Tensions were high in Los Angeles after the 1962 police attack on the Nation of Islam headquarters in which seven unarmed Muslims were shot, including mosque secretary Ronald Stokes, who was killed.
During the trial of the wounded NOI members charged with assault after the attack, several people carried anti-Muslim picket signs in front of the courthouse.
Minister Abdul Allah Muhammad, columnist for the Final Call newspaper, recalled in the Oct. 9, 2001, edition the power activist Maggie Hathaway held in organizing a protest on short notice:
“Malcolm X [a friend of Ms. Hathaway] who was with me, was ready to attack [the picketers], but I told him I had a better idea. I went into the phone booth and made a call. Then we proceeded into the courtroom. When we broke for lunch, we walked outside to find traffic stalled and the sidewalk across the street crowded with observers. In front of the courthouse, spanning the entire block were picket signs—in favor of the Muslims—carried by young Caucasian men and women who worked in the various downtown offices, and who had skipped eating lunch to be part of this demonstration.
And there, standing on the courtroom steps, orchestrating the entire thing, was Marvelous Maggie Hathaway!”
Born in the sawmill town of Campti, La., July 1, 1911, Maggie Mae Hathaway was an activist, blues singer, actor, sports writer and golfer who lobbied and picketed to integrate golf courses in Los Angeles, making facilities and careers available for the first time to African-Americans.
She launched the same war on Hollywood, helping many Blacks get jobs in film. Whenever her name was mentioned, studio executives panicked, often asking, “Is she picketing us?” To honor the outstanding work of Blacks excluded from the Oscars and other awards, she co-founded the Image Awards.
She was also a Los Angeles County Commissioner, serving on the Alcoholism and Narcotics, the Status of Women, the Probations and the Martin Luther King Hospital commissions.
She went to Los Angeles in 1940 with dreams of playing piano in one of the exclusive cabarets on Central Avenue, then known as Black Broadway. Instead she worked in film and as an extra, mainly as Egyptians and “exotics.” In “Cabin in the Sky,” her statuesque figure (which she maintained until her death) landed her a job as Lena Horne’s body double, and she stands out among the extras in the film, wearing long black gloves and a black hat and strutting a sassy walk in the cabaret scene.
When she was cast in a film biopic about Woodrow Wilson, she was told to wear a bandana and sit in a field on a bale of cotton.
“I could hear the voice of my father, a Louisiana farmer, telling me to get an education and never pick a piece of cotton,” she said. “I returned the bandana to the director, asked for a limousine and left Hollywood.”
She began singing in Los Angeles cabarets and recorded several songs in the early 1950s, including “Bayou Baby Blues,” “School Girl Blues,” “A Falling Star” and “When Gabriel Blows His Horn” with The Robins and “Here Goes a Fool” as a solo artist
In the 1950s, Hathaway began writing a golf column for the Los Angeles Sentinel. For 30 years, she covered the achievements of African-Americans and continued to fight discrimination in the sport.
In 1962, with her friend Sammy Davis Jr., she co-founded the Beverly Hills/Hollywood branch of the NAACP to fight racism in Hollywood. Through the branch, she fought for positions for Blacks in every area of the industry, often opening doors by leading boycotts and picket lines until studio execs relented. With a branch committee two years later, she helped organize the first Image Awards.
In the 1960s, Hathaway led picket lines against several segregated Los Angeles golf courses, forcing them to admit Blacks. She put political pressure on the whites-only membership at the Jack Thompson Golf Course at the city-owned Sportsman Park (renamed Jesse Owens Park in the early 1980s), located in a Black area of South Central Los Angeles. After a long, relentless battle, the group finally announced it would hold a ceremony to accept 12 Blacks who had applied for membership. Hathaway, who expected to be accepted, realized she had not been invited to join when her name was not mentioned during the ceremony.
“I tore that place up,” she later recalled, laughing as she described how she pulled her pistol and sent the white members running for cover. She broke every window in the clubhouse by throwing bottles of Champagne, a cake, punch bowl and chairs through each one and then waited for the police to arrive, she said. She became director of Jack Thompson in the 1970s, and in 1998, the nine-hole golf course was renamed the Maggie Hathaway Golf Course.
Hathaway died Sept. 24, 2001, at her home in the Baldwin Hills section of Los Angeles.
