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

Sadly, this particular day of service is made more compelling by the tragedy still unfolding in Haiti where more than 70,000 people are now known dead and are being buried in mass graves. The outpouring of response to the crisis has been intense–both multi-faceted and multi-national. 

Only a few sour notes have been sounded throughout the crisis–not surprisingly from the Right (see my post Making Hay of Haiti), which never seems to miss an opportunity to make itself look like the political phalanx of crassness and heartlessness. (I was particularly stunned by a posting on Rush Limbaugh’s website that said “don’t give aid to Haiti, Obama will steal it.”)  

Like so many Americans, I feel a personal connection to Dr. King’s legacy.  My parents–young socialist ideologues that they were then–were civil rights workers throughout the 1960s. This meant I had the honor of  growing up stuffing envelopes, making signs and meeting some of the major players in the black civil rights movement. My childhood years were spent listening in awe to the stories being told by the men and women who came North and stayed in our house, spoke at our church and did organizing with my parents. I have no doubt that these experiences–as well as the concomitant threats against my parents from the KKK and the John Birch Society for what they were doing–informed my own political and social activism which began in those years when I was an elementary school child.

I was still in grade school when Dr. King was assassinated. I had already frequently experienced being called “nigger-lover” without even really understanding what the slur meant, only that it was indeed a slur.

The morning after Dr. King’s murder I got into a brawl with several other girls in the schoolyard. It wasn’t pretty. By the time it was over I had slapped a nun in the face and excoriated her for not standing up for Dr. King against the girls who were making jokes about his death. 

Of course in my child’s outrage, I had lost all sense of Dr. King’s non-violent approach to social change. Pushing, shoving, yelling and slapping was obviously not what he advocated. But I was a child and I was angry, hurt and incensed for Dr. King. I wasn’t in a Gandhi-esque mode.

Like so many other sad days in America it was bright and sunny and warm. But a light had gone out, and even as a child, I felt it. And I still remember what that felt like.

I still have fits of rage like the one I had that April day in the schoolyard in response to the vile racism that still sparks here and there in this country—Rush Limbaugh’s remarks last week about Haiti typified that racism as have so many comments about Barack Obama since his election.

I don’t hit anyone anymore, of course and I am still embarrassed about that scene in the schoolyard. Not that I spoke out, but that I shoved several other girls and slapped a nun. The girls were only repeating what they had learned at home and my response taught them nothing.  As for the nun–there are fewer excuses for her. Likely she was a product of her racist era and really didn’t understand that her role was to inculcate us girls with Jesus Christ’s perspective–which wasn’t racism. She didn’t make the connection between Dr. King and Jesus. But some of us–the children of King’s legacy–were taught that there was a connection, that King was representative of Christ.  I wonder now why that nun didn’t see it–it seems so obvious.

When one reads of the final weeks of King’s life, they pattern Christ’s with eerie similarity. King knew he might be killed and didn’t want to die. He was exhausted from the work he had been doing for years, tired at 39–not that many years older than Christ was at his crucifixtion–of the nights in jail, the separations from his family, the endless losses and the endless attacks. And yet, like Christ, he went on, even as he had premonitions of his own assassination.

I replay that day after King’s assassination  in my head–the fight in the schoolyard which was so not in keeping with Dr. King’s legacy, the poem I wrote for Dr. King as I sat outside Mother Superior’s office waiting to find out if I would be expelled, the men and women from Mississippi and Alabama who would call later at my parent’s house, the overwhelming sorrow and anger we all felt, even children like myself.  I replay that day on every anniversary of Dr. King’s death  and on his day of tribute. Kids like I was then, the children of the Sixties, were being raised on leftist ideology and protest songs. The music of our lives was by Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs and Odetta. We were being innoculated with the antidote to generations of racism and Jim Crow laws and “coloreds only” signs. We were being taught that there was indeed no difference between white and black. We were the children of Dr. King in ways that were not biological but sociological. And so the killing of Dr. King seemed for a child like I was then, terrifying as it was incomprehensible. It was one more killing that I didn’t understand–like the murder of four little girls like myself  in a Birmingham church and three civil rights workers only a few years younger than my parents in Mississippi and all those others whose names we’ll never know. Dr. King would not be the last to die for the sins of others, and he wasn’t even the first in my own childhood; I had already watched the funeral of John Kennedy on TV. But I was just old enough when Dr. King was assassinated to feel how terrible his killing was and that it was an event that would touch millions and ultimately inform my own life and my future.

And so on this day of tribute I remember Dr. King in my own, very personal way, as do so many other Americans. But within those personal reminiscences there are also the wishes for the future of today: that we really do move toward a post-racial or at the very least post-racist society. That people like Limbaugh either cease to make their racist comments or cease to be honored with listeners. That we each examine ourselves for any hints of bigotry–and not just racism of whites toward blacks, but any malice that is borne out of racial, ethnic, religious or gender-based stereotypes we have internalized.

The best tribute to Dr. King and all he fought for and gave his life for is that we not hate, that we not perpetuate bigotry and discrimination. We may all be able to sit where we want on a bus today, but we are not all equal—not blacks and whites, not blacks and Latinos, not Asians and Latinos, not Jews and Muslims, not women and men, not queers and straights.

Let us pay tribute the best way we can—not with a fight in the literal or metaphorical  schoolyard, but with understanding and love. Dr. King exhorted us to open ourselves to difference and gave his life in the quest for equality. On this day of tribute, what are each of us doing to carry on his legacy?—VAB