A great lady has left us: Dorothy Height, age 98, passed away today. All of us at EVE mourn her passing and honor her incredible legacy of vision and dedication.

Dr. Height has been called the godmother of the civil rights movement, its founding matriarch, its unsung heroine. She was among the handful of top leaders who plotted strategy with Martin Luther King, but as a woman she was often overlooked — or deliberately ignored. Sexism was as rampant in the civil rights movement as in the rest of American society, and Dorothy Height made it her mission to fight all forms of discrimination.

In her autobiography, Open Wide The Freedom Gates, she recalled her unsuccessful effort to include women speakers in the March on Washington:

As King and his associates planned what would become the historic March on Washington, Height pushed to add a woman to the list of leaders scheduled to address the marchers, but the idea was met with great resistance.

One of the main antagonists was march organizer Bayard Rustin.

“Even on the morning of the march there had been appeals to include a woman speaker,” Height recalled in her memoir. “But Bayard Rustin held fast, insisting that women were part of all the groups — the churches, the synagogues, labor — represented on the podium. In the end, Mahalia Jackson, who sang the national anthem, was the only female voice.

“That moment was vital to awakening the women’s movement. Mr. Rustin’s stance showed us that men honestly didn’t see their position as patriarchal or patronizing. They were happy to include women in the human family, but there was no question as to who headed the household!”

It’s an attitude that’s still with us, unfortunately. As is the belief that men somehow magically stand for the entire human race, and so there’s no need to acknowledge women at all. That’s why EVE exists.

Dorothy Height went on to become a great feminist leader as well as a civil rights leader, working to end what she called the “triple bind of racism, sexism, and poverty.” She was president of the National Council of Negro Women for four decades, and in 1971 she co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus along with Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, and Betty Friedan. As Eleanor Holmes Norton remarked, sooner or later everybody in the women’s movement and civil rights movement worked with Dorothy Height. She was also an important adviser to the occupants of the White House — all of them, beginning with Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Tributes are pouring in from all quarters today, with more being posted online every hour. I particularly appreciated the photo gallery at the Washington Post. By all means, visit it if you can (and let’s hope it doesn’t get blocked behind WaPo’s registration wall). There’s also a photo gallery at NPR, along with audio from “Talk of the Nation.”

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