Dorothy Cotton

Dorothy Lee Foreman was born on June 9, 1930, in Goldsboro, Wayne County, North Carolina. Her father, Claude Foreman, was a Black tobacco-factory and mill worker who raised his daughters alone after their mother, Maggie Pelham Foreman, died when Dorothy was a small child. From those modest beginnings she made her way to Shaw University and then to Virginia State College, where her gifts as an organizer and teacher first took shape.

In Petersburg, Virginia, she joined the movement led by the Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker, and when Walker was called to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, she followed. There Martin Luther King, Jr., drew her into the inner circle. As the SCLC's Education Director, she became arguably the highest-ranking woman in the organization, and from 1960 to 1968 she directed its Citizenship Education Program.

That program was her enduring work. Building on the pioneering literacy schools of Septima Clark and Esau Jenkins, Cotton traveled the South teaching ordinary people to read, to claim their rights, and to register to vote against laws designed to shut them out. More than six thousand men and women passed through the workshops she led, returning home to teach others and to change their communities.

She stayed with the SCLC for some twenty-three years, later making her home in Ithaca, New York, where she continued to teach, sing, and inspire until her death on June 10, 2018, at the age of eighty-eight. A teacher of freedom who lifted thousands into their full citizenship, Dorothy Cotton is honored here among the ancestors who taught a people to stand.