Civil-Rights Leader Sought a Bigger Role for Women

While more reticent than some of her male colleagues, Dorothy Height was one of a select group of leaders who coordinated the struggle for black civil rights in the 1960s. Ms. Height, who died Tuesday at age 98, was for 40 years the president of the National Council of Negro Women and the only woman among a group of leaders that included Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins, Bayard Rustin and others.

In 1963, when Mr. King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., Ms. Height was on the dais. She had tried and failed to persuade organizers that a woman should be among those to address the crowd. "Sometimes the men had trouble seeing why I was always linking desegregation with hunger and children and other social welfare issues," Ms. Height wrote in a 2003 memoir.

Ms. Height fought for civil rights from adolescence. The daughter of a contractor and a nurse in Rankin, Pa., she won a college scholarship with a speech about constitutional rights in an Elks Club elocution contest. But Barnard College, which initially had accepted her, refused to admit her because its quota of two black students for the class of 1933 had been filled. New York University then admitted her. "From that day forward," Ms. Height wrote, "I have loved every brick of that university."

While a student, Ms. Height lived in Harlem and attended nightclubs in the company of blues composer W.C. Handy. She marched in demonstrations in Times Square and on 125th Street. After working as a social worker, she switched to a job at the Young Women's Christian Association in Harlem. In 1937, she coordinated a visit to the YWCA by first lady Eleanor Roosevelt to speak before the National Council of Negro Women.

Ms. Height went on to become a regular visitor to the White House, where she advised Ms. Roosevelt and presidents starting with Dwight Eisenhower. She led an effort to desegregate the YWCA after World War II, and in 1957 became president of the NCNW.

Ms. Height was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal, as well as several honorary doctorates.

"Dr. Height devoted her life to those struggling for equality," President Barak Obama said in a statement Tuesday.

Ms. Height prized civility and in the 1960s spoke out against the "black power" movement, though she later came to embrace its goal of increased economic power. In 1995, she addressed the Million Man March. She continued to work until recently.

Starting in 2005, a musical biography titled "If This Hat Could Talk" toured the nation, including a repeat booking at Harlem's Apollo Theater.

"I came up at a time when young women wore hats, and they wore gloves," Ms. Height told a Denver audience in 2003. "Too many people in my generation fought for the right for us to be dressed up and not put down."

—Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A8
* REMEMBRANCES
* APRIL 21, 2010
By STEPHEN MILLER
Dorothy Height 1912 - 2010
Civil-Rights Leader Sought a Bigger Role for Women