Dorothy Height:DOROTHY HEIGHT, who has died aged 98, was the most prominent woman in the US civil rights movement.
She was considered an older sister by Martin Luther King and his colleagues, and was chair of the executive committee of the Leadership Conference On Civil Rights, the umbrella organisation for the civil rights movement. An elegant woman with silky diplomatic skills and a taste for memorable hats, her equable manner could sometimes hide her steely determination and lifelong commitment to an open society where African-Americans could escape from what she called “the deep roots of poverty”.
At one civil rights conference, she was reprimanded for knitting during the debates, but boldly defended knitting as a way of keeping more awake than some other delegates.
Height’s own roots were in social work in Harlem in the late 1920s, where she was a friend of such luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance as Langston Hughes. She was something of a protege of Eleanor Roosevelt, and of the woman Height succeeded as head of the National Council of Negro Women, Mary McLeod Bethune.
She first met King in the mid-1940s, when she was staying with the historian and president of Morehouse College, Benjamin Mays, in Atlanta, Georgia. King was then in his teens, a precocious boy who had been allowed to go straight to college early.
Although she was sometimes literally airbrushed out of photographs of the African-American leadership, and was often the only woman present at meetings, she insisted that she saw herself as one of a group of peers. Although as committed to equality for women as for racial justice, her rather patrician style was in sharp contrast to that of younger radical feminists. One of her favourite and most characteristic sayings was that one should be radical in what you do, but should not try to be a radical.
She was born in Richmond, Virginia, to a builder and a nurse. Her father moved the family to the Pittsburgh area in western Pennsylvania, no doubt hoping to find a racially more tolerant environment away from the former capital of the Confederacy. Dorothy soon encountered discrimination, however. When her high school entered a basketball competition, it was excluded because she was a member of the team. Later, she was not allowed to stay with other contestants at a statewide speech contest in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The only person in the hall with a black face, she remembered, was the janitor. But with a speech about Aristide Briand’s work for world peace, she won the competition.
Height also won an essay contest, which brought the prize of a scholarship to Barnard College in New York. However, when she arrived there in 1929, she was excluded because the college had already filled an unspoken quota of two African-American students. Height went instead to New York University, where she did an undergraduate and a master’s degree in educational psychology. Decades later, Barnard gave her an honorary degree.
Her first job was in Harlem as a caseworker for the New York City welfare department. She soon got involved in civil rights demonstrations. Whenever there was a lynching in the south, she and a group of friends would demonstrate in Times Square, wearing black armbands. In those early New Deal years, African-Americans made up 8 per cent of New York City’s population, but accounted for 42 per cent of those on welfare.
Height was so effective that she was made a special investigator into welfare fraud. She liked being on the firing line, she recalled: “I don’t mess around!” In 1954 she went to work for the YWCA, where she could lobby for civil and women’s rights. In 1957 she became director of the National Council of Negro Women, a job she held for 40 years. She sat on the podium when King made his “I have a dream” speech at the 1963 march on Washington.
When King was killed in 1968, Height rushed to the White House where she and her colleagues tried to advise then president Lyndon B Johnson on how to minimise black protests and rioting.
Later in life, Height was showered with honours and awards. Bill Clinton gave her the presidential medal of freedom in 1994, and last year she sat on the podium at Barack Obama's inauguration. A musical was made about her life and called – in reference to her millinery propensity – If This Hat Could Talk. Her sister, Anthanette, survives her.
Dorothy Irene Height: born March 24th, 1912; died April 20th, 2010