WASHINGTON — Dorothy Height, the leading female voice of the 1960s civil rights movement and a participant in historic marches with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others, died Tuesday. She was 98.
Height, whose activism on behalf of women and minorities dated to the New Deal, led the National Council of Negro Women for 40 years. She continued actively speaking out into her 90s, often getting rousing ovations at events around Washington, where she was immediately recognized by the bright, colorful hats she almost always wore.
She died at Howard University Hospital, where she had been in serious condition for weeks.
In a statement, President Barack Obama called her "the godmother of the civil rights movement" and a hero to Americans.
“Dr. Height devoted her life to those struggling for equality ... and served as the only woman at the highest level of the Civil Rights Movement witnessing every march and milestone along the way,” Obama said.
It was the second death of a major civil rights figure in less than a week. Benjamin L. Hooks, the former longtime head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, died Thursday in Memphis at 85.
As a teenager, Height marched in New York's Times Square shouting, "Stop the lynching." In the 1950s and 1960s, she was the leading woman helping King and other activists orchestrate the civil rights movement, often reminding the men heading the movement not to underestimate their women counterparts.
One of Height's sayings was, "If the time is not ripe, we have to ripen the time." She liked to quote 19th century abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who said that the three effective ways to fight for justice are to "agitate, agitate, agitate."
Height was on the platform at the Lincoln Memorial, sitting only a few feet from King, when he gave his "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington in 1963.
“He spoke longer than he was supposed to speak,” Height recalled in a 1997 Associated Press interview. But after he was done, it was clear King's speech would echo for generations, she said, “because it gripped everybody.”
