Dorothy Height, who was called the queen mother of the civil rights movement through seven decades of advocacy for racial equality — including 41 years as president of the National Council of Negro Women — has died. She was 98.
Height, who also played a key role in integrating the YWCA, died Tuesday of natural causes at Howard University Hospital in Washington, D.C., the council announced.
Often the only woman at strategy meetings with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders, she was a determined voice pressing the importance of issues affecting women and children, such as child care and education.
Beginning in the 1930s, she helped shape the national agenda for the YWCA. Traveling throughout the nation, she prodded local chapters to implement interracial charters at a time when racial segregation was still the order of the day.
As president of the National Council of Negro Women from 1957 to 1998, she led the group to expand its mission. Her initiatives included training thousands of women — housewives, teachers, office workers, students — to work as community advocates. It was a way to help women escape what Height called the “triple bind of racism, sexism and poverty.”
One of Height’s accomplishments was the Black Family Reunion Celebration, a three-day cultural event in Washington, with related events around the country. Founded to counter negative images of African-American families, it has been held annually since 1986.
The daughter of a nurse and a building contractor, Height was born March 24, 1912, in Richmond, Va., and grew up in Rankin, Pa.
After graduating from high school at 16, she was accepted into Barnard College in New York but was told she had to delay her entrance a year because the school had met its annual quota of two African-American students. Instead she entered New York University. In four years she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in social work.
Height never married and had no children.
She was a 25-year-old assistant director at the YWCA in Harlem when then-first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and National Council of Negro Women founder Mary McLeod Bethune paid a visit. Height was assigned the job of greeting and escorting the first lady, but a conversation with Bethune, the daughter of former slaves, altered the course of Height’s life.
We need you at the council, Bethune said to Height.
“I remember how she made her fingers into a fist to illustrate for the women the significance of working together to eliminate injustice,” Height wrote in her 2003 memoir “Open Wide the Freedom Gates.” Height began volunteering at the council and became the organization’s fourth president in 1957.
In 2004, President George W. Bush awarded Height the Congressional Gold Medal.
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