Dorothy Height

Dorothy Irene Height was born on the twenty-fourth of March 1912 in Richmond, Virginia, the daughter of James Edward Height, a building contractor, and Fannie Burroughs Height, a nurse who gave much of herself through the missionary work of the church. While Dorothy was still young, the family moved north to Rankin, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, where her gifts as a student and orator first drew notice. Barred from a scholarship she had rightfully won because of her race, she pressed on and earned degrees from New York University in the depths of the Great Depression.

Her life's work took root in service. She joined the staff of the Harlem Young Women's Christian Association and rose to national leadership within the YWCA, where she labored to desegregate its facilities and to place racial justice at the heart of its mission. In 1937 a chance meeting with Mary McLeod Bethune drew her into the National Council of Negro Women, the organization she would come to embody.

In 1957 Height became president of the National Council of Negro Women, and she held that trust for forty years, until 1997. She stood among the organizers of the 1963 March on Washington — the sole woman regularly seated with the movement's leading men — and pressed tirelessly to bind the cause of civil rights to the cause of women. She built programs of practical uplift, from voter education to the "Wednesdays in Mississippi" that quietly bridged divides.

Honors gathered late but fittingly: the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2004. She died on the twentieth of April 2010 in Washington, D.C., at the age of ninety-eight. Called the godmother of the civil rights movement, Dorothy Height carried dignity as both shield and standard — and taught a nation to lift as it climbed.