Anna Arnold Hedgeman (1899-1990) was the first Black woman to be a member of a mayoral cabinet in New York City and the only woman on the administrative committee for the 1963 March on Washington.
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Hello! From Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan and this is Encyclopedia Womannica.
Today we’re talking about a trailblazing political activist and educator. She was the first Black woman to be a member of a mayoral cabinet in New York City and the only woman on the administrative committee for the 1963 March on Washington. Let’s talk about Anna Arnold Hedgeman.
Anna was born in 1899 in Marshalltown, Iowa. Her family later moved to Anoka, where they were the only Black family in the community. In 1918, Anna graduated from high school and enrolled in Hamline University. It was there that she heard a lecture by W.E.B Du Bois and was inspired to pursue a career in education.
In 1922, Anna was the first African American to graduate from her university. After graduation, unable to find a teaching job in St Paul public school because she was Black, Anna found a teaching job at a historically Black school in Mississippi – Rust College.
On her train ride down South to her new job in Mississippi, Anna had her first experience with Jim Crow segregation laws. A train conductor told her that when the train reached Illinois, she had to sit in the overcrowded “colored” section, and not in the dining car, where white people sat. Anna spent two years at Rust College before returning to Minnesota. Unable to find a teaching job after once again facing racial discrimination, she switched careers. In 1924, Anna became an executive director of the Black branch of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA). She continued her executive role for 12 years, helping to develop various international programs in education.[1] In 1933, Anna married folk musician Merritt A. Hedgeman.
In 1944, Anna was appointed executive director at the FEPC, the National Council for a Permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee. She spearheaded the fight against employment discrimination. From 1954 to 1958, Anna served in the cabinet of Robert F. Wagner, Jr., then New York Mayor. She was the first African American and first female member of a mayoral cabinet.
For the next few years, she worked in a variety of roles including as a columnist as well as a public relations consultant. In 1953, Anna spent three months in India as an exchange leader for the State Department. She also unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 1960, and for New York city council president in 1965.
One of her most famous feats was her role in the 1963 March on Washington. Anna was the only woman on the administrative committee, working with Civil Rights leaders Martin Luther King, Bayard Rustin and A. Phillip Randolph. She urged the men to include women in the planning, but to her frustration, they ignored her. Much of the work to mobilize people to attend, arrange transportation logistics and organize food and water for attendees fell on Anna’s plate because King, Randolph and the other men she wrote “were carrying on all of their regular responsibilities and it was difficult to get them to the meetings”.[2] Shortly before the March, Anna was angry when she saw that no women were included as speakers as the march. Instead, Randolph was planning to briefly mention some Black women activists in his speech.
Although Anna strongly urged for women to be included as speakers on the program, her calls were largely dismissed. In the end, as a compromise, Daisy Bates was allowed to speak at the end of the march – but her allotted speech time was significantly shorter than all the other, male, speakers.[3]
Anna later captured in her autobiography a moment during the march as she sat in front of the steps of the Lincoln Memorial: “"I thought of the 180,000 Negro soldiers and 29,000 black seamen who had moved in at the crucial moment to win the war and save ‘the fragile union,'" she wrote. "Most of the 250,000 people present could not know of these men, for the history books available to Americans have failed to record their story."
In the 1970s, Anna continued her work as an author and lecturer in the U.S and abroad. She wrote two books about her life’s work: The Trumpet of Sounds in 1964 and The Gift of Chaos in1977. Anna was honored for her work in race relations by various organizations throughout her life and awarded honorary doctor degrees from both Howard and Hamline University. She also received the “pioneer woman” award in 1983 from the New York State Conference on Midlife and Older Women.
Anna died in 1990. She was 90 years old. She was part of – and led – some of the 20th century’s most critical movements from workplace justice to civil rights to feminism.
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