Ms. Height was an educator, civil rights activist, and women’s rights activist. Civil rights activist James Farmer listed her as one of the “Big Six” of the civil rights movement. As a young woman, she was accepted to Barnard, but was denied admission because they’d already filled their quota of two Black students that year. She graduated from NYU with a master’s degree in educational psychology. Ms. Height began her career as an activist at 25, when she joined the National Council of Negro Women, of which she was president for 40 years. She later worked for the YWCA at the national level, and served as national president of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority. In the 60’s, she organized “Wednesdays in Mississippi,” which opened a dialogue between Black and white women. Beginning in 1965, she wrote a weekly column, “A Woman’s Word,” in the New York Amsterdam News, one of the oldest Black newspapers in the US. She served on a number of presidential and national committees, and was a founding member of the Council for United Civil Rights Leadership. In 1990, Ms. Height helped form the African-American Women for Reproductive Freedom.“If the times aren’t ripe,” Ms. Height said, “you have to ripen the times.” She died in 2010 at age 98.
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