Anna Hedgeman: Activist for civil rights
Who was Anna Arnold Hedgeman, and why has the Anoka County Historical Society received calls suggesting we create a memorial to her? Was she a movie star, a performer, an athlete? Is her name widely recognized throughout the country or, for that matter, in Anoka? In 2013, the public television show Almanac aired a segment on her life and accomplishments, which reran recently and prompted the conversation once more.
Hedgeman, who grew up in Anoka and graduated from Anoka High in 1918, became a giant in the civil rights movement. From the 1920s through the 1980s, she worked in several public and private organizations to promote opportunity, particularly fair opportunity for employment, for African Americans.
Her participation in the planning of the 1963 civil rights march on Washington – remembered not only for Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, but also for its effect on the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in 1964 and 1965 – remains a highlight of her career. As a coordinator for the National Council of Churches, she organized the recruitment of over 40,000 mostly white Christians who participated in the March. Although Hedgeman contributed as much as anyone to the event’s success, neither she, nor any other woman, was featured as a speaker. This was one of many incidents that drove her to advocate for women’s rights as well as African American rights.
Hedgeman began life as Anna Arnold, born in Iowa in 1899 and moved with her family to Anoka the following year. Her father, William Arnold, had grown up in South Carolina, attended college in Atlanta, and moved to the Midwest as soon as he graduated. He was a devout Christian and a strict man who imbued in his children an ethic of seriousness, hard work, service and faith.
Hedgeman described her childhood in Anoka in her 1964 autobiography, “The Trumpet Sounds.” She remembers Anoka as a “comfortable Midwestern town with the traditional main street,” and her house as a large one with play space, trees and a garden. As the only African American family in town, the Arnolds were more an object of curiosity than discrimination. William Arnold was active in the Methodist church and in local and regional affairs.
After graduating from Hamline University in 1922, Anna Arnold sought a job as a teacher. The St. Paul school system hired many of her white classmates but refused to consider her. She took a job teaching at a historically black college in Mississippi, where the brutality of Jim Crow brought an end to the relative innocence of her Minnesota upbringing. After two years, she moved north and served as director of several YWCAs, including one in Harlem, where she made it her mission to improve the community. At the time, the YWCA was a segregated organization, and she managed the separate but unequal black facilities. In 1936 she married Merritt Hedgeman, a professional singer of opera and traditional African American music.
In the late ‘30s Hedgeman left the Y and continued her work in public and private service. Over an illustrious career that spanned decades, she directed the National Committee for Permanent Fair Employment Practices, directed a major effort to recruit black voters for Harry Truman’s 1948 presidential campaign, served in the HEW department during the Truman administration and served in the cabinet of New York Mayor Robert Wagner. She earned the distinction of being the first African American woman to do these things. She wrote extensively, traveled, lectured, founded a consulting company and co-founded the National Organization of Women. Hedgeman died in Harlem in 1990, having lived 90 consequential and productive years.
Anyone interested in exploring the idea of memorializing Hedgeman in Anoka County can contact the Anoka County History Center at 763-421-0600 or rebecca@anokacountyhistory.org to form a task force.
John Evans is a volunteer with the Anoka County Historical Society.
originally printed July 17, 2018