August 24
On August 24, 1963, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom concluded with Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech before 250,000 people on the National Mall. The march had been organized, logistics managed, coordination handled, in no small part by the staff of the National Council of Negro Women.
Dorothy Height was the president of the National Council of Negro Women. She stood on the platform that day, a few feet from the speakers, in a hat. She was not invited to speak.
Height was born on March 24, 1912, in Richmond, Virginia. She was admitted to Barnard College in 1929 but denied enrollment when she arrived on campus — the college told her that its "quota" for Black students had been filled. She enrolled at New York University instead, earning her degree in three years. She began her career as a social worker in New York in the 1930s, joining the YWCA and eventually becoming the national director of its Center for Racial Justice.
She served as president of the National Council of Negro Women for forty years — from 1957 to 1997. The NCNW, under her leadership, organized voter registration drives, coordinated the domestic workers' rights movement, established hunger relief programs in Mississippi, and convened meetings that brought together leaders of all the major women's organizations to establish a common agenda on poverty and race.
She was a participant in every major civil rights event from 1944 onward: the meeting with Eisenhower, the Albany Movement, the Selma campaign, the Poor People's Campaign. She knew Eleanor Roosevelt, Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King, Lyndon Johnson, and every president from Eisenhower to Obama. She was usually the person in the room who had been there longest.
She did not speak at the 1963 March on Washington. None of the women who organized it did.
She died in 2010 at ninety-seven. She received the Congressional Gold Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The March on Washington's all-male speaker roster was criticized by Pauli Murray and others at the time. It was not changed.
The March on Washington's speaker roster is now one of the better-documented examples of the civil rights movement's internal gender politics — the same movement that demanded recognition for Black Americans reproduced exclusion along gender lines with little apparent friction. Height organized the institutional infrastructure of the movement for forty years. She did not speak at its most visible public event. Both of these things are true simultaneously.
A new forgotten woman, every day. Direct to you.