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Dorothy Height to receive Urban League's Legend Award tonight

Wednesday, July 30, 2003

By Ann Rodgers-Melnick, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Dorothy Height is the most prominent civil rights leader you've probably never heard of.

	Dorothy Height addresses the NAACP during its convention in Pittsburgh in July, 1997. (John Beale, Post-Gazette)

She's the one cropped out of White House photos of Martin Luther King and the "Big Six," the champion orator not permitted to speak at the Washington march she helped to plan; the one who quietly saved lives by easing racial tension in the hot Mississippi summers of 1964 and 1965.

While Rosa Parks is the mother of the civil rights movement, noted Pennsylvania activist C. DeLores Tucker once said, "Dorothy Height is the queen."

Tonight Height will receive the Legend Award from the National Urban League conference at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center Downtown. At 91, she returns as a prophet largely unknown in her hometown.

Her first major protest took place not far from where she will receive her award. When she was 12 and a poster girl for the YWCA Girls Reserves Club, the Pittsburgh YWCA refused to let her take swimming lessons. Height was unable to persuade the Y director to let her in, and never learned to swim. But, as an adult, she would eventually integrate every YWCA in the United States.

Her youth in Rankin "was really very decisive in my life," she said.

There, her father was a successful painter, and her mother a community volunteer who taught her children to use their abilities for others. Young Dorothy sometimes tutored her immigrant European neighbors in proper English.

One of just a few black students, she recalls her white teachers and classmates as supportive and proud of her accomplishments. Once, a new high school principal forbade her from directing the school chorus, which the music teacher had appointed her to do. At the next school assembly the chorus refused to stand and sing until she was called to lead it.

Height recounts in her memoir, "Open Wide the Freedom Gates," that the principal later became one of her greatest supporters.

Rankin Christian Center also had a key role in her development -- and vice versa. At first, its social programs were available to blacks only on "Negro days."

The first step toward integration occurred when, at 11, Height boldly volunteered to read Bible stories to white toddlers. Her service had important repercussions years later. When Height finished graduate school in New York during the Depression, a Brooklyn community center solicited help from a wealthy donor in order to hire her. The donor, also a benefactress of the Rankin Christian Center, recognized her as the girl she had once seen reading Bible stories, and offered to pay her full salary.

Her road to college was paved by a full scholarship from the Elks for winning a national speech contest in 1929. Four years later she had a master's in social work from New York University and was enjoying the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance. She went to jazz clubs with W.C. Handy, edited copy for Marcus Garvey and was an organizer in Adam Clayton Powell's boycott of Harlem businesses that wouldn't hire black workers. She credits communists with teaching her to examine social problems systematically, but was repelled by their atheism.

In 1937, she began a 40-year career with the YWCA. Most cities then had a white Y and a black Y. In 1946 she led the organization to adopt an interracial charter for full integration. She worked 30 more years to make the policy a reality.

It was a dangerous job. In 1947, the Klan raided a North Carolina camp where she was leading a YWCA meeting and she nearly died of an asthma attack while hiding in an attic. But the interracial meeting went on.

To this day anyone hired for an executive position is taught how Height made the YWCA into a model and mover for racial justice, said Cecilia Griffin Golden, CEO of the YWCA of Greater Pittsburgh. Height developed a presentation on the "web of racism" that the YWCA still uses to explain that racism is not just personal prejudice, but involves social and economic power structures, Golden said.

In 1937, through her Y work, Height formed crucial friendships with both First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and social activist Mary McLeod Bethune.

Roosevelt first led Height into the corridors of power: In 1961, John F. Kennedy named her to the President's Commission on the Status of Women; in 1966, she was the only woman on a White House commission for the implementation of civil rights legislation; in 1968, she was among a handful of leaders summoned to the White House to map out a response to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Bethune was her mentor, and in 1958, Height succeeded her as president of the National Council of Negro Women, which worked for policies to benefit poor families. She remains active as president emerita, and is best-known for that work.

Height has a gift for empowering others, and is skilled at helping disparate people to work together under difficult circumstances, said Doris Wilson, 82, of Shadyside, who followed Height into Mississippi when it was a very dangerous place for northern black women.

Wilson had worked for the YWCA, where Height encouraged her to develop her administrative skills.

"Dorothy would put you in spots and ask you to do things that you didn't even know you could do -- and, by God, you did it," Wilson said. "I think that is a great gift in leadership, to see the potential in somebody and push them along."

In the civil rights movement, Height "was the only black woman included in that inner circle," Wilson said.

Martin Luther King Jr. dispatched her to Birmingham to help black families respond to the deaths of four little girls in a notorious church bombing. She was part of the planning committee for the 1963 March on Washington, and was among those who insisted that King speak last, so his words would be remembered.

Some planners wanted a female speaker. Though Height says it did not have to be her, she had oratorical skills to compete with any preacher.

"The women finally decided that our overall objective was too great, and we didn't want to detract from that. So we accepted that the only female voice would be that of Mahalia Jackson, who sang the national anthem," Height said.

She was consistently edged out of pictures with presidents. "But I knew I was there, and that wasn't the most important thing," she said.

When it came to getting things done, she says, the other civil rights leaders treated her as a peer. She believes she helped them work together more effectively.

One of her most important and daring achievements was a behind-the-scenes project to help the activists who flooded into Mississippi in the summers of 1964 and 1965 to run "freedom schools" and voter registration drives. Height brought together an interracial, interfaith group of women from national organizations to prepare each Mississippi community.

Each Wednesday a team of those well-to-do northern women was spirited into a Mississippi town to enlist the support of Southern women to ease racial tension and prevent violence.

Women of all colors and faiths were the backbone of the civil rights movement, Height said.

"All the way through the whole struggle for civil rights there have been white women, as well as black women, who have felt called to be of help, and they have found it helpful even to themselves," she said.

By 1986, she was confronting internal issues among black Americans. She founded the National Black Family Reunion Project to highlight the strengths of extended families and make new generations proud of their history and aware of their opportunities. Her most recent project was to purchase an elegant building on the site of an infamous Washington, D.C., slave market, to provide leadership training for future generations of black women.

"We are survivors because we are a people of faith and strength," she said. "We have to bear in mind that we are not a problem people. We are simply people with problems, like everyone else."

She won't name any one accomplishment as her most important.

"I think the most important thing is that I had a purpose for life and tried to achieve it, and I tried hard to work steadily for equality and justice. Whatever was accomplished, I had the opportunity to work with many great people, and just stayed the course."