about the soldiers but also about the children whose fathers were fighting and sacrificing their lives. Some of these kids did not even have a bed to sleep in. I immediately went to work to try to solve this problem. This involved me fully in the antiwar movement and in the fight for racially integrated child care in New York City. Working women desperately needed child care services. I knew many women in the late 1960s and early 1970s who were working at any job they could get and leaving their children at home. The kids were not left totally by themselves. Children often were taking care of other children; twelve-year-olds were taking care of four-year-olds. Twelve-year-olds were doing the cooking, cleaning, and clothes washing —the things a full-grown person would do. They could do it, but I did not think it was safe to have children taking care of babies. I started a child care center in my home, and when that proved too small, I started looking for a larger place. The only place that I could get with a big enough room that was also inexpensive was in the Endicott Hotel on West 81st Street. In the late 1960s, the Endicott was one of the largest welfare hotels, a place of ill repute. I remember that there were always winos sitting around out on the stoop. I got them to help clean up the street in front of the building. I persuaded them that they should create a better environment for the children in their 230 Dorothy Pitman Hughes community. Soon they started to hide whatever they were drinking when anyone from the center was on the street. I did what I could to make this community-based center a success, even if I had to pick up furniture off the street to fill it. In fact, I got a call one morning that someone had seen me collecting furniture and wanted to donate ten thousand dollars to the center. A woman with young children who lived on the same street had seen what I was doing and wanted to help. I could offer her friendship and support in exchange for her contribution. Once we started building community support, we became more successful at fund-raising and eventually were able to buy our own space on West 80th Street. At first I used my income from singing in nightclubs to help pay for the center. Soon I was able to go from charging very little to offering free day care with city and state funding. In addition to providing day care and child care services, we focused on job skills training for women and on providing food and housing resources for families. In 1972, the year the Free to Be album appeared, I organized a large group of children and day care workers to occupy New York City mayor John Lindsay’s presidential campaign headquarters to protest his limitations for day care eligibility, which would have destroyed the racial and economic integration of our West 80th Street Day Care Center and similar centers. When Gloria Steinem heard about what I was doing at the child care center, she came by to talk and write about us for New York magazine.1 Through Gloria I was introduced to the larger women’s movement. At that point, we thought we could make child care and children’s welfare a part of the feminist movement and make social change. Some people questioned me about why would I join the women’s...