She Was An Outspoken Activist For Civil Rights. Then She Was Erased From History.

Doris Price stares out from the 1965 photograph like a dare. It’s as if she already knows you’re going to forget her, despite her years of activism and the fact that she’s standing with Malcolm X at what would be his last public speech.
In reproductions of the iconic photograph, Price is shaved off the end, even though she helped to coordinate the civil rights leader’s Feb. 16 appearance at the Corn Hill Methodist Church in Rochester, New York — just five days before he was assassinated.
When the photograph including Doris Price was immortalized in paint in a 2022 mural in downtown Rochester, the other local civil rights leaders in the image — Constance Mitchell and Minister Franklin Florence — were included, but Price was left out. Ironically, the piece of public art is titled “Hidden Figures,” even as it obscures the people it’s meant to commemorate.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but what about the stories images don’t tell?
“This is often what happens in history,” said Dave McCleary, publisher of the online news outlet The Minority Reporter, which has as its mission to amplify lesser-known achievements. “Everyone knows Rosa Parks, but no one knows about Claudette Colvin,” McCleary continued, referring to the 15-year-old activist who was arrested nine months prior to Parks for not giving up her seat to a white woman on a crowded bus.
There are surface explanations behind Price’s omission: She’s a lesser-known figure, she’s not smiling, she’s dressed differently from everyone else in the photograph. But there are also deeper — and darker — reasons, ones that speak to power and fear.
In all the exquisite ways high school can get people wrong, the 1935 yearbook from Doris Price’s graduating class in Red Bank, New Jersey, may have made the biggest mistake: “Silent as the day is long,” reads the description next to her gently smiling face.
As an outspoken activist for civil rights, Price would later become known for just the opposite: her ferociousness.
Born and raised in New Jersey, a place she called “Little Georgia,” Price was one of 14 children, only two of whom were born in a hospital. She often didn’t smile because she was embarrassed by the condition of her teeth, said her daughter Sondra Price.
Doris Price made a mean BBQ turkey and was “tiny but strong,” said her granddaughter Kay Washington. She loved Octavia Butler and hated religion.
Doris Price eventually settled in Rochester to open a real estate agency with her husband, Theodore Roosevelt. Her efforts to secure housing for working- and middle-class African Americans as a realtor fueled her activism, and she served as a chairman of the housing committee of the local NAACP.
“She found housing for Black community members when there was so much discrimination,” McCleary said. “She should get the recognition she deserves.”
Doris Price didn’t only source housing — she also offered up her own. Sondra Price remembers coming home from school nearly every day to new people, families who needed a place to stay. After a 1961 fire in a Rochester apartment complex killed four and caused 40 to lose their belongings, Doris Price formed a relief committee along with Mitchell to gather clothing and organize shelter.
She was also an avid hunter, the lone female member of Rochester’s Rod and Gun Club, according to her daughter. “She’d go out every deer hunting season,” Sondra Price said, who grew up eating venison and still has her mother’s 1956 hunting license. “And I was always worried she was going to get killed.”
Yet it was the death of Doris Price’s husband in 1957 that bellowed the embers of her activism into a flame. “It was always simmering,” Sondra Price said of her mother’s turn to more radical organizing. “But she was able to fully express it after he died.”
That freedom led to Doris Price’s two most significant achievements: the opening of the first Black bookstore in Rochester and the creation of a local Black Panther Party chapter. As her commitment to her activism deepened, so did her candor.
As one of the last stops on the Underground Railroad, Rochester has a historic connection to the struggle for civil rights. The city’s reputation only expanded in light of the city’s 1964 race riots, Saul Alinsky and Franklin Florence’s formation of the civil rights group FIGHT and the imprisonment of Black Muslims — all part of what attracted Malcolm X to the city.
Doris Price’s activism was steeped in this furnace, and her son-in-law, Declan Brown, remembers her kitchen table as the foundry. “We’d be up until 3 or 4 in the morning, talking and drinking coffee,” he said. “The ’60s were a time of transition.”
Brown grew up with the Price family, and Doris Price became a surrogate mother figure. He called her a true community organizer, someone who focused on the little people instead of the limelight. She’d also become his business partner.
Brown and Doris Price first hatched their idea for a Black bookstore in Rochester during one of those early morning kitchen table conversations. “There was so much difficulty in getting a good education for African American kids,” he said. “Are they getting the right history about their background and heritage?”
The two, along with Brown’s wife and Doris Price’s daughter Sheila, established their original inventory on loan from the Negro book club in Manhattan, with a promise to return books that didn’t sell — but that never came to pass, Declan Brown said. Word of mouth spread quickly, and the inventory sold out, with titles like “Africa Before the White Man,” “Adventures of American Negro Cowboys” and “African Art in American Collections.”
Yet it wasn’t only locals who were learning of the bookstore. Soon, the shop had attracted the attention of a Black Panther Party representative in New York. The same year Doris Price opened her bookstore, she made another leap in her activism — by opening a Rochester chapter of the Black Panther Party.
Even though her mother, sister and brother-in-law all became members of the Black Panther Party, Sondra Price refused. “There was a lot of grandstanding,” she said. “They’d be in the house asking, ‘Hi sister, can you cook us breakfast?’ and I’d say, ‘Get the hell out of my house.’”
“She was never afraid to stand up to anybody,” Sondra Price said of her mother. “I got that from her.”
Author and professor Wesley Brown grew up in Queens and became active in the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s, a time he remembers as marred by violence and unrest — the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., fatal altercations between Black Panthers and the police, the murder of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) volunteers in Mississippi.
“Everything was radioactive,” he said.
Former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover identified the Black Panther Party as the single biggest threat to domestic peace, and he vowed to destroy the organization by the end of 1969.
“There was a target on the backs of the people in the Black Panther Party,” Wesley Brown said.
Yet it was the relative peacefulness of Doris Price’s chapter that prompted Wesley Brown to move to Rochester in 1968 and join forces with her and Declan Brown (no relation). He had grown tired of the police confrontations, dominant personalities and incendiary rhetoric in the New York chapters.
“It was not an environment where you could organize and deal with the situation Black communities were facing,” he said. “But when I met Doris, it was love at first sight.”
While the stereotype of aggressive, armed Black men became the dominant image of the Black Panther Party, the reality was much more complex. The majority of Black Panthers were women, not men, as author and former member Ericka Huggins has shown, and the organization began service programs that continue today, such as free breakfast in schools.
The relative peacefulness of the Rochester chapter, however, didn’t mean it wasn’t under scrutiny. Both Sondra Price and Declan Brown remember the FBI regularly showing up at the house on Edinburgh Street.
“We all got visited,” Declan Brown said. “But it was wide open, what we were doing as a chapter — we had no secrets.” Nevertheless, the presence of the Black Panther Party in Rochester — and in particular Doris Price — became an increasing threat.
“The media was disparaging and loved the sensational side,” Declan Brown said. “A lot of people didn’t want to join.”
According to Wesley Brown, a rift began to open up between Doris Price and Florence about the best way to organize, a conflict that came to a head with one of the city’s largest employers: Eastman Kodak. The company was notorious for their unfair hiring practices; FIGHT founder Alinsky famously said that the only contribution Kodak made to race relations was “the invention of color film.”
Doris Price eschewed making any deals with Kodak, whereas Florence wanted to seek a compromise. The rift continued to grow, with Price becoming concerned that Florence was becoming too much of a figurehead, according to Wesley Brown.
“She could be fierce in ways that she wasn’t concerned about your feelings,” he said. “And things got very personal.” While Doris Price’s founding of Rochester’s Black Panther Party chapter invited FBI scrutiny, Florence and Mitchell worked within establishment institutions: church and government (Mitchell became the first Black woman elected in Monroe County).
“Our presence, in particular Ms. Price, became a threat,” Wesley Brown said. “There was no way you could shut this woman up.”
Acres away from the silent young woman depicted in high school, could Doris Price’s cauldron of commitment have resulted in her being cropped out of the photo with Malcolm X? Wesley Brown thinks it’s absolutely the reason. And that altered photograph — the one without Doris Price — became the inspiration for a mural honoring Rochester activists.
As a newspaper columnist for Rochester’s Democrat and Chronicle, Erica Bryant wrote a 2015 column about Malcolm X’s last visit to the city, the publication of which prompted an idea: Why not make a mural of that iconic photograph?
Bryant helped to raise funds from hundreds of individual donations as well as local grants.
“It was a big morale boost,” she said, “for Rochester, a smaller city, to have an international figure come to support our leaders.”
Bryant saw the project as a true community effort, with local businesses selling T-shirts as part of the fundraiser. Yet the larger-than-life, black-and-white mural is missing one person from that photograph: Doris Price.
“We don’t think she’s not worthy of being honored,” Bryant said in regards to Doris Price’s exclusion from the mural. “It was a decision by the artist,” she continued, noting that the other figures are more well known in Rochester’s fight for civil rights.
The mural’s artist, Quajay Donnell, could not be reached for comment.
Jilchristina Vest, who turned her West Oakland, California, home into the canvas for the only mural dedicated to women of the Black Panther Party, wants to champion the contributions of the majority-female social organization, not obscure them. The excluding of Black women happens all the time, Vest said. Her house stands as a colorful curb against that. From her perspective, there’s no valid excuse for leaving Doris Price out of the mural.
“The power of public art is in the hands of the oppressed,” she said. “What story are we going to tell?”
Returning to the story of Colvin, it may seem she was forgotten in favor of Parks because of surface reasons: She was so young, she was darker-skinned, she was not as experienced of an activist as Parks. But time would reveal another, less visible, reason for Colvin’s omission — she became pregnant. Fearful of the backlash that could ensue about Colvin being a “bad woman,” civil rights leaders intentionally back-burnered her story to favor Parks.
Images — and reputations — play a role in who we remember and also how we forget. Washington, Doris Price’s granddaughter, hopes to amend that record. She’s advocating for a mural of Doris Price in Rochester and is collecting funds to support its realization.
After all, remembering heroes can be life-altering if you know the names — and the faces.