About Dorothy
Dorothy Dewberry Aldridge, a native of Detroit, Michigan, began her civil and human rights work as a member of the Detroit NAACP Youth Council in the 1950’s. The seeds of this life-long endeavor took root with her work as a full-time staff member of the Northern Student Movement (NSM) from 1960 to 1963. As the emerging Civil Rights Movement began to spread North, Martha Prescod, a friend, organized the Detroit Friends of SNCC.
Mrs. Dewberry-Aldridge worked full-time on the staff of SNCC from 1963 to 1969. She later became co-Director of the Detroit SNCC office with Martha Kocel, becoming director when Ms. Kocel left to work in Boston.
In 1965, James “Jim” Forman suggested that the Detroit SNCC office adopt the Lowndes County project and thus a forty-year relationship with the people of Lowndes was initiated. This suggestion evolved and under the leadership of Simon Owen, a Lowndes County native who lived in Detroit, into the Michigan-Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights (M-LCCMHR). This energetic group raised funds for the early candidates of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization; purchased 225 acres of land for residents who had been thrown off the land for voting rights activity, and for its continuing upkeep; provided college scholarships for Lowndes County Youth and later, organized Freedom Tours for the youth of Lowndes Clounty and Albany, Georgia to visit historic underground railroad sites in Detroit and Canada. Support was also given to the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery, Alabama.
Through her work with the Michigan Coalition for Human Rights (MCHR), she organized and led bus tours for young people from Metropolitan Detroit to Lowndes County, Birmingham, Selma, Albany, Memphis, Nashville, and other places where the Movement’s battles were waged. Through her work in the international arena, she worked in the Anti-Apartheid and African Liberation Support Movements, and was a United States Delegate to the Sixth Pan African Congress in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania and was among the first United States citizens to be admitted to the Peoples’ Republic of China, after its reopening in 1972.
This recognition is humbly accepted in the names of those who welcomed SNCC workers into the Lowndes County “Beloved Community”, Matthew and Emma Jackson, Mary Jane Jackson, Laura Mae Reed, Lula Gulley, and Mattie Lee Moorer.
Mrs. Dewberry-Aldridge is married to fellow human rights activist. Reverend Dan Aldridge, and they have one daughter, Che’-Lin, and a grandson, Aaryk.
