Dorothy Hollingsworth: A life of firsts

Dorothy Hollingsworth’s life is the story of an evolving Seattle, of our reckoning with the twin divides of racism and poverty. It is a journey that remains unfinished, though we have lost Hollingsworth, who was a trailblazer. She died July 26 at age 101.

Hers was a life of firsts.

First in her family to attend college — Paine College in Georgia, a historically Black Christian college.

First director of a Head Start program in Washington, at Seattle Public Schools.

Deputy director for Seattle’s Model Cities program — the first of its kind to be funded through the national Model Cities initiative combating urban poverty and blight.

First Black woman to serve on a school board in Washington state — in Seattle, where she helped implement desegregation through busing. Later, she was elected to the Washington State Board of Education.

When Hollingsworth and her husband moved to Seattle in 1946, she found it more like her native South than she expected, as Times reporter Alexandra Yoon-Hendricks recounted in a news obituary last week. Hollingsworth was an experienced teacher, but the Seattle schools — “not overwhelmingly ready to hire Negros’’ — wouldn’t hire her. As a Black person, she found racial restrictive covenants meant homes in certain Seattle neighborhoods were off-limits to people of color.

But she was fiercely persistent. At the University of Washington, she earned a master’s in social work and went that route to work for the Seattle School District. She was passionate about “education as a pathway to a prosperous future,” about equal rights and equal opportunity. A person of deep faith, early on she came together with folks of different faiths and races to oppose discrimination in housing and employment.

The task of building neighborhoods and sustaining civil rights remains incomplete, but it’s a lot closer to reality thanks to Hollingsworth. The way to honor her is to continue the work, taking her resilience to heart.