Women in Public Life, (18 July 1960) Accra, Ghana

Context

For nearly seventy years, Anna Arnold Hedgeman advocated for equal rights, education, poverty relief, public health, and Christian service in the United States. Her advocacy was central to her work in a variety of roles—including teacher, nonprofit administrator, consultant, civil rights activist, government official, journalist, political candidate, church leader, and author. As a Black woman, Hedgeman often labored under a glass ceiling yet refused to be confined by it. She was a determined, tireless advocate who challenged others’ assumptions about her and the reigning social order of her times. Hedgeman was accomplished, humble, and among the unsung heroes of the struggle for social justice during the twentieth century.¹

Anna Arnold Hedgeman was born in Iowa on July 5, 1899, but grew up in Minnesota.  Her parents raised her to become a self-sufficient, educated, and devout Black Christian woman.² Hedgeman attended Hamline University in St. Paul and was its first African American graduate in 1922. Her intellect, passion, and rhetorical skills grew during her time at Hamline, as did her race-consciousness. Such race-consciousness was heightened after attending a local lecture by W.E.B. DuBois during her sophomore year. Despite her training and accomplishments, Hedgeman could not find a teaching position in St. Paul after she graduated because of the racially-discriminatory hiring practices of area schools. She left Minnesota for Mississippi in 1922 to teach at Rust College, one of the nation’s oldest Historically Black Colleges and Universities.³

Disillusioned by the “denial of ordinary freedoms” to African Americans in the Deep South but unable to find a teaching position back home, Hedgeman switched careers in 1924.⁴ She subsequently worked as a program coordinator and administrator for the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) for over a decade. This work—at branches in the Midwest and Northeast—was an outlet for her commitment to Christian service and interracial cooperation, as well as her budding Black feminism. It also deepened her understanding of systemic racism and her involvement in community organizing and politics. Eventually, she left her director position at the Philadelphia YWCA and committed herself to influencing public policy.⁵

For the next 20 years, Hedgeman served in various federal agencies and civil rights organizations, including the Emergency Relief Bureau, the National Office of Civil Defense, and the National Council for a Permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee. Through her political advocacy, Hedgeman became a core figure who laid “the foundation of the black freedom struggle in the North.”⁶ During this time, she also began to speak about the role of Black women in the struggle for equal rights in the United States and in liberation movements by “people of color all over the world.”⁷ After assuming a post in the Federal Security Agency in 1949, Hedgeman traveled internationally as a cultural exchange leader and met with foreign delegates to the United States. Through her travels, she gained experience “standing up for America at the same time she critiqued it.”⁸ She also began to think of herself as a global citizen and “to think carefully about a transnational role for black Americans, for black women, for herself.”⁹

Hedgeman transitioned to local politics in New York City during the 1950s, yet remained concerned about global affairs, especially in Africa. She spoke out against apartheid in South Africa and, like many African Americans, was excited when Ghana gained its independence in 1957. Yet even as she developed a Pan-African consciousness, she initially spoke the language of American liberalism—emphasizing the need to improve U.S. democracy through greater equality of opportunity. This message of equality led to greater identification with African nations.¹⁰

Hedgeman was thus elated to receive the invitation to deliver the keynote address at the Conference of Women of Africa and African Descent in Accra, Ghana. Black feminism was at the core of her identity, and suddenly she had the opportunity to express it in a place that held a mystical attraction. Hedgeman’s interests aligned closely with those expressed by the Ghanaian women at the conference: an emphasis on the contributions of Black women in all aspects of society, on their responsibility to keep improving society, and on their solidarity, regardless of their station in life.¹¹ Hedgeman emphasized these themes in her speech, and she argued for solidifying their shared commitments through international political action, namely via the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. A key takeaway from her speech was that “women have always been in public life, but the men have not always known it.” Her address was well-received and judged rhetorically-savvy by the leaders of the Women’s Africa Committee of the African American Institute.¹²

Hedgeman remained a prominent advocate at the intersection of Black equality and women’s rights for the rest of her life.¹³ During the second half of her career in public life, she served as the only woman on the organizing committee for the 1963 March on Washington, ran for public office, served as the coordinator for the National Council of Churches’ Commission on Religion and Race, and was a founding member of the National Organization for Women.  She also continued to serve as a member of countless community organizations and government advisory bodies until her death on January 17, 1990. She left an impressive legacy, and her achievements were honored by the National Urban League, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the National Council of Negro Women. She also was awarded honorary doctoral degrees from Howard University and from Hamline University, which dedicated The Hedgeman Center for Student Diversity Initiatives and Programs in her honor in 2011.¹⁴

1.  Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2009), 4.
2. Anna Arnold Hedgeman, The Gift of Chaos: Decades of American Discontent (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 5.
3. Anna Arnold Hedgeman, Oral History Interviews (12/6/1978, 1/21/1979, 4/23/1979, and 5/9/1979), Black Women Oral History Project, Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe College, Harvard University; Julie Gallagher, “Hedgeman, Anna Arnold,” African American National Biography, vol. 4, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 171.
4. Anna Arnold Hedgeman, The Trumpet Sounds: A Memoir of Negro Leadership (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), 27-28.
5. Hettie V. Williams, “Sounding the Trumpet: Anna Arnold Hedgeman and the Civil Rights Movement in the North,” in Bury My Heart in a Free Land: Black Women Intellectuals in Modern U.S. History, ed. Hettie V. Williams (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2017), 146-51; Black feminism is a perspective that calls attention to the “intersecting oppressions” of institutional racism and sexism that Black women experience. See: Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge 2000), 21-22.
6. Williams, “Sounding the Trumpet,” 158.
7. Anna Arnold Hedgeman, “The Role of the Negro Woman,” Journal of Educational Sociology 17, no. 8 (April 1944): 463-69.
8. Jennifer Scanlon, Until There is Justice: The Life of Anna Arnold Hedgeman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 123.
9. Scanlon, Until There is Justice, 129.
10. Julie A. Gallagher, Black Women and Politics in New York City (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 108.
11. Naaborko Sackeyfio-Lenoch, “Women’s International Alliances in an Emergent Ghana,” Journal of West African History 4, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 43.
12. Dorothy Ferebee and Jean Noble, “Report on the Conference of Women of Africa and African Descent,” Box 2, Folder 6, Africa-America Institute, Women’s Africa Committee, November 23, 1959 – August 24, 1961, Horace Mann Bond Papers (MS 411), Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.
13. Carol Giardina, “MOW to NOW: Black Feminism Resets the Chronology of the Founding of Modern Feminism,” Feminist Studies 44, no. 3 (2018): 743.
14. Paula F. Pfeffer, “Hedgeman, Anna Arnold,” in Black Women in America, 2nd ed., ed. Darlene Clark Hine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 40.