Anna Arnold Hedgeman

Anna Arnold Hedgeman (1899-1990), writer and activist. Anna Arnold was born in Marshalltown, Iowa, the granddaughter of former slaves. When she was young her family moved to Anoka, Minnesota, where they were the only African Americans in the area. She attended Hamline University, a small Methodist college in Minneapolis, where a visit by W.E.B. DuBois, who offered an “image of black men of poise, dignity and intelligence, who were determined to be free” inspired her to become an educator. After graduation she took a position teaching English and history at Rust College in Mississippi. It was here, though, that she also experienced racial segregation and rural black poverty for the first time, and she decided to return to the North and fight inequality there. She took a job with the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) in Springfield, Ohio, but she quickly learned that African Americans were confined to segregated, inferior facilities. She then moved on to executive positions in Philadelphia and the New York area, where she had “equipment with which to work and the challenge of the largest Negro community in the nation.” Her efforts at the YWCA became even more important during the Great Depression, when the poverty that she had dedicated her life to fighting against became much greater.

During World War II, Hedgeman turned her attention to the problem of racism in the defense industry, fighting unsuccessfully for a federal law that would have banned discrimination by companies that had government contracts. After the war, she served as assistant dean of women at Howard University, worked for Harry Truman’s presidential election campaign, and became an administrator with the Office of Health, Education and Welfare. In 1954, Hedgeman was appointed the first African American woman member of a mayoral cabinet in New York, serving in Robert Wagner’s administration as a liaison for the city’s international guests. After leaving this position, she became an editor and columnist for the African American newspaper New York Age, also publishing two books: The Trumpet Sounds: A Memoir of Negro Leadership (1964) and The Gift of Chaos: Decades of American Discontent (1977). In 1960, she traveled to Ghana to give the keynote address for the first Conference of the Women of Africa and of African Descent. Three years later, Hedgeman took a position with the National Council of Churches, helping to mobilize more than 30,000 white Protestants to take part in the March on Washington later that year; she also protested the lack of women speakers at the historic event. Her work with the National Council of Churches also helped ensure the passage of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964. In 1966, she co-founded the National Organization of Women (NOW), the nation’s largest feminist organization, and chaired its Task Force on Women in Poverty. In 1970, she and her husband founded Hedgeman Consultant Services, using this to facilitate her lecturing, teaching, and consulting on race relations at schools and universities throughout the over the next two decades. She was also involved in organizations such as the Child Study Association, Urban League, NAACP, United Nations Association, Advisory Committee on Alcoholism, and the National Conference of Christians and Jews. She died in Harlem in 1990 after seventy years of public service, based on the four principles that her parents had instilled in her as a child: “education, religion, character, and service to mankind.”

©David Brodnax, Sr.