Archaeo - Histories@archeohistories
When Dorothy Height showed up at Barnard College in 1929 with her admission letter in hand, a dean looked at her and told her they had already reached their quota of "two Negro students per year." Height had just graduated with honors from an integrated high school in Rankin, Pennsylvania, a small steel town outside Pittsburgh. She had won a national oratorical contest and a $1,000 scholarship. None of it mattered. "It was such a shock to me," she later recalled. "I never thought there would be a racial quota. I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep for days."
Unwilling to give up on her dreams, she walked into New York University with her Barnard acceptance letter in hand -- and they admitted her on the spot. She earned both her bachelor's and master's degrees in four years. Years later, Height said the rejection at Barnard taught her the most important lesson of her life: "That there is no advantage in bitterness, that I needed to go into action, which is something I have tried to follow since."
Born on this day in 1912, Dorothy Height would become what President Barack Obama called "the godmother of the Civil Rights Movement," observing that she was "the only woman at the highest level of the Civil Rights Movement -- witnessing every march and milestone along the way." Yet for decades, sexism ensured that her name was rarely mentioned alongside the men she worked beside as an equal.
In 1933, Height graduated from NYU with a master's degree in educational psychology and began working as a caseworker with the New York City Welfare Department. But it was a chance encounter four years later, in 1937, that set her on the path of her life's work.
The 25-year-old Height was assigned to escort First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt into a meeting of the National Council of Negro Women. The organization's founder, the legendary Mary McLeod Bethune -- the daughter of former slaves who had built a college for Black women and become one of the most powerful figures of the New Deal era -- noticed the young woman's poise and ability.
"What is your name?" Bethune asked.
"Dorothy Height," she whispered.
"We need you," Bethune said.
By the time Height returned from walking Roosevelt to her car, Bethune had already appointed her to a committee. "On that fall day," Height later wrote in her memoir, "the redoubtable Mary McLeod Bethune put her hand on me. She drew me into her dazzling orbit of people in power and people in poverty." Height joined Bethune's crusade to end poll taxes, lynching, and unfair employment practices. "I don't think that outside of my mother and my church," she reflected, "there's been anything of greater influence than Mary McLeod Bethune."
In 1957, two years after Bethune's death, Height was named president of the National Council of Negro Women -- a position she would hold for the next forty years. She advised presidents from Eisenhower to Obama, pushing Eisenhower on desegregating schools and Johnson on appointing Black women to government positions. And she became the only woman working directly alongside the leaders who would come to be known as the "Big Six" of the Civil Rights Movement: Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, A. Philip Randolph, James Farmer, Roy Wilkins, and Whitney Young.
On August 28, 1963, Height sat an arm's length from King as he delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington. But she was not allowed to speak.
Height had helped organize the march. She mobilized thousands of women volunteers and arranged transportation. When it came time to set the program, the male leaders refused to include a single woman as a speaker. Height pushed back.
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