Dorothy Height spent more than seventy years building the institutions through which Black women organized for civil rights. From the Harlem YWCA and the national YWCA staff, through Delta Sigma Theta, to four decades as president of the National Council of Negro Women, she worked at the intersection of race and gender, often out of the spotlight but at the table where the movement’s strategy was made.
At a Glance
- Born
- 24 March 1912, Richmond, Virginia
- Died
- 20 April 2010, Washington, D.C.
- Birth name
- Dorothy Irene Height
- Known for
- President of the National Council of Negro Women (1957–1990s); Wednesdays in Mississippi (1964); the National Black Family Reunion (1986); Open Wide the Freedom Gates (2003)
- Fields
- Organizing · Civil Rights
- Era
- Civil Rights Era
Early Life
Dorothy Irene Height was born in Richmond, Virginia, on 24 March 1912. While she was a young child her family moved to Rankin, Pennsylvania, a steel town outside Pittsburgh, where she attended integrated schools, developed a reputation as a public speaker, and as a high school student took part in campaigns against lynching.
An oratory prize won her a college scholarship. By her own account, Barnard College accepted her in 1929 but then refused to let her enroll because it had already admitted its quota of Black students. She went instead to New York University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in education and a master’s degree in psychology in four years, and later did postgraduate work at Columbia University and the New York School of Social Work.
Life and Work
Height began her career as a caseworker in New York’s welfare system and in 1937 was serving as assistant executive director of the Harlem YWCA. On 7 November 1937, assigned to escort First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt into a meeting of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), she met the council’s founder, Mary McLeod Bethune, who recruited her on the spot. Bethune became her mentor, and Height worked in the council’s campaigns on employment, anti-lynching legislation, and the rights of Black women workers.
Height joined the staff of the national board of the YWCA of the USA in 1944 and remained there until 1977, pressing the association to desegregate; its 1946 convention adopted an interracial charter committing the organization to integration. From 1947 to 1956 she served as national president of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, expanding its programs of public service and social action.
In 1957 Height was elected the fourth national president of the NCNW, the umbrella body Bethune had founded in 1935, and she led it for four decades. She was often the only woman present at the planning sessions of the leaders of the major civil rights organizations in the early 1960s, and she was on the platform at the March on Washington on 28 August 1963. No woman delivered a major address that day, an omission Height later criticized and cited as a turning point in her own thinking about sexism within the movement.
In 1964 Height and Polly Cowan organized Wednesdays in Mississippi, which sent interracial, interfaith teams of Northern women to Mississippi during Freedom Summer to build contacts with Black and white women there and to observe conditions in the freedom schools. Under her leadership the NCNW also ran projects on housing, hunger, and child care in the rural South, and in 1968 Height arranged the council’s donation of fifty female and five male pigs to Fannie Lou Hamer’s “pig bank” in Sunflower County, Mississippi, which lent breeding stock to poor families and became part of Hamer’s Freedom Farm Cooperative. The council’s Mississippi work also extended to child care and self-help housing programs in the late 1960s and 1970s, part of Height’s argument that civil rights had to include the economic conditions of Black women and their families.
Concerned with public portrayals of Black family life, Height launched the National Black Family Reunion in 1986, a day-long festival on the National Mall in Washington that drew more than 200,000 people to its first gathering and was soon repeated in cities from Los Angeles to Philadelphia. The reunions presented multigenerational Black families as a source of strength, in deliberate contrast to the portrait of family breakdown then common in national media and policy debate. She secured a permanent headquarters for the council on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, stepped down from the presidency in the late 1990s, and continued as the council’s chair. In 2003 she published her memoir, Open Wide the Freedom Gates.
Legacy
Height received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Bill Clinton in 1994, and on her ninety-second birthday, 24 March 2004, President George W. Bush presented her with the Congressional Gold Medal. She died in Washington on 20 April 2010, at ninety-eight; her funeral was held at Washington National Cathedral, and President Barack Obama delivered the eulogy, describing decades of work done quietly and without self-promotion. She had earlier received a Citizens Medal from President Ronald Reagan in 1989 and some two dozen honorary degrees. The U.S. Postal Service issued a Dorothy Height stamp in its Black Heritage series in 2017.
Height’s career spanned the long civil rights movement, from the anti-lynching campaigns of the 1920s to the twenty-first century, and historians have used it to show how much of the movement’s organizational work was carried by women’s associations, church networks, and sororities rather than by the handful of men who were its public face. The council’s records trace that infrastructure in detail, from voter education to housing and hunger programs that outlasted the movement’s best-known campaigns. Her insistence that the rights of women and of Black Americans were a single cause made her a link between the civil rights and women’s movements.
Much of the civil rights movement’s work was done by organizations and organizers outside the spotlight, and Height showed how Black women built lasting institutions for change. Open the classroom lesson →
Key Dates
- 24 March 1912 Born in Richmond, Virginia.
- 1929 Turned away by Barnard College; enrolls at New York University.
- 7 November 1937 Meets Mary McLeod Bethune while escorting Eleanor Roosevelt to an NCNW meeting.
- 1944 Joins the staff of the YWCA national board, where she works until 1977.
- 1947 Elected national president of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority (serves until 1956).
- 1957 Elected fourth national president of the National Council of Negro Women.
- 28 August 1963 On the platform at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
- 1964 Launches Wednesdays in Mississippi with Polly Cowan.
- 1986 Founds the National Black Family Reunion.
- 20 April 2010 Dies in Washington, D.C., at ninety-eight.
Sources and Further Reading
- Dorothy Height, Open Wide the Freedom Gates: A Memoir (New York: PublicAffairs, 2003).
- Dorothy I. Height Education Foundation, “Dorothy I. Height.” Link
- National Women’s History Museum, “Dr. Dorothy Height.” Link
- National Center for Civil and Human Rights, “The Legacy of Dorothy Height.” Link
- Barack Obama, “Eulogy at a Funeral Service for Civil Rights Activist Dorothy I. Height,” 29 April 2010, American Presidency Project. Link
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