The death, at Howard University Hospital, was announced jointly by the hospital and the National Council of Negro Women, which Ms. Height had led for four
decades. A longtime Washington resident, Ms. Height was the council’s
president emerita at her death.
One of the last living links to the social activism of the New Deal era, Ms. Height had a career in civil rights that spanned nearly 80 years,
from anti-lynching protests in the early 1930s to the inauguration of President
Obama in 2009. That the American social landscape looks as it does
today owes in no small part to her work.
Originally trained as a social worker, Ms. Height was president of the National Council of Negro Women from 1957 to 1997, overseeing a range of
programs on issues like voting rights, poverty and in later years AIDS.
A longtime executive of the Y.W.C.A., she presided over the
integration of its facilities nationwide in the 1940s.
Ms. Height presented the Mary McLeod Bethune Human Rights Award to Eleanor Roosevelt in New York in 1960.
With Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, Betty
Friedan and others, she helped found the National Women’s Political Caucus in
1971. Over the decades, she advised a string of American presidents on
civil rights. If Ms. Height was less well known than her contemporaries in either the
civil rights or women’s movement, it was perhaps because she was doubly
marginalized, pushed offstage by women’s groups because of her race and
by black groups because of her sex. Throughout her career, she responded
quietly but firmly, working with a characteristic mix of limitless
energy and steely gentility to ally the two movements in the fight for
social justice. As a result, Ms. Height is widely credited as the first person in the
modern civil rights era to treat the problems of equality for women and
equality for African-Americans as a seamless whole, merging concerns
that had been largely historically separate.
The recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and other prestigious awards, Ms. Height was accorded a place of honor on
the dais on Jan. 20, 2009, when Mr. Obama took the oath of office as the
nation’s 44th president. In a statement on Tuesday, he called Ms.
Height “the godmother of the civil rights movement and a hero to so many
Americans.”
Over the years, historians have made much of the so-called “Big Six” who led the civil rights movement: the Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr., James Farmer, John Lewis, A. Philip Randolph, Roy
Wilkins and Whitney M. Young Jr. Ms. Height, the only woman to work
regularly alongside them on projects of national significance, was very
much the unheralded seventh, the leader who was cropped out,
figuratively and often literally, of images of the era.
In 1963, for instance, Ms. Height sat on the platform an arm’s length from Dr. King as he delivered his epochal “I Have a Dream” speech at the
March on Washington. She was one of the march’s chief organizers and a
prize-winning orator herself. Yet she was not asked to speak, although
many other black leaders — all men — addressed the crowd that day.
Ms. Height recounted the incident in her memoir, “Open Wide the Freedom Gates” (PublicAffairs, 2003; with a foreword by Maya Angelou).
Reviewing the memoir, The New York Times Book Review called it “a
poignant short course in a century of African-American history.”
Dorothy Irene Height was born on March 24, 1912, in Richmond, Va. Her father, James, was a building contractor; her mother, the former Fannie
Burroughs, was a nurse. A severe asthmatic as a child, Dorothy was not
expected to live, she later wrote, past the age of 16. When Dorothy was small, the family moved north to Rankin, Pa., near
Pittsburgh, where she attended integrated public schools. She began her
civil rights work as a teenager, volunteering on voting rights and
anti-lynching campaigns.
In high school, Ms. Height entered an oratory contest, sponsored by the Elks, on the subject of the United States Constitution. An eloquent
speaker even in her youth, she soon advanced to the national finals,
where she was the only black contestant. She delivered a talk on the
13th, 14th and 15th Amendments — the Reconstruction Amendments
—intended to extend constitutional protections to former slaves and
their descendants. The jury, all white, awarded her first prize: a
four-year college scholarship.
As Ms. Height told The Detroit Free Press in 2008, “I’m still working today to make the promise of the 14th Amendment of equal justice under
law a reality.”
A star student, the young Ms. Height applied to Barnard College and was accepted. Then, in the summer of 1929, shortly
before classes began, she was summoned to New York by a Barnard dean. There was a problem, the dean said. That Ms. Height had been admitted to
Barnard was certain. But she could not enroll — not then, anyway.
Barnard had already met its quota for Negro students that year.
Too distraught to call home, as she later wrote, Ms. Height did the only thing possible. Clutching her Barnard acceptance letter, she took the
subway downtown to New
York University. She was admitted at once, earning a bachelor’s
degree in education there in 1933 and a master’s in psychology two years
later.
Ms. Height was a caseworker with the New York City Welfare Department before becoming the assistant executive director of the Harlem Y.W.C.A.
in the late 1930s. One of her first public acts at the Y was to call
attention to the exploitation of black women working as domestic day
laborers. The women, who congregated on street corners in Brooklyn
and the Bronx known locally as “slave markets,” were picked up and
hired, for about 15 cents an hour, by white suburban housewives who
cruised the corners in their cars.
Ms. Height’s testimony before the New York City Council about the “slave markets” attracted the attention
of the national and international news media. For a time, the
publicity was enough to drive the markets underground, though they later
re-emerged.
In 1946, as a member of the Y’s national leadership, Ms. Height oversaw the desegregation of its facilities nationwide. In 1965, she founded the
Y’s Center for Racial Justice, which she led until 1977. While working for the Y in the late ’30s, Ms. Height was chosen to
escort the first lady, Eleanor
Roosevelt, to a meeting of the National Council of Negro Women.
There, Ms. Height caught the eye of Mary McLeod Bethune, the council’s
founder, who became her mentor.
As the council’s president during the most urgent years of the civil rights movement, Ms. Height instituted a variety of social programs in
the Deep South, including the pig bank, in which poor black families
were given a pig, a prize commodity. In the mid-’60s, she helped
institute “Wednesdays in Mississippi,” a program that flew interracial
teams of Northern women to the state to meet with black and white women
there.Ms. Height, who long maintained that strong communities were at the
heart of social welfare, inaugurated a series of “Black Family Reunions”
in the mid-1980s. Sponsored by the National Council of Negro Women and
held in cities across the United States, the reunions were large,
celebratory gatherings devoted to the history, culture and traditions of
African-Americans. Hundreds of thousands of people attended the first
one, in Washington in 1986.
From 1947 to 1956, Ms. Height was also the president of Delta Sigma Theta, an international sorority of black women. Besides the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded by President Bill Clinton in 1994, Ms. Height’s many honors include the Congressional Gold Medal, awarded
by President George W.
Bush in 2004. The two medals are the country’s highest civilian
awards.Ms. Height, who never married, is survived by a sister, Anthanette
Aldridge, of New York City. If despite her laurels Ms. Height remained in the shadow of her male
contemporaries, she rarely objected. After all, as she often said in
interviews, the task at hand was far less about personal limelight than
it was about collective struggle.“I was there, and I felt at home in the group,” she told The Sacramento
Bee in 2003 “But I didn’t feel I should elbow myself to the front when
the press focused on the male leaders." Ms. Height received three dozen honorary doctorates, from institutions
including Tuskegee, Harvard
and Princeton Universities. But there was one academic honor — the
equivalent of a bachelor’s degree — that resonated more strongly than
all the rest: In 2004, 75 years after turning her away, of the Barnard citation."">Barnard College designated Ms. Height an
honorary graduate.
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