On September 25, 1963, Dorothy Height read accounts of the March on Washington in the newspapers. She had helped organize it. She had not been invited to speak.

Height was born in 1912 in Richmond, Virginia, and grew up in Rankin, Pennsylvania. She was accepted to Barnard College in 1929 and was denied admission in person when the admissions office saw she was Black — Barnard had filled its informal quota of two Black students for the year. She enrolled at New York University instead, earning bachelor's and master's degrees in four years.

She joined the National Council of Negro Women in 1937 under Mary McLeod Bethune and eventually became its president in 1957, a position she held for forty years. She served on the National Board of the YWCA, worked with Eleanor Roosevelt on civil rights, and was one of the central organizers of the 1963 March on Washington.

The March's organizing committee was informally known as the "Big Six." Height was not among them. The Six who met with President Kennedy and planned the event were all men: A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, James Farmer, Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young. The women who had done substantial organizational work — Height, Anna Arnold Hedgeman, Pauli Murray — were not included in the leadership group. Hedgeman later wrote that she and others had raised this explicitly with Randolph and were told it was "not the right time."

At the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, six women were brought to the stage briefly and acknowledged. None of them gave speeches.