Dorothy Height, 'Queen' of Civil Rights Movement, Dies

I AM NOT THAT GUY · April 20, 2010

(April 20) -- Dorothy Height, one of the most influential women in the civil rights movement, died today at age 98. Her name does not often appear in the history books, but Height spent a lifetime on the front lines of the fight for racial equality and women's rights.

"At every major effort for social progressive change, Dorothy Height has been there," Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., said in 1997.

Height was best known as the former president of the National Council of Negro Women, an organization that has agitated for equal rights since 1935. But she was at the center of some of the most pivotal moments in civil rights history -- and indeed, American history -- in the past century.

Height was the only woman on stage when Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963. She wanted to speak, but women were not allowed that day. "He spoke longer than he was supposed to speak," Height later said of King.

In 2003, she told NPR that the women in the civil rights movement met the day after the speech to strategize about how to achieve equality within the movement.

"All of it was toward saying how can we bring all the people who need to understand the role that women have played, but also the predicament women face, and especially we who are women of color, where we've had both sex and racial discrimination as a characteristic of our lives," Height said.

She stood beside president John F. Kennedy as he signed the Equal Pay Act mandating equal wages for women in the workplace. And she was on stage when the first black president was sworn in. "I never thought I would live to see this," she told The New York Times last year.

Height was more than a witness to history, however.

She was a civil rights activist from the beginning. She protested the lynchings that were sweeping the country during her youth in the 1920s. She helped integrate the YWCA in 1947. She appealed to Eleanor Roosevelt and President Dwight D. Eisenhower to integrate the armed forces.

Despite her low profile, Height was among the senior members of the civil rights leadership, and she outlasted them, as well. In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. sent Height to Montgomery, Ala., to help console the families of the four girls who were murdered in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, according to The Washington Post.

She also worked on programs that addressed poverty, drug abuse and poor nutrition in black communities during her 40-year tenure as president of the National Council for Negro Women. In 1994, President Bill Clinton awarded Height the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Civil rights activist C. DeLores Tucker once said Height was an icon for women and blacks alike.

"I call Rosa Parks the mother of the civil rights movement," Tucker told The Associated Press in 1997. "Dorothy Height is the queen."

Height was born in Richmond, Va., in 1912. She never married and had no children. She was not a civil rights celebrity, but she worked tirelessly for the movement.

"So long as God let's me live, I will be on the firing line," she once said.

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