Taps
By Kim Jackson

"If the time is not ripe, we have to ripen the time." - Dorothy Height

Our continued fight (whether you want to believe one exists or not) lost a powerful ally this morning. Dorothy Height, who as longtime president of the National Council of Negro Women was the leading female voice of the 1960s civil rights movement, has died. She was 98.

Height, who continued actively speaking out into her 90s, had been at Howard University Hospital since late March. The hospital said in a statement that she died of natural causes.

In the 1950s and 1960s, she was the leading woman helping the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other activists orchestrate the civil rights movement. She also liked to quote 19th century abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who said that the three effective ways to fight for justice are to "agitate, agitate, agitate."

It was the second death of a major civil rights figure in less than a week. Benjamin L. Hooks, the former longtime head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, died Thursday in Memphis. He was 85.

Height became president of the National Council of Negro Women in 1957 and held the post until 1997, when she was 85. During the height of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Height organized "Wednesdays in Mississippi", which brought together black and white women from the North and South to create a dialogue of understanding. She remained chairman of the group.

Height was born in Richmond, Va. and the family moved to the Pittsburgh area when she was four. She earned her bachelor's and master's degrees from New York University and did postgraduate work at Columbia University and the New York School of Social Work. (She had been turned away by Barnard College because it already had its quota of two black women.). Years later, at its 1980 commencement ceremonies, Barnard College awarded Height its highest honor, the Barnard Medal of Distinction. According to an article written in the New York Amsterdam News by author Jamal E. Watson, Barnard College also officially apologized to Height for their refusal to admit her into the college.

In 1937, while she was working at the Harlem YWCA, Height met famed educator Mary McLeod Bethune, the founder of the National Council of Negro Women, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who had come to speak at a meeting of Bethune's organization. Height eventually rose to leadership roles in both the council and the YWCA.

American leaders regularly took her counsel, including First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and Height also encouraged President Dwight D. Eisenhower to desegregate schools and President Lyndon B. Johnson to appoint African American women to positions in government.

"I hope not to work this hard all the rest of my life," Height said, during a 1997 Associated Press interview. "But whether it is the council, whether it is somewhere else, for the rest of my life, I will be working for equality, for justice, to eliminate racism, to build a better life for our families and our children."