July 1, 2026 | Dr. Cheryl Watkins-Knott, MBA, President and CEO, YWCA Metro St. Louis
This year, America celebrates her 250th birthday, complete with fireworks, parades, and speeches waxing poetic about the founders. But as the country looks back, I find myself asking a different question: when we tell the story of America, whose story gets told?
I love this country. Which is exactly why it is essential that we tell her full story. And the full story of America cannot be told without the women, especially the women of color, who built it alongside the men whose names fill our textbooks. Since 1858, YWCA has been one of the places where those women did that building. Our history and America’s history are inextricably intertwined, and this anniversary belongs to all of us.
Consider three women often overlooked in the history books, women who helped shape YWCA into the movement it is today and whose fingerprints are all over the America in which we live.
Before there was a national YWCA, there was Rosetta Evelyn Lawson. Born in Virginia to an enslaved father and a free mother, Lawson led the creation of the first local YWCA organized by and for Black women, in Washington, D.C. At the height of Jim Crow, when segregation barred Black women and girls from safe and dignified housing, she built a haven of safe, affordable housing for Black women migrating to cities in search of opportunity. For decades she was little more than a footnote in our own history, yet she understood just how essential Black women’s leadership would be to our movement’s future.
That national organization Lawson and many other local leaders anticipated soon took shape in 1906 under Grace Hoadley Dodge, the philanthropist and educator who united a fragmented movement into one national YWCA and became its first president. Dodge understood something radical for her era: that the working women streaming into American cities deserved not just charity, but dignity, power, and the infrastructure for independence.
A generation later, Dr. Dorothy Irene Height carried that work forward. As a young girl in Pittsburgh, she learned that her race barred her from swimming in the pool at the central YWCA branch and marched in to see the executive director about it. In the 1960s and 70s, as she led YWCA’s Office for Racial Justice and stood on the platform at the March on Washington, Dr. Height pushed our movement to adopt its One Imperative: to thrust our collective power toward the elimination of racism, wherever it exists, by any means necessary. She helped desegregate our facilities, in many cases years before the law required it.
Lawson, Dodge, and Height are three generations with one through-line: when America fell short of her promise, they did not abandon her. They got to work expanding her to be a place for peace, justice, freedom, and dignity for all.
YWCA Metro St. Louis was formed in 1904 to provide safe housing for women coming to work at the World’s Fair, but it did not serve women of color. In 1911, a group of African American women petitioned YWCA for a branch to serve women of color. The branch, eventually named after Phyllis Wheatley (the first African American and the second American woman to publish a book of poetry), flourished under the management of the Committee on Administration (COA), which played a critical role in sustaining the branch and its services at a time when resources were limited.
The COA’s leadership helped fund the branch’s programs and initiatives and provided a central meeting place for the African American community. The COA organized membership drives and dinners to support the branch. They often provided clothing for women in the housing program out of their own closets, and, for years, organized the celebrated Alberta E. Gantt Fashion Show to raise support for housing services. Today, YWCA Metro St. Louis is home to the only intact Committee on Administration in the country. We are proud, honored, and grateful for its continued commitment.
This is not a sidebar to the American story. It is our American story. The beauty of this country has always been its complex, diverse reality — a nation continually remade by people who were told they didn’t belong in it, and who answered by building it anyway.
So as the semiquincentennial arrives, YWCA Metro St. Louis will not be waiting for an invitation to the celebration. We are not merely guests at America’s 250th. Women — especially women of color — helped set the table. We are America 250.
The question before all of us is the one Lawson, Dodge, and Height answered in their own time: what is the history we are writing now? What will we leave the next generation? Two hundred fifty years in, the work of ensuring peace, justice, freedom, and dignity for all people is unfinished, and the story of America is still being written. We intend to keep showing up, and to bring this work, and these women, fully into the light.
Dr. Cheryl Watkins-Knott is President and Chief Executive Officer of YWCA Metro St. Louis, one of more than 190 local associations of YWCA USA, one of the nation’s oldest and largest women’s organizations. Each year we serve 10,000 individuals, families and survivors of sexual and domestic violence through transformative services including St. Louis Regional SART (Sexual Assault Response Team), Rapid Rehousing, Early Education, and Apprenticeship. Learn more at ywcastl.org
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