Height, Hooks: The Passing of Two Civil Rights Leaders
23 April 2010
Dorothy Height, right, during Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech in Washington on August 28, 1963
This is IN THE NEWS in VOA Special English.
In recent days, Americans have lost two civil rights leaders of the twentieth century, Dorothy Height and Benjamin Hooks.
Dorothy Height died Tuesday at the age of ninety-eight. She witnessed more civil rights history than any other African-American leader of her time. She said the greatest change she witnessed was the ending of racial segregation laws in the United States.
She was the longtime chairwoman of the National Council of Negro Women. She was an activist, humanitarian and adviser to presidents including Barack Obama. He remembered her as "the godmother of the Civil Rights Movement."
Dorothy Height grew up in Pennsylvania. She won a four-year college scholarship, the top prize nationally in a public speaking contest on the Constitution.
She arrived at school in New York City -- only to learn that an unwritten limit of "two Negro students per year" had already been met.
DOROTHY HEIGHT: "I was accepted at Barnard College and I was denied admission when I arrived because they had a quota of two. And they did not know that I was not white. And so when I got there I was turned away."
Dorothy Height went on to earn bachelor and master's degrees in four years at New York University. She worked with Martin Luther King Junior in the push for civil rights for blacks in the nineteen fifties and sixties.
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