WASHINGTON – Dorothy Height, the leading female voice of the 1960s U.S. civil rights movement and a participant in historic marches with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others, died Tuesday. She was 98.
WASHINGTON – Dorothy Height, the leading female voice of the 1960s U.S. civil rights movement and a participant in historic marches with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others, died Tuesday. She was 98.
Height led the National Council of Negro Women for 40 years. She continued actively speaking out into her 90s but had been at Howard University Hospital for some time. The hospital said in a statement she died of natural causes.
President Barack Obama called her "the godmother of the civil rights movement" and a hero to many Americans. Obama said in a statement that Height was the only woman at the highest level of the civil rights movement and witnessed "every march and milestone along the way." It was the second death of a major civil rights figure in less than a week. Benjamin L. Hooks, the former longtime head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, died Thursday in Memphis at 85.
In the 1950s and 1960s, she was the leading woman helping King and other activists orchestrate the civil rights movement.
One of Height’s sayings was, "If the time is not ripe, we have to ripen the time." She liked to quote 19th century abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who said that the three effective ways to fight for justice are to "agitate, agitate, agitate."
Height was on the platform at the Lincoln Memorial, sitting only a few feet (meters) from King, when he gave his famous I Have A Dream speech at the March on Washington in 1963. "He spoke longer than he was supposed to speak," Height recalled in a 1997 Associated Press interview. But after he was done, it was clear King’s speech would echo for generations, she said, "because it gripped everybody."
Height became president of the National Council of Negro Women in 1957 and held the post until 1997, when she was 85. She remained chairman of the group.
Height received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994 from President Bill Clinton.
Copyright 2010 Associated Press.
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