At the memorial service for Hattie B. Dorsey, it was no accident that three Atlanta mayors paid tribute to the woman who advocated for affordable housing long before it became the city’s top priority.
Dorsey, founder of Atlanta Neighborhood Development Partnership (ANDP), died on May 25, only six days shy of her 85th birthday.
Her life was celebrated on June 8 at Lindsay Street Baptist Church.
Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens spoke of how “cities are fueled by the energy and audacity” of bold people. He said Dorsey was one of those “short Black women” who helped fuel Atlanta.
“Sit down and listen to them,” Dickens said. “They will tell you what’s on their mind.”
Dickens said he first met Dorsey in 2013 when he was running for City Council the first time. Former Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin encouraged him to get to know Dorsey.
“From the moment I met her, she had an opinion,” Dickens said. “Her opinions had a hand to go with head and heart. This legend of a lady told me about affordable housing. Let me show you how it’s done.”
It was Dorsey who helped convince Dickens to make “affordability” his gospel.
“She was ahead of her time by a decade,” Franklin said at the service. She remembered first being introduced to Dorsey by Dan Sweat when they were making plans to create ANDP to focus on affordability in mixed-income communities. “That’s now the top issue of our mayor.”
Dorsey was the eldest of 11 children, which Franklin said gave her leadership skills in getting people to sign on to her vision for a more equitable Atlanta.
“She was serious and glamorous, determined yet loving and gracious,” Franklin said. “She extended her network to others.”
The third mayor who spoke was Andrew Young.
“What Hattie did in her real life was take the spirit from the Lord and put it in the gumbo pot, simmering it with seasonings,” Young said. “To go to Hattie’s house with Shirley and eating that gumbo, she would have given you whatever life lesson you needed that day.”
I remember getting to know Dorsey in the late 1980s, when she was drafting up plans to create ANDP — the entity she later would run for 15 years.
Dorsey was the first person to speak to me about “holistic” communities. She said it was important to create communities that had mixed-income and mixed-uses, places where residents could get an education, shop, play and receive services.
“Clearly, Atlanta is the leader of holistic communities,” said John O’Callaghan, who succeeded Dorsey as president of ANDP. “I’m not surprised she was a visionary who brought national cutting-edge concepts to Atlanta and the country with mixed-income communities and Purpose Built Communities. ANDP is just one of the seeds she planted.”
Attending the service were other architects of Atlanta’s holistic approach to communities. Both Egbert Perry, CEO of the Integral Group, and Renee Glover, former CEO of the Atlanta Housing Authority, were at the service. They helped create the Hope VI model that transformed the Techwood Homes public housing project into the mixed-income community of Centennial Place before the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta.
O’Callaghan, who has been at ANDP for 18 years, said other cities often make trips to Atlanta to learn about the model, a model Dorsey had helped design. When he first met Dorsey, he was working for former Atlanta Mayor Jackson, early in his third term. He was assigned to help with one of Jackson’s initiatives — housing — and O’Callaghan was able to get tutorials from Dorsey.
Nathaniel Smith, founder of Partnership for Southern Equity, spoke of how Dorsey mentored him.
“She spoke truth to power,” Smith said, adding how she helped raise him. “I didn’t invite you to these rooms with the powerful to be quiet. Speak up.”
Smith has been speaking up ever since.
“Hattie was incredible,” Smith said. “She was so powerful that she took a city that was too busy to hate and made sure it wasn’t a city too busy to care.”
Rev. Anthony A.W. Motley of Lindsay Baptist Church said Dorsey was a mentor to so many in Atlanta.
“We have gathered here to celebrate the life of an incredible woman, a Renaissance woman, a trailblazer woman, a glass-ceiling-breaking woman, a woman who stood for civil rights and human rights and women’s rights and the rights of anybody and everybody.”
The program disclosed several facts about Dorsey that many of us did not know. At 11, she battled rheumatic fever, spending three years at St. Francis Hospital and Sanatorium for Cardiac Children in Roslyn, N.Y.
Later, she began her higher education at Spelman College before transferring to Clark Atlanta University to study secretarial sciences. In 1963, she joined the administration of Atlanta Mayor Ivan Allen Jr. as his personal assistant, becoming the first Black employee in the mayor’s office. She also leveraged her secretarial skills to work for U.S. Rep. Charles Weltner in the 1960s.
Dorsey also was politically active, serving as the first vice chair of the Georgia Democratic Party. She also served as chair of the Georgia Democratic Party’s Women’s Caucus until 2022.
As Young said, Dorsey had that special sauce.
“We didn’t have a blueprint, but we had a spirit that bound things together,” said Young, who then addressed Mayor Dickens. “When you are catching hell, mayor, find out what Hattie put in that gumbo. “
Later, Young said Dorsey found ways to contribute to Atlanta.
“Hattie always had ideas, always had suggestions, and always had an order,” Young said. “You want to know why this is a great city? It’s because of people like Hattie Dorsey putting divine seasoning in it.”
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