[2] Her mother, Rachel Sie (née Hall), was a domestic worker, and she was part of the First Great Migration, moving to New York from Virginia and Maryland in the early 1920s.
[2] At the college, Beveridge integrated herself into leftist political and student social justice organizations, which included the Communist Party and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and she also became a mentee of the Committee for the Negro in the Arts (CNA), which acted as her formal film education.
[1] Additionally, the CNA was where Beveridge would become acquainted with her eventual longtime collaborator and fellow female film editor Peggy Lawson, as well as other contemporary leftist documentarians.
[1] In the fall of 1949, Beveridge visited Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Soviet Union, after which she returned to school and her job at the communist Worker's Book Store.
[2] On November 25, 1952, Hortense Beveridge applied to the Local 771 for Motion Picture Film Editors, and on June 17, 1953, she became the first Black woman to be admitted to the union.