EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was originally published June 20, 2024. Dr. Hazel N. Dukes passed away on March 1, 2025. Read more here.
On the fourth floor of an apartment building near Harlem Hospital, at the end of a long, grayish corridor, is the home of former National President of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Dr. Hazel Nell Dukes, 92. Her attendant opened the door recently and welcomed two members of the Amsterdam News for a sit-down.
A civil rights activist and prominent voice in politics, Dukes has created a legacy that personifies the essence of Juneteenth: a lifelong fight for Black American freedoms. The AmNews had the opportunity to speak to her about her childhood, her life, her accomplishments, and her take on the current state of the nation.
Dukes has enjoyed close friendships with the late President Lyndon B. Johnson, Bill and Hillary Clinton, President Joe Biden, and former President Barack Obama.
We entered at the sound of Dukes’s voice in the distance. Her home furnishings were awash with pastels and cool, curved shapes, reminiscent of the ’70s, while tables were accented with flowers and Black art pieces. Dukes was working at a square table in the back of the apartment that was covered in papers and mail.
Well, more like fretting.
A cellphone in one hand, a landline phone receiver in the other, she was animatedly speaking to two people about former President Donald Trump being found guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records. Moments before we arrived, Trump became the first U.S. president to be a convicted felon. The ruling was replaying constantly in the background on her mounted TV.
After she got off both lines, Dukes paused, looking disappointed, angry, and happy all at once.
“For this country, I’m saddened,” Dukes said about Trump. “I don’t know how this man, from his apprenticeship (TV program); from him and his dad denying Blacks to stay in their properties in Brooklyn; the things that he said about African American people, how he ever became the president of this great nation. No one is above the law.”
We waited for her to take in the moment. She waited for us to set up.
Dukes went back to the beginning of her childhood in Montgomery, Ala., in 1932. “I was the little princess, if you will, of the family,” she said. “Really a ‘daddy’s girl’ to the T. He thought that I could not do any wrong and I just loved that. My grandparents were gracious. I remember I had a godmother who was a seamstress and she would make me dresses, and I would change dresses on a Sunday. Oh, yeah, with…white socks with lace around them and dresses that had eyelet material on them. I was always perfectly dressed; hair and everything was perfect.”
She lived a good life, she said, as the only child of Edward and Alice Dukes. Her father was a Pullman porter. After the Civil War, thousands of formerly enslaved people were hired to serve white passengers on luxury overnight trains by white Chicago business mogul George M. Pullman at a time when no one would pay Black men for employment.
Despite deplorable working conditions and overt racism, being a Black pullman was a coveted position, compared to sharecropping, that helped shape the Black middle class in the 1860s. Edward Dukes went on to be active in the first all-Black railroad union, organized by civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph, in the deeply segregated South.
“My dad had to serve the whites,” Dukes said. “Me and my mom had to sit in the colored section and we had our fried chicken and our pound cake. But my Daddy was serving the whites, you know, with their napkins and all the food, whatever they wanted to order.”
As a child growing up in what would become one of the most active cities in the Civil Rights Movement, Dukes was always surrounded by history. She and her family lived in the Graetz neighborhood of Montgomery, which would eventually be known as the former home of civil rights icon Rosa Parks. Parks had moved to Montgomery and had gotten married the year Dukes was born. The couple joined the Montgomery NAACP chapter. Parks would go on to inspire the Montgomery Bus Boycott of the 1950s.
“I could stand on my front porch and look at Ms. Parks’s front porch,” Dukes recalled. “Sweet, kind, low-key woman who went to work every day. She and her husband had no children.”
Dukes said that those early years in the South were a “quiet kind of radical” environment that relied on furtively organizing Black labor efforts instead of the loud protests of future decades. Although she was young, she took after her father in questioning the status quo of racial segregation. She didn’t quite understand why things were the way they were, she said, but never equated the feeling to others taking issue with her skin color.
“I knew something was wrong,” said Dukes. “In my books, there were pages torn out of them and the word nigger [written] in them. When I would want to talk about it, my Mom would say ‘just learn.’”
Her parents’ families were both involved in education. Dukes had thought she’d be a teacher, even enrolling at Alabama State Teachers College in 1949 for a year, but when her family moved to New York in 1955, she ended up attending Nassau Community College on Long Island. There, she got involved with tenant and community organizing through the Economic Opportunity Commission (EOC) of Nassau County in the town of Roslyn in North Hempstead. The town had very few Black residents—mostly those who had migrated from North and South Carolina. She set out to educate impoverished Black children in the neighboring towns, get them into pre-K, and speak about health screenings.
In the 1960s, Dukes was appointed by Johnson to his Head Start early childhood education program—one of the oldest and largest programs of its kind. Around this time, she was attending classes at Adelphi University. She said a Jewish professor inspired her to pursue a career as an attorney.
In 1966, she became the first Black person to take a position in the Nassau County Attorney’s Office. Her job was to work with the attorneys and assign their cases. It gave her an exciting chance to debate with lawyers, dive into housing and foster care issues from a legal standpoint, and explore politics, she said. She was a staunch Democrat in a wholly Republican county, but things were changing.
Dukes eventually received a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Adelphi University in 1978 and completed post-graduate work at Queens College.
“It’s still very segregated in certain parts of Long Island,” said Dukes. Despite that, Roslyn named a street after Dukes in 2023 for her work as a fierce advocate against housing discrimination.
By 1989, Dukes headed the national NAACP organization with the help of Dr. Benjamin L. Hooks, who was elected executive director of the NAACP at the time. She remained in that office until 1992 and is the only woman still alive to have held that title.
A very outspoken person, Dukes made incredible allies and infamous enemies throughout her lifetime. She sparred publicly with former Mayors Ed Koch and Rudy Guiliani.
“I had fights with them,” said Dukes. “We had a NAACP convention. Giuliani was so bad that I said he could not even bring greetings. His behavior toward the Black community was so bad that he could not speak at an NAACP convention.”
RELATED: AmNews Archives: Hazel Dukes
During her time as national president of the NAACP, Dukes said that fostering relationships with other women leaders and mentoring Black youth was probably her greatest accomplishment.
In 1990, Dukes also became the president of the New York City Off-Track Betting Corporation (NYCOTB), but her reign wasn’t completely without stain. In 1997, at the age of 65, Dukes pleaded guilty to attempted grand larceny, which caused a shockwave of scandal throughout New York City. She was accused of stealing $13,000 from longtime friend and disabled employee Velma McLaughlin in 1993. McLaughlin had reportedly given Dukes permission to cash her NYCOTB paychecks and pay her bills after her cancer diagnosis. Dukes took a plea bargain to pay the money back, although she did maintain her innocence.
“It wasn’t a failure,” said Dukes about the trial. “This young woman I had helped so much—she got cancer, she had one son, no other family member. I had signed papers for her at Sloan Kettering, never taking a penny.”
Despite the negative media attention about the case, Dukes said she had the support of the late AmNews publisher William Tatum, former Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton, former Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania C. Delores Tucker, and the community at large. McLaughlin died in February 2024 due to her long battle with her illness, said her son, Rev. Dr. Rodney McLaughlin. Dukes said she felt sorry for her and the entire situation.
Duke’s list of accomplishments since the 1990s is vast.
Among them, Dukes was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the City University of New York Law School at Queens College in 1990, an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Medgar Evers College in 2009, and an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from the Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine in 2012. She has also received the Ellis Island Medal of Honor, YWCA City of New York John La Farge Memorial Award for Interracial Justice, Guy R. Brewer Humanitarian Award, Network Journal’s 25 Most Influential Black Women in Business Award in 2007, a city proclamation at the New York City Council’s 3rd Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Awards ceremony, the First Annual Ruth Clark Trailblazer Award, National Action Network Legacy Award, City & State 50 Over 50 Lifetime Achievement Award, and John E. Zuccotti Public Service Award by the Real Estate Board of New York.
Dukes received the key to the city from former Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2020, was a Greater Harlem Chamber of Commerce 125th Anniversary Gala honoree in 2023, and made history by becoming the first civilian person in the United States to administer the oath of office to a governor—Kathy Hochul, New York State’s first female governor. She was especially proud of that.
She dreams of being remembered for helping others and educating the youth, and believes the secret to a long life is being kind and healthy. “I feel that my legacy for my community has left a mark and is very well respected,” Dukes said.
Currently, Dukes is president of the NAACP’s New York State chapter and an active member of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Northern Manhattan Alumnae Chapter. She was married once and is divorced with one son, who lives in New Jersey.
For decades, Dukes has worked behind the scenes in New York and national politics, but has never wanted to run for office.
“I wanted to be outside and make government work,” Dukes said. “If you’re inside, yes, you’re sitting at the table, but you have to negotiate with other people. As president of the NAACP, I have my voice. I don’t have to decide whether it’s the right thing to do or is somebody gonna re-elect me. (I want) to be outside to make government and people work for the people that elect them. That’s why I never wanted to be (an elected official).”
[updated Mon, Jun 24]
Ariama C. Long is a Report for America corps member who writes about politics for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.
Hazel Dukes is a convicted felon. Why the Borough President thinks it’s appropriate to have a 90-year-old on the Community Board still? It’s time for her to go to pasture and train someone.
She is 90 years old she is not dead. It’s a shame to “put “ an icon in the pasture as if she were a slave. Those times are over. Learn some respect.