Legendary civil rights leader Dorothy Height, who spent most of her life battling for the empowerment of women and blacks and who had the ear of U.S. presidents from Eisenhower to Obama, died Tuesday. She was 98.
In 1963, Height was the only woman on the speaker’s platform when Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech.
Harvard professor Charles Ogletree called Height “an absolute genius.”
“Everything that we do today is influenced by her sacrifices decades ago, her marches as a teenager against lynching, her buying a building right on Pennsylvania Avenue to in a sense to talk about the slave trade, and her commitment to open up doors for others is unparalleled,” Ogletree said.
Height continued to fight for equal justice up until the end of her life. In 2008, she told NPR — while wearing a feathered purple chapeau with a fetching bow — that there is unfinished business in civil rights.
