A Great Woman Passes
Dorothy Height died today. She was 98.
Height’s name is not well-known outside civil rights circles, but she was one of the movers and shakers of the black civil rights movement–a movement that many still think of as all male–plus the footnotes of Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King. But Height was one of the “Big Six”–the organizers of the 1963 March on Washington–and the only woman of the most important civil rights group in American history..
She was, in the words of many of her colleagues, the matriarch of the civil rights movement.
Height didn’t just break ground for African Americans, though–she also broke ground for women. She was as devoted to gender equality as she was to racial equity. For decades she worked to link black and white women through the common ground of their shared gender inequality. She was as much a radical feminist as she was a civil rights leader.
At 17, Height was admitted to Barnard College. Unfortunately, there was a quota system for blacks at that time–1929: two black “girls” a year. So Height went to New York University. By the time she was 22 she had a master’s degree.
At 25, she became involved with the National Council for Negro Women (NCNW) which sparked her life-long commitment to and involvement in the black civil rights movement. In 1957, she was named president of NCNW and remained in that post for 40 years.
Throughout her long career as an activist, Height worked to secure the rights of African Americans and women in the workplace and society.
One of Height’s key missions in the 1950s and 1960s was to bridge the gap between North and South (she was raised in Pennsylvania, but born in Virginia and lived most of her adult life in Washington, D.C.). Height was responsible for organizing “ Wednesdays in Mississippi.” These were intensive dialogues about the apartheid that existed in what was then the nation’s most racist and oppressive state. She brought white and black women from the North to the South to gain a keener understanding of the impact of racism and racial inequality on blacks in Mississippi.
Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), one of the other Big Six organizers, has said that Height’s work on informing people about Mississippi was a pivotal element of the movement and garnered so much attention that it helped trigger national response to the civil rights cause. On learning of her death, he said Height was ” a feminist, and long before there was a women’s movement.” Lewis called her, ”A great American, a brave and courageous woman who worked tirelessly for the cause of civil rights and social justice.”
The work that Height did was manifold–she was both street fighter and board-room organizer. By the time she was 30, she was advising national leaders, starting with Eleanor Roosevelt. She was an advisor to numerous presidents, advising Eisenhower to desegregate the nation’s schools and Johnson to add black women to his cabinet and other positions of power in his administration. Height was a friend and supporter of and advisor to both Hillary and Bill Clinton.
In 2004, George W. Bush awarded Height the Congressional Gold Medal for her civil rights work. She was 92. Of Height, Bush said, she was a “giant of the civil rights movement” and that she had advised presidents–whether they wanted her advice or not–for more than 50 years.
The prestige that accrued to Height over her long life was earned through the dligence and hard work that first got her accepted to Barnard as a 17-year-old in a highly segregated world. But it was not diligence and hard work alone–essential as those things were–that led her to the place in history she now holds. She was first and foremost a woman of immense integrity, compassion, fire and vision. If Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. saw a future where racial equality was a commonplace, Height envisioned the steps it would take to get there and began taking them early on, dragging others along with her, whether, as Bush noted, they wanted to go or not.
Height had been at Howard University Hospital since March 25, suffering from what was to be her final illness. To die at 98 is itself an accomplishment. But Height lived to see the desegregation of the schools and the end of Jim Crow. She lived to see a time when there was no quota on the number of black women entering Barnard College and she lived to see that those entering were no longer called “girls.” She lived to see Shirley Chisholm, a black woman, run for president. She lived to see Condoleezza Rice be named the first black woman Secretary of State. She lived to be among those sitting front and center at the Inauguration of Barack Obama. She lived to become the embodiment of Gandhi’s dictate: Be the change you want to see in the world.
Dorothy Height was that change. She augured that change. Thus while her passing is sad, it also gives time to reflect on the grand scale of her long and meaningful life. She was an extraordinary woman of style, grace, wit and intellect and her vision–and her implementation of that vision–utterly changed our world. –VAB
