AI
Wednesday, April 21, 2010 2:41:24 AM
Dorothy I. Height 1912 -- 2010
Dorothy I. Height, founding matriarch of U.S. civil rights movement, dies at 98
Dorothy Height's Civil Rights Legacy
Dorothy I. Height's crusade for racial justice and gender equality spanned more than six decades. Ms. Height was among the coalition of African American leaders who pushed civil rights to the center of the American political stage in the years after World War II, and she was a key figure in the struggles for school desegregation, voting rights, employment and public accommodations.
» LAUNCH PHOTO GALLERY [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/gallery/2010/04/20/GA2010042001303.html ]
By Bart Barnes
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Special to The Washington Post
Dorothy I. Height, 98, a founding matriarch of the American civil rights movement whose crusade for racial justice and gender equality spanned more than six decades, died Tuesday at Howard University Hospital. The cause of death was not disclosed.
Ms. Height was among the coalition of African American leaders who pushed civil rights to the center of the American political stage after World War II, and she was a key figure in the struggles for school desegregation, voting rights, employment opportunities and public accommodations in the 1950s and 1960s.
As president of the National Council of Negro Women for 40 years, Ms. Height was arguably the most influential woman at the top levels of civil rights leadership.
Although she never drew the media attention that conferred celebrity and instant recognition on some of the other civil rights leaders of her time, Ms. Height was often described as the "glue" that held the family of black civil rights leaders together. She did much of her work out of the public spotlight, in quiet meetings and conversations, and she was widely connected at the top levels of power and influence in government and business.
As a civil rights activist, Ms. Height participated in protests in Harlem during the 1930s. In the 1940s, she lobbied first lady Eleanor Roosevelt on behalf of civil rights causes. And in the 1950s, she prodded President Dwight D. Eisenhower to move more aggressively on school desegregation issues. In 1994, Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.
In a statement issued by the White House, President Obama called Ms. Height "the godmother of the Civil Rights Movement and a hero to so many Americans."
She "devoted her life to those struggling for equality . . . witnessing every march and milestone along the way," Obama said.
In the turmoil of the civil rights struggles in the 1960s, Ms. Height helped orchestrate strategy with movement leaders including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph and John Lewis, who would later serve as a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia.
In August 1963, Ms. Height was on the platform with King when he delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial. But she would say later that she was disappointed that no one advocating women's rights spoke that day at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Less than a month later, at King's request, she went to Birmingham, Ala., to minister to the families of four black girls who had died in a church bombing linked to the racial strife that had engulfed the city.
"At every major effort for social progressive change, Dorothy Height has been there," Lewis said in 1997 when Ms. Height announced her retirement as president of the National Council of Negro Women.
Women's rights champion
As a champion of social justice, Ms. Height was best known during the early years of her career for her struggles to overcome racial prejudice.
She was also energetic in her efforts to overcome gender bias, and much of that work predated the women's rights movement. When President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act in 1963, Ms. Height was among those invited to the White House to witness the ceremony. She returned to the White House in 1998 for a ceremony marking the 35th anniversary of that legislation to hear Clinton urge passage of additional laws aimed at equalizing pay for men and women.
"Dorothy Height deserves credit for helping black women understand that you had to be feminist at the same time you were African . . . that you had to play more than one role in the empowerment of black people," Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) once said.
As president of the National Council of Negro Women, Ms. Height was instrumental in organizing and sponsoring programs that emphasized self-help and self-reliance.
Those included nutrition, child care, housing and career counseling. In response to a public TV program, "The Vanishing Black Family," Ms. Height helped create and organize the Black Family Reunion Celebration, which has been held on the Mall and in cities across the country annually since 1985. The gatherings are intended to honor the traditions, strength and history of African American families while seeking solutions to such social problems as teen pregnancy and drug abuse.
"The reunion is as important today as some of our marches were in the past," Ms. Height said in 1992.
In 1995, Ms. Height was among the few women to speak at the Million Man March on the Mall, which was led by Louis Farrakhan, the chief minister of the Nation of Islam. "I am here because you are here," she declared. Two years later, at 85, she sat at the podium all day, in the whipping wind and rain, at the Million Woman March in Philadelphia.
A constant fight
Dorothy Irene Height was born in Richmond on March 24, 1912, and she grew up in Rankin, Pa., near Pittsburgh, where she attended racially integrated schools. But she felt the lash of racial bigotry early in her life. A music teacher in her mostly white elementary school appointed her student director of the school chorus, but a new principal forbade her to take that position. At the next school assembly, the chorus refused to stand and sing until Ms. Height was reinstated as leader, and the principal relented.
The principal subsequently became one of her staunchest supporters, Ms. Height recalled in her 2003 memoir, "Open Wide the Freedom Gates."
As a high school senior and the valedictorian, she won a national oratorical contest, and with it a $1,000 college scholarship. But the college of her choice, Barnard in New York, had already admitted its quota of black students -- two. When Ms. Height applied, she was informed that she would have to wait at least a semester before she could enroll.
Instead, she went to New York University, where she graduated in three years and received a master's degree in educational psychology in her fourth year.
As a young woman, Ms. Height made money through jobs such as ironing entertainer Eddie Cantor's shirts and proofreading Marcus Garvey's newspaper, the Negro World. She went nightclubbing in Harlem with composer W.C. Handy.
Ms. Height began her professional career as a caseworker for the New York City welfare department. She got her start as a civil rights activist through the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Sr., pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, and from the pastor's son, the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who later represented Harlem in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Ms. Height later said that as an officer of the Harlem Christian Youth Council, "I was one of the multitude whose first experience as a civil rights activist was in walking and talking with merchants on 125th Street."
Seizing an opportunity
After attending an international church youth conference in London in the summer of 1937, Ms. Height returned to New York with the conviction that she needed to operate from a broader base than that of a welfare caseworker. She found her opportunity that November at the Harlem branch of the YWCA during a visit by Eleanor Roosevelt.
Mary McLeod Bethune, president of the Harlem YWCA, was impressed by Ms. Height's poise and style in greeting the president's wife, and she promptly offered her a job.
Quitting her job as a welfare caseworker, Ms. Height joined the staff of the Harlem YWCA. She remained a full-time YWCA staffer until 1975, serving the last 18 years simultaneously as president of the National Council of Negro Women.
As a child, she had once been turned away from the Pittsburgh YWCA swimming pool. As a YWCA staff member, she was instrumental in bringing about an interracial charter for Ys in 1946.
In the 1940s, Ms. Height came to Washington as chief of the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA branch. She joined the staff of the national YWCA board in 1944, and, until 1975, she remained on that staff with a variety of responsibilities, including leadership training and interracial and ecumenical education.
In 1965, she organized and became the director of the YWCA's Center for Racial Justice, and she held that position until retiring from the YWCA board in 1975. She was a visiting professor at the Delhi School of Social Work in India, and she directed studies around the world on issues involving human rights.
Ms. Height became national president of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority in 1947, and she held that position until 1957, when she became the fourth president of the National Council of Negro Women.
Over the next four decades, she established a national reputation as a graceful and insistent voice for civil rights and women's rights. She was tall and stately and spoke in a tone that always commanded attention. She rarely had to raise her voice.
"If the times aren't ripe, you have to ripen the times," she liked to say. It was important, she said, to dress well. "I came up at a time when young women wore hats, and they wore gloves. Too many people in my generation fought for the right for us to be dressed up and not put down."
Ms. Height never married. She is survived by one sister, Anthanette Height Aldridge of New York.
Wide influence
As the women's rights movement gained momentum in the early 1970s, Ms. Height forged alliances with white feminist leaders, while disagreeing periodically on matters of tactics and racial emphasis. "African American women have advanced in every field that women have advanced, but the sad point is that those are the few and not the many," she said.
Under her leadership, the National Council of Negro Women sponsored voter registration drives and organized an education foundation for student activists who interrupted their education to do civil rights work.
Another 1960s program, Wednesdays in Mississippi, was a favorite of Ms. Height's. It consisted of weekly trips to Mississippi by interracial groups of women to assist at Freedom Schools and voter registration campaigns. This was often perilous work, especially during the summers of 1964 and 1965, when the hundreds of young civil rights volunteers who streamed into Mississippi were routinely harassed, sometimes beaten and, in a few cases, killed.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the council helped organize and operate development projects in African countries. It ran a "pig bank" project in rural Mississippi in which pigs were given to poor, hungry families so they could raise them, with the understanding that two pigs from subsequent litters would be put back into the bank for another family.
Over the years, there were fundraising drives for a statue of Bethune and acquisition of a large and imposing headquarters building in downtown Washington to house the National Council and the Dorothy I. Height Leadership Institute. The building, with white oak woodwork, a marble staircase and fluted cast-iron columns, stands at 633 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, the site of what was once a slave market. For years after stepping down as president of the National Council, Ms. Height made daily visits to her office there, using a walker or a wheelchair as she became infirm.
On her 92nd birthday, she received the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest decoration Congress can bestow. But Ms. Height often urged her co-workers to "stop worrying about whose name gets in the paper and start doing something about rats, and day care and low wages. . . . We must try to take our task more seriously and ourselves more lightly."
Staff writer Hamil R. Harris contributed to this report.
© 2010 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/20/AR2010042001287.html [also at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2010/04/20/ST2010042001352.html ]
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Appreciation: Civil rights matriarch fought racism with dignity
By Hamil R. Harris
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 20, 2010; 11:30 AM
The first time I met Dorothy Height, she seemed out of place.
She was wearing an obviously expensive pantsuit, sporting a wide-brim church hat and zipping around the Mall on a golf cart.
It was 1986, the first year of the National Black Family Reunion that Height had boldly pushed for. Even though racial diversity was in full bloom, Height believed that African American families needed to celebrate themselves in a big way.
By then, Height was already a civil rights icon, revered as a national treasure. I was new to Washington. As a freelance broadcast journalist, I needed a sound bite to get paid. Height stood in front of my little microphone and gave much more.
Of course I knew her, had seen her on television, but as I listened to Height her passion for social justice was overwhelming. Since then, I have interviewed her dozens of times. She was always available and accessible to the ordinary, as well as the extraordinary. And she always seemed to say the right thing.
Height began her career with another civil rights leader, educator Mary McLeod Bethune, and worked with presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Barack Obama. She always mixed the social with the political, closing out the annual family reunion with a gospel concert and a traditional benediction.
More than a half-million people have attended the National Black Family Reunions since they began in 1986. Along the way, she reminded everyone that the event was not just about money. She forced vendors to keep the food prices low and kept the focus on health care and education.
In the summer of 1991, my wife and I attended the annual summer gathering with my mother-in-law and our new baby Aria. My wife, Taunya Harris, had never been to the reunion and wanted to see singer Jermaine Jackson. But it was Dorothy Height who stole the show. "I will never forget. Dr. Height came out on stage dressed in this blue outfit," she said.
Height knew how to bring people together. When comedian Bill Cosby offered a scorching critique of black America during the 50th anniversary of the landmark Brown vs. the Board of Education case, which declared separate schools for blacks and whites unconstitutional, many blacks were angry. But Height said that Cosby was right because "the promises of Brown have yet to be fulfilled."
Former secretary of labor Alexis Herman, who has been leading the day-to-day operations of the National Council of Negro Women, said when she thinks of Height's legacy, she thinks of one word: service.
"She has lived her whole life serving the people," Herman said. "Hers was a life of service and giving back.
"She not only expected us to keep going, she instructed us to keep going," she added. "She would ball that fist up and say that the National Council of Negro Women wasn't about one or two persons. She balled her fist to say that you can strike a mighty blow when you make a fist and work together."
Before coming to the NCNW, Height served as president of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority from 1947 to 1956. E. Faye Williams, a lawyer and president of the National Congress of Black Women, said she met Height at a Delta convention when Williams was only 17.
"Dr. Height has been a mentor and a role model for so many of us who work in the service to our country," Williams said. "She leaves impossible shoes for us to fill. She was involved in organizational leadership when it was not always popular for women to be leaders."
In 1995, NCNW became the only historic black organization on Pennsylvania Avenue, in close proximity to the Capitol. A few years later, Oprah Winfrey paid off the mortgage. Before her death, Height said one of the proudest moments came when the organization hosted an inaugural viewing party for the first African American president.
"Having worked hard for civil rights and opportunities, I was excited," she said. "The fact that we won the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which eliminated legal segregation, made the country better not just for black people, but for white people, too."
Height fought racism with dignity. On Sunday, Sept. 13, 2009, the last black family reunion Height attended, she parked her wheelchair on the main stage as gospel artist CeCe Winans performed. My camera was rolling.
"We open with a prayer breakfast, we close with a gospel concert, because we know that with all we have been through we have not come this far alone," Height said. "We do not like to hear the black family always described as a problem. Our children were a problem, our men were a problem, our women were a problem. We know we have problems, but we are not a problem people!"
© 2010 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/20/AR2010042002307.html [comments at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/20/AR2010042002307_Comments.html ]
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Dr. Dorothy I. Height
LCCREF [ http://www.youtube.com/user/LCCREF ]
July 08, 2008
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Dorothy Height, Heroine of Civil Rights Era, Is Dead at 98
Dorothy Height in 2003.
Paul Hosefros/The New York Times
---
VIDEO »
An Interview With Dorothy Height
In a January interview with The Times's Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Dorothy Height discussed race, her own life and President Obama.
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2010/04/20/obituaries/1247467659411/an-interview-with-dorothy-height.html
---
By MARGALIT FOX
Published: April 20, 2010
Dorothy Height, a leader of the African-American and women’s rights movements who was considered both the grande dame of the civil rights era and its unsung heroine, died on Tuesday in Washington. She was 98.
The death, at Howard University Hospital, was announced jointly by the hospital and the National Council of Negro Women [ http://www.ncnw.org/ ], 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. [ http://www.ywca.org/site/pp.asp?c=djISI6PIKpG&b=284783 ], she presided over the integration of its facilities nationwide in the 1940s.
With Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, Betty Friedan and others, she helped found the National Women’s Political Caucus [ http://www.nwpc.org/ ] 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 [ http://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/reference/two_column_table/Presidential_Medal_of_Freedom_Recipients.htm ] 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 [ http://www.blackpast.org/?q=primary/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 [ http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20D1FF93E5C1B7A93CBA8178ED85F4C8385F9&scp=2&sq=%22dorothy%20height%22%20and%20%22slave%20markets%22&st=cse ]. 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 [ http://www.deltasigmatheta.org/ ], 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 [ http://clerk.house.gov/art_history/house_history/goldMedal.html ], 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, Barnard College designated Ms. Height an honorary graduate [ http://www.barnard.edu/newnews/news060304c.html ].
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/21/us/21height.html
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Dorothy Height remembered as a supporter of church unity
From "Philip Jenks" <pjenks@ncccusa.org>
Date Tue, 20 Apr 2010 13:01:58 -0400
Ecumenical leaders recall Dorothy I. Height
as a tireless supporter of church unity
Washington, April 20, 2010 -- Dorothy Irene Height, who began her activist
career as a teenager marching in New York's Times Square shouting, "Stop the
lynching," was remembered Tuesday as one of the last great voices of the
American Civil Rights Movement.
Height, 98, who led the National Council of Negro Women for four decades and
continued to speak out on justice issues in her 90s, died early today.
"We remember Dr. Height both as a civil rights leader and as a tireless
champion of church unity," said the Rev. Dr. Michael Kinnamon, General
Secretary of the National Council of Churches.
"History will not forget the contributions Dorothy Height made to the cause of
freedom and justice," Kinnamon said. "We in the church will never forget the
essential role her faith played in motivating her lifelong quest on behalf of
persons of all ages, races and ethnicities. She knew that persons of faith can
be an irresistible force for justice when we join hearts and hands, and she
was a leader in that march throughout most of our lifetimes."
A United Methodist, Height was the first recipient in 2004 of the National
Council of Churches J. Irwin Miller Award, named for one of the Council's lay
presidents, Kinnamon noted. (See
http://www.ncccusa.org/generalassembly/ga2004/heighttext.html )
Presenting the award was Bishop Thomas L. Hoyt of the Christian Methodist
Episcopal Church, and NCC president in 2004.
"Friends, I cannot think of anyone who is more deserving of the J. Irwin
Miller Award than Dorothy Height," Hoyt said at the time. "She is a living
legend in the movement for civil rights in this nation. She has dedicated
herself to improving the quality of life for African-American women and
children. She is known internationally for her work for human rights for all.
The world is truly a better place because of the work and witness of Dr.
Dorothy Irene Height.
"Dr. Height is also an unassuming and gracious woman of God. When you first
see her, impeccably dressed from head to toe, with soft smile, and a twinkle
in her eye, you would not imagine what a powerful woman she has become," said
Hoyt.
Height was also honored by Church Women United in 1999 as a recipient of the
CWU Human Rights Award.
"Dr. Height was a tremendous supporter of Church Women United since our
beginning in 1941," said Djamillah Samad, Church Women United national
executive in New York.
Height and her friend Eleanor Roosevelt, then First Lady, saw the organization
as an important witness for peace on the brink of the Second World War. "We
are going to miss her greatly. It was through the leadership and guidance of
women like Dr. Height that working with social justice issues from a Christian
perspective became and remains the focus of CWU today," Samad said.
In 1937, while she was working at the Harlem YWCA, Height met famed educator
Mary McLeod Bethune, the founder of the National Council of Negro Women, and
first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who had come to speak at a meeting of Bethune's
organization. Height eventually rose to leadership roles in both the council
and the YWCA.
In 2006, National Council of Churches staff were invited to preview
performances of a musical about the life of Dorothy Height, "If This Hat Could
Talk." The "hat" referred to Height's wide-brimmed trademark hats that she
wore throughout her life. (See http://www.ncccusa.org/069530hat.html )
NCC News contact: Philip E. Jenks, 212-870-2228 (office), 646-853-4212 (cell)
, pjenks@ncccusa.org
The posting organizations grant permission to reproduce, copy or quote all documents on the WFN web site [ http://www.wfn.org/index.php ].
http://www.wfn.org/2010/04/msg00109.html
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Highlights of civil rights activist Dorothy Height’s life
Dorothy Height stands with former President Bill Clinton to celebrate the signing of the Equal Pay Act.
Dorothy Height, a leading civil rights activist, died Tuesday [ http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/04/20/obit.height/index.html ], Howard University Hospital confirmed.
The hospital spokesman, Ron Harris, said Height died at 3:41 a.m. No cause of death was given. She was age 98.
Height, who had been chair and president emerita of the National Council of Negro Women, worked in the 1960s alongside civil rights pioneers, including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., future U.S. Rep. John Lewis and A. Philip Randolph.
Here's a look at the highlights of her life:
Personal:
Birth date: March 24, 1912
Birth place: Richmond, Virginia
Birth name: Dorothy Irene Height
Parents: James Edward, building contractor, and Fannie (Burroughs) Height
Education: New York University, BA and MA (Educational Psychology), 1933
Columbia University and the New York School of Social Work (Post-Graduate)
Career Highlights:
* 1933 – Leader of the United Christian Youth Movement of North America. Height works to prevent lynching and desegregate the armed forces.
* 1935 – Height is asked to work with ending Harlem riot.
* 1937 – Mary McLeod Bethune, National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) founder asks Height to join organization assisting with women's rights for equal pay and education.
* 1944-1977 – Height works in several leadership positions with the National Board of the YWCA of the USA.
* 1965 – Becomes Director of the Center for Racial Justice.
* 1944-1956 – Height serves as Vice President and later President of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority.
* 1952-1955 – Is a member on the U.S. Department of Defense Advisory Committee on Women.
* 1957-1998 – National President of National Council of Negro Women.
* 1958-1968 – Is a member on the New York State Welfare Board.
* 1964 – Organizes "Wednesdays in Mississippi" to open communication among women of various races.
* 1964-1970 – Is a member of the American Red Cross board of governors.
* 1965-1977 – Is the founder and director of YWCA Center for Racial Justice.
* 1970 – Height creates the Women's Center for Education and Career Advancement in New York City. Center helps women with entry-level jobs.
* 1993 – Is inducted into The National Women's Hall of Fame.
* 1994 – Is Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by president Bill Clinton.
* October 25, 1997 – Participates in the "Million Woman March" in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
* 1998 – Height becomes Chair and President Emerita of NCNW.
* 2004 – President George W. Bush presents Height with the Congressional Gold Medal.
* January 20, 2009 – Is at the podium when Barack Obama is sworn in as the 44th president of the United States.
* April 20, 2010 – Dies of natural causes at Howard University Hospital in DC.
Publications:
Open Wide the Freedom Gates: A Memoir, 2003
Sources: Biography Resource Center, NCNW, Britannica
© 2010 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/04/20/highlights-of-civil-rights-activist-dorothy-heights-life/ [with comments]
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and in addition to (items linked in) the post to which this post is a reply and preceding, see also e.g. (items linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=48166526
Dorothy I. Height, founding matriarch of U.S. civil rights movement, dies at 98
Dorothy Height's Civil Rights Legacy
Dorothy I. Height's crusade for racial justice and gender equality spanned more than six decades. Ms. Height was among the coalition of African American leaders who pushed civil rights to the center of the American political stage in the years after World War II, and she was a key figure in the struggles for school desegregation, voting rights, employment and public accommodations.
» LAUNCH PHOTO GALLERY [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/gallery/2010/04/20/GA2010042001303.html ]
By Bart Barnes
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Special to The Washington Post
Dorothy I. Height, 98, a founding matriarch of the American civil rights movement whose crusade for racial justice and gender equality spanned more than six decades, died Tuesday at Howard University Hospital. The cause of death was not disclosed.
Ms. Height was among the coalition of African American leaders who pushed civil rights to the center of the American political stage after World War II, and she was a key figure in the struggles for school desegregation, voting rights, employment opportunities and public accommodations in the 1950s and 1960s.
As president of the National Council of Negro Women for 40 years, Ms. Height was arguably the most influential woman at the top levels of civil rights leadership.
Although she never drew the media attention that conferred celebrity and instant recognition on some of the other civil rights leaders of her time, Ms. Height was often described as the "glue" that held the family of black civil rights leaders together. She did much of her work out of the public spotlight, in quiet meetings and conversations, and she was widely connected at the top levels of power and influence in government and business.
As a civil rights activist, Ms. Height participated in protests in Harlem during the 1930s. In the 1940s, she lobbied first lady Eleanor Roosevelt on behalf of civil rights causes. And in the 1950s, she prodded President Dwight D. Eisenhower to move more aggressively on school desegregation issues. In 1994, Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.
In a statement issued by the White House, President Obama called Ms. Height "the godmother of the Civil Rights Movement and a hero to so many Americans."
She "devoted her life to those struggling for equality . . . witnessing every march and milestone along the way," Obama said.
In the turmoil of the civil rights struggles in the 1960s, Ms. Height helped orchestrate strategy with movement leaders including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph and John Lewis, who would later serve as a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia.
In August 1963, Ms. Height was on the platform with King when he delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial. But she would say later that she was disappointed that no one advocating women's rights spoke that day at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Less than a month later, at King's request, she went to Birmingham, Ala., to minister to the families of four black girls who had died in a church bombing linked to the racial strife that had engulfed the city.
"At every major effort for social progressive change, Dorothy Height has been there," Lewis said in 1997 when Ms. Height announced her retirement as president of the National Council of Negro Women.
Women's rights champion
As a champion of social justice, Ms. Height was best known during the early years of her career for her struggles to overcome racial prejudice.
She was also energetic in her efforts to overcome gender bias, and much of that work predated the women's rights movement. When President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act in 1963, Ms. Height was among those invited to the White House to witness the ceremony. She returned to the White House in 1998 for a ceremony marking the 35th anniversary of that legislation to hear Clinton urge passage of additional laws aimed at equalizing pay for men and women.
"Dorothy Height deserves credit for helping black women understand that you had to be feminist at the same time you were African . . . that you had to play more than one role in the empowerment of black people," Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) once said.
As president of the National Council of Negro Women, Ms. Height was instrumental in organizing and sponsoring programs that emphasized self-help and self-reliance.
Those included nutrition, child care, housing and career counseling. In response to a public TV program, "The Vanishing Black Family," Ms. Height helped create and organize the Black Family Reunion Celebration, which has been held on the Mall and in cities across the country annually since 1985. The gatherings are intended to honor the traditions, strength and history of African American families while seeking solutions to such social problems as teen pregnancy and drug abuse.
"The reunion is as important today as some of our marches were in the past," Ms. Height said in 1992.
In 1995, Ms. Height was among the few women to speak at the Million Man March on the Mall, which was led by Louis Farrakhan, the chief minister of the Nation of Islam. "I am here because you are here," she declared. Two years later, at 85, she sat at the podium all day, in the whipping wind and rain, at the Million Woman March in Philadelphia.
A constant fight
Dorothy Irene Height was born in Richmond on March 24, 1912, and she grew up in Rankin, Pa., near Pittsburgh, where she attended racially integrated schools. But she felt the lash of racial bigotry early in her life. A music teacher in her mostly white elementary school appointed her student director of the school chorus, but a new principal forbade her to take that position. At the next school assembly, the chorus refused to stand and sing until Ms. Height was reinstated as leader, and the principal relented.
The principal subsequently became one of her staunchest supporters, Ms. Height recalled in her 2003 memoir, "Open Wide the Freedom Gates."
As a high school senior and the valedictorian, she won a national oratorical contest, and with it a $1,000 college scholarship. But the college of her choice, Barnard in New York, had already admitted its quota of black students -- two. When Ms. Height applied, she was informed that she would have to wait at least a semester before she could enroll.
Instead, she went to New York University, where she graduated in three years and received a master's degree in educational psychology in her fourth year.
As a young woman, Ms. Height made money through jobs such as ironing entertainer Eddie Cantor's shirts and proofreading Marcus Garvey's newspaper, the Negro World. She went nightclubbing in Harlem with composer W.C. Handy.
Ms. Height began her professional career as a caseworker for the New York City welfare department. She got her start as a civil rights activist through the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Sr., pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, and from the pastor's son, the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who later represented Harlem in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Ms. Height later said that as an officer of the Harlem Christian Youth Council, "I was one of the multitude whose first experience as a civil rights activist was in walking and talking with merchants on 125th Street."
Seizing an opportunity
After attending an international church youth conference in London in the summer of 1937, Ms. Height returned to New York with the conviction that she needed to operate from a broader base than that of a welfare caseworker. She found her opportunity that November at the Harlem branch of the YWCA during a visit by Eleanor Roosevelt.
Mary McLeod Bethune, president of the Harlem YWCA, was impressed by Ms. Height's poise and style in greeting the president's wife, and she promptly offered her a job.
Quitting her job as a welfare caseworker, Ms. Height joined the staff of the Harlem YWCA. She remained a full-time YWCA staffer until 1975, serving the last 18 years simultaneously as president of the National Council of Negro Women.
As a child, she had once been turned away from the Pittsburgh YWCA swimming pool. As a YWCA staff member, she was instrumental in bringing about an interracial charter for Ys in 1946.
In the 1940s, Ms. Height came to Washington as chief of the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA branch. She joined the staff of the national YWCA board in 1944, and, until 1975, she remained on that staff with a variety of responsibilities, including leadership training and interracial and ecumenical education.
In 1965, she organized and became the director of the YWCA's Center for Racial Justice, and she held that position until retiring from the YWCA board in 1975. She was a visiting professor at the Delhi School of Social Work in India, and she directed studies around the world on issues involving human rights.
Ms. Height became national president of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority in 1947, and she held that position until 1957, when she became the fourth president of the National Council of Negro Women.
Over the next four decades, she established a national reputation as a graceful and insistent voice for civil rights and women's rights. She was tall and stately and spoke in a tone that always commanded attention. She rarely had to raise her voice.
"If the times aren't ripe, you have to ripen the times," she liked to say. It was important, she said, to dress well. "I came up at a time when young women wore hats, and they wore gloves. Too many people in my generation fought for the right for us to be dressed up and not put down."
Ms. Height never married. She is survived by one sister, Anthanette Height Aldridge of New York.
Wide influence
As the women's rights movement gained momentum in the early 1970s, Ms. Height forged alliances with white feminist leaders, while disagreeing periodically on matters of tactics and racial emphasis. "African American women have advanced in every field that women have advanced, but the sad point is that those are the few and not the many," she said.
Under her leadership, the National Council of Negro Women sponsored voter registration drives and organized an education foundation for student activists who interrupted their education to do civil rights work.
Another 1960s program, Wednesdays in Mississippi, was a favorite of Ms. Height's. It consisted of weekly trips to Mississippi by interracial groups of women to assist at Freedom Schools and voter registration campaigns. This was often perilous work, especially during the summers of 1964 and 1965, when the hundreds of young civil rights volunteers who streamed into Mississippi were routinely harassed, sometimes beaten and, in a few cases, killed.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the council helped organize and operate development projects in African countries. It ran a "pig bank" project in rural Mississippi in which pigs were given to poor, hungry families so they could raise them, with the understanding that two pigs from subsequent litters would be put back into the bank for another family.
Over the years, there were fundraising drives for a statue of Bethune and acquisition of a large and imposing headquarters building in downtown Washington to house the National Council and the Dorothy I. Height Leadership Institute. The building, with white oak woodwork, a marble staircase and fluted cast-iron columns, stands at 633 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, the site of what was once a slave market. For years after stepping down as president of the National Council, Ms. Height made daily visits to her office there, using a walker or a wheelchair as she became infirm.
On her 92nd birthday, she received the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest decoration Congress can bestow. But Ms. Height often urged her co-workers to "stop worrying about whose name gets in the paper and start doing something about rats, and day care and low wages. . . . We must try to take our task more seriously and ourselves more lightly."
Staff writer Hamil R. Harris contributed to this report.
© 2010 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/20/AR2010042001287.html [also at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2010/04/20/ST2010042001352.html ]
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Appreciation: Civil rights matriarch fought racism with dignity
By Hamil R. Harris
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 20, 2010; 11:30 AM
The first time I met Dorothy Height, she seemed out of place.
She was wearing an obviously expensive pantsuit, sporting a wide-brim church hat and zipping around the Mall on a golf cart.
It was 1986, the first year of the National Black Family Reunion that Height had boldly pushed for. Even though racial diversity was in full bloom, Height believed that African American families needed to celebrate themselves in a big way.
By then, Height was already a civil rights icon, revered as a national treasure. I was new to Washington. As a freelance broadcast journalist, I needed a sound bite to get paid. Height stood in front of my little microphone and gave much more.
Of course I knew her, had seen her on television, but as I listened to Height her passion for social justice was overwhelming. Since then, I have interviewed her dozens of times. She was always available and accessible to the ordinary, as well as the extraordinary. And she always seemed to say the right thing.
Height began her career with another civil rights leader, educator Mary McLeod Bethune, and worked with presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Barack Obama. She always mixed the social with the political, closing out the annual family reunion with a gospel concert and a traditional benediction.
More than a half-million people have attended the National Black Family Reunions since they began in 1986. Along the way, she reminded everyone that the event was not just about money. She forced vendors to keep the food prices low and kept the focus on health care and education.
In the summer of 1991, my wife and I attended the annual summer gathering with my mother-in-law and our new baby Aria. My wife, Taunya Harris, had never been to the reunion and wanted to see singer Jermaine Jackson. But it was Dorothy Height who stole the show. "I will never forget. Dr. Height came out on stage dressed in this blue outfit," she said.
Height knew how to bring people together. When comedian Bill Cosby offered a scorching critique of black America during the 50th anniversary of the landmark Brown vs. the Board of Education case, which declared separate schools for blacks and whites unconstitutional, many blacks were angry. But Height said that Cosby was right because "the promises of Brown have yet to be fulfilled."
Former secretary of labor Alexis Herman, who has been leading the day-to-day operations of the National Council of Negro Women, said when she thinks of Height's legacy, she thinks of one word: service.
"She has lived her whole life serving the people," Herman said. "Hers was a life of service and giving back.
"She not only expected us to keep going, she instructed us to keep going," she added. "She would ball that fist up and say that the National Council of Negro Women wasn't about one or two persons. She balled her fist to say that you can strike a mighty blow when you make a fist and work together."
Before coming to the NCNW, Height served as president of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority from 1947 to 1956. E. Faye Williams, a lawyer and president of the National Congress of Black Women, said she met Height at a Delta convention when Williams was only 17.
"Dr. Height has been a mentor and a role model for so many of us who work in the service to our country," Williams said. "She leaves impossible shoes for us to fill. She was involved in organizational leadership when it was not always popular for women to be leaders."
In 1995, NCNW became the only historic black organization on Pennsylvania Avenue, in close proximity to the Capitol. A few years later, Oprah Winfrey paid off the mortgage. Before her death, Height said one of the proudest moments came when the organization hosted an inaugural viewing party for the first African American president.
"Having worked hard for civil rights and opportunities, I was excited," she said. "The fact that we won the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which eliminated legal segregation, made the country better not just for black people, but for white people, too."
Height fought racism with dignity. On Sunday, Sept. 13, 2009, the last black family reunion Height attended, she parked her wheelchair on the main stage as gospel artist CeCe Winans performed. My camera was rolling.
"We open with a prayer breakfast, we close with a gospel concert, because we know that with all we have been through we have not come this far alone," Height said. "We do not like to hear the black family always described as a problem. Our children were a problem, our men were a problem, our women were a problem. We know we have problems, but we are not a problem people!"
© 2010 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/20/AR2010042002307.html [comments at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/20/AR2010042002307_Comments.html ]
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Dr. Dorothy I. Height
LCCREF [ http://www.youtube.com/user/LCCREF ]
July 08, 2008
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEa0kr42XYk [with comments]
=====
Dorothy Height, Heroine of Civil Rights Era, Is Dead at 98
Dorothy Height in 2003.
Paul Hosefros/The New York Times
---
VIDEO »
An Interview With Dorothy Height
In a January interview with The Times's Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Dorothy Height discussed race, her own life and President Obama.
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2010/04/20/obituaries/1247467659411/an-interview-with-dorothy-height.html
---
By MARGALIT FOX
Published: April 20, 2010
Dorothy Height, a leader of the African-American and women’s rights movements who was considered both the grande dame of the civil rights era and its unsung heroine, died on Tuesday in Washington. She was 98.
The death, at Howard University Hospital, was announced jointly by the hospital and the National Council of Negro Women [ http://www.ncnw.org/ ], 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. [ http://www.ywca.org/site/pp.asp?c=djISI6PIKpG&b=284783 ], she presided over the integration of its facilities nationwide in the 1940s.
With Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, Betty Friedan and others, she helped found the National Women’s Political Caucus [ http://www.nwpc.org/ ] 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 [ http://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/reference/two_column_table/Presidential_Medal_of_Freedom_Recipients.htm ] 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 [ http://www.blackpast.org/?q=primary/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 [ http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20D1FF93E5C1B7A93CBA8178ED85F4C8385F9&scp=2&sq=%22dorothy%20height%22%20and%20%22slave%20markets%22&st=cse ]. 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 [ http://www.deltasigmatheta.org/ ], 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 [ http://clerk.house.gov/art_history/house_history/goldMedal.html ], 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, Barnard College designated Ms. Height an honorary graduate [ http://www.barnard.edu/newnews/news060304c.html ].
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/21/us/21height.html
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Dorothy Height remembered as a supporter of church unity
From "Philip Jenks" <pjenks@ncccusa.org>
Date Tue, 20 Apr 2010 13:01:58 -0400
Ecumenical leaders recall Dorothy I. Height
as a tireless supporter of church unity
Washington, April 20, 2010 -- Dorothy Irene Height, who began her activist
career as a teenager marching in New York's Times Square shouting, "Stop the
lynching," was remembered Tuesday as one of the last great voices of the
American Civil Rights Movement.
Height, 98, who led the National Council of Negro Women for four decades and
continued to speak out on justice issues in her 90s, died early today.
"We remember Dr. Height both as a civil rights leader and as a tireless
champion of church unity," said the Rev. Dr. Michael Kinnamon, General
Secretary of the National Council of Churches.
"History will not forget the contributions Dorothy Height made to the cause of
freedom and justice," Kinnamon said. "We in the church will never forget the
essential role her faith played in motivating her lifelong quest on behalf of
persons of all ages, races and ethnicities. She knew that persons of faith can
be an irresistible force for justice when we join hearts and hands, and she
was a leader in that march throughout most of our lifetimes."
A United Methodist, Height was the first recipient in 2004 of the National
Council of Churches J. Irwin Miller Award, named for one of the Council's lay
presidents, Kinnamon noted. (See
http://www.ncccusa.org/generalassembly/ga2004/heighttext.html )
Presenting the award was Bishop Thomas L. Hoyt of the Christian Methodist
Episcopal Church, and NCC president in 2004.
"Friends, I cannot think of anyone who is more deserving of the J. Irwin
Miller Award than Dorothy Height," Hoyt said at the time. "She is a living
legend in the movement for civil rights in this nation. She has dedicated
herself to improving the quality of life for African-American women and
children. She is known internationally for her work for human rights for all.
The world is truly a better place because of the work and witness of Dr.
Dorothy Irene Height.
"Dr. Height is also an unassuming and gracious woman of God. When you first
see her, impeccably dressed from head to toe, with soft smile, and a twinkle
in her eye, you would not imagine what a powerful woman she has become," said
Hoyt.
Height was also honored by Church Women United in 1999 as a recipient of the
CWU Human Rights Award.
"Dr. Height was a tremendous supporter of Church Women United since our
beginning in 1941," said Djamillah Samad, Church Women United national
executive in New York.
Height and her friend Eleanor Roosevelt, then First Lady, saw the organization
as an important witness for peace on the brink of the Second World War. "We
are going to miss her greatly. It was through the leadership and guidance of
women like Dr. Height that working with social justice issues from a Christian
perspective became and remains the focus of CWU today," Samad said.
In 1937, while she was working at the Harlem YWCA, Height met famed educator
Mary McLeod Bethune, the founder of the National Council of Negro Women, and
first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who had come to speak at a meeting of Bethune's
organization. Height eventually rose to leadership roles in both the council
and the YWCA.
In 2006, National Council of Churches staff were invited to preview
performances of a musical about the life of Dorothy Height, "If This Hat Could
Talk." The "hat" referred to Height's wide-brimmed trademark hats that she
wore throughout her life. (See http://www.ncccusa.org/069530hat.html )
NCC News contact: Philip E. Jenks, 212-870-2228 (office), 646-853-4212 (cell)
, pjenks@ncccusa.org
The posting organizations grant permission to reproduce, copy or quote all documents on the WFN web site [ http://www.wfn.org/index.php ].
http://www.wfn.org/2010/04/msg00109.html
=====
Highlights of civil rights activist Dorothy Height’s life
Dorothy Height stands with former President Bill Clinton to celebrate the signing of the Equal Pay Act.
Dorothy Height, a leading civil rights activist, died Tuesday [ http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/04/20/obit.height/index.html ], Howard University Hospital confirmed.
The hospital spokesman, Ron Harris, said Height died at 3:41 a.m. No cause of death was given. She was age 98.
Height, who had been chair and president emerita of the National Council of Negro Women, worked in the 1960s alongside civil rights pioneers, including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., future U.S. Rep. John Lewis and A. Philip Randolph.
Here's a look at the highlights of her life:
Personal:
Birth date: March 24, 1912
Birth place: Richmond, Virginia
Birth name: Dorothy Irene Height
Parents: James Edward, building contractor, and Fannie (Burroughs) Height
Education: New York University, BA and MA (Educational Psychology), 1933
Columbia University and the New York School of Social Work (Post-Graduate)
Career Highlights:
* 1933 – Leader of the United Christian Youth Movement of North America. Height works to prevent lynching and desegregate the armed forces.
* 1935 – Height is asked to work with ending Harlem riot.
* 1937 – Mary McLeod Bethune, National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) founder asks Height to join organization assisting with women's rights for equal pay and education.
* 1944-1977 – Height works in several leadership positions with the National Board of the YWCA of the USA.
* 1965 – Becomes Director of the Center for Racial Justice.
* 1944-1956 – Height serves as Vice President and later President of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority.
* 1952-1955 – Is a member on the U.S. Department of Defense Advisory Committee on Women.
* 1957-1998 – National President of National Council of Negro Women.
* 1958-1968 – Is a member on the New York State Welfare Board.
* 1964 – Organizes "Wednesdays in Mississippi" to open communication among women of various races.
* 1964-1970 – Is a member of the American Red Cross board of governors.
* 1965-1977 – Is the founder and director of YWCA Center for Racial Justice.
* 1970 – Height creates the Women's Center for Education and Career Advancement in New York City. Center helps women with entry-level jobs.
* 1993 – Is inducted into The National Women's Hall of Fame.
* 1994 – Is Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by president Bill Clinton.
* October 25, 1997 – Participates in the "Million Woman March" in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
* 1998 – Height becomes Chair and President Emerita of NCNW.
* 2004 – President George W. Bush presents Height with the Congressional Gold Medal.
* January 20, 2009 – Is at the podium when Barack Obama is sworn in as the 44th president of the United States.
* April 20, 2010 – Dies of natural causes at Howard University Hospital in DC.
Publications:
Open Wide the Freedom Gates: A Memoir, 2003
Sources: Biography Resource Center, NCNW, Britannica
© 2010 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/04/20/highlights-of-civil-rights-activist-dorothy-heights-life/ [with comments]
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and in addition to (items linked in) the post to which this post is a reply and preceding, see also e.g. (items linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=48166526
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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