YWCA CEO Magdeline Jensen was slightly nervous about attendance prior to her organization’s 23rd Annual Racial Justice Awards ceremony because it was a luncheon—all the previous events had been dinners. She needn’t have been.
Nearly 250 people filled the ballroom at the Westin Hotel for the Oct. 29 ceremony paying tribute to individuals and organization that have worked to further the cause of racial justice.
In her welcoming remarks, Jensen noted that while the YWCA has always fought for gender equity, its mission to eliminate racism was not codified until the 1960s. Much of the work leading up to that, she credited to Dorothy Height, the “Godmother of the Civil Rights movement” who advanced the cause of Black women, in no small part, through her work in the Y.
But her relationship with the Pittsburgh YWCA was not always so good, Jensen said. In the 1920s, she recalled, Height, who was then living in Rankin, had been selected for a national magazine feature on the Y’s Girl Reserves along with two White girls. Well if she was to be a proper representative, Height figured she should learn to swim and traveled to the Downtown Y to do so.
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