THEY BEGAN queuing outside Washington Cathedral early yesterday morning, before President Barack Obama, the first lady, vice-president and a host of cabinet ministers and politicians arrived to pay their last respects to the “godmother of civil rights”.
Like Dorothy Height, who died last week at the age of 98, many of the mourners were African-American women. In homage to Height, they wore extravagant hats.
Height marched shoulder-to-shoulder with the Rev Martin Luther King jnr on the Mall in August 1963. For 40 years, she led the National Council of Negro Women, but was almost as well-known for her plumed and be-ribboned, Queen Mother-style hats.
The life’s work of people like Dorothy Height “made it possible for Michelle and me to be here as president and first lady”, Mr Obama observed in his eulogy.
It was only the third funeral oration he has delivered as president, after Teddy Kennedy and the miners who were killed when their shaft collapsed in West Virginia this month. The cathedral was filled to capacity, and Mr Obama received standing ovations before and after speaking.
The Obamas met Height in the early days of the presidential campaign. “And we came to love her, as so many loved her,” Mr Obama said. “We came to love her stories and we loved her smile. And we loved those hats that she wore like a crown – regal.”
Height visited the White House 21 times under the Obama presidency. In the last months of her life, she participated in discussions on healthcare. Although confined to a wheelchair, she insisted on attending a meeting during the blizzard in February, relenting only when the car could not reach her house. “But she still sent a message about what needed to be done,” Mr Obama noted.
The incident captured “the quiet, dogged, dignified persistence that all of us who loved Dr Height came to know so well.”
Height was born in Richmond, Virginia, “the capital of the old confederacy”, Mr Obama said. In the America of her childhood, “Jim Crow ruled the South. The Klan was on the rise . . . Lynching was all too often the penalty for the offence of black skin. Slaves had been freed within living memory.
“Each time she entered a room, she brought with her a rich lesson in history, discipline and personal responsibility,” Robin Givhan wrote in the Washington Post.
“When she sat in a classroom or was honoured at the White House, it was as though grainy 16mm film footage from the 1960s had suddenly been brought to life and into present-day, vivid colour.”
Though she had received an acceptance letter, Dorothy Height was denied entrance to Barnard College in 1929 because the women’s college admitted only two black women a year then. Seventy-five years later, Barnard made her an honorary alumna.
In the meantime, Height earned two degrees from New York University, worked as a welfare caseworker and became a civil rights leader. She advised generations of US leaders, starting with Eleanor Roosevelt. In 2005, a musical entitled If This Hat Could Talk was based on Height’s memoirs, Open Wide the Freedom Gates.
President Obama said Height “deserves a place in our history books . . . a place of honour in America’s memory”. He recalled how she desegregated the Young Women’s Christian Association and called her “Queen Esther to this Moses generation”.
When he hung the emancipation proclamation in the Oval Office a few months ago, Mr Obama recounted, Height was present. She recalled meeting “the gifted child” who would become the Rev Martin Luther King jnr at a dinner in the 1940s.
Height embodied what King called “the drum major instinct” to be first, Mr Obama said. “Dorothy Height was a drum major for justice, a drum major for equality, a drum major for freedom.”