Dorothy Height`s mother used to worry that her thin, asthmatic daughter was too frail to keep pace with all of the activities she`d taken on. We should all be so frail.
Height, now 80 and in her 36th year as president of the National Council of Negro Women, also ran Delta Sigma Theta, a national black sorority for 11 years. She has served on numerous national committees and has traveled extensively to promote women`s and social causes worldwide.
Those are just her volunteer activities. For 40 years, Height earned her living with the Young Women`s Christian Association, working her way up from an administrative job with a Harlem, N.Y., affiliate to the organization`s national staff.
A civil-rights activist, Height has been appointed to presidential councils and won a presidential award from Ronald Reagan for distinguished service to the country. She earned a master`s degree in psychology from New York University and has been awarded 23 honorary doctorates.
”My mother always encouraged me, but she used to say that if I joined anything else, she`d take me out of everything,” Height recalled during a recent visit to Chicago. Height was kicking off the Black Family Reunion Celebration, one of her latest projects with the National Council of Negro Women, a coalition of organizations dedicated to uniting black women in social action.
The celebration, also traveling to Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Cincinnati, Washington, Atlanta and Memphis through October, is Height`s response to what she sees as dwindling pride in a strong family heritage among blacks.
Outrage over a public TV documentary, ”The Vanishing Family: Crisis in Black America,” spawned the idea.
The 1986 Bill Moyers documentary examined what the network called ”the country`s crumbling black family structure” through interviews with black teenage parents.
”It`s not that it was inaccurate, but it was incomplete,” Height explains. ”It only dealt with teenage pregnancy. The Black Family Reunions are a positive response to so much negative talk about the black family, because when we hear so much that is negative, we begin to internalize it.”
The family reunions are festivals of education and recreation, she says. National corporations sponsor most of the festivals` pavilions, which offer information about topics ranging from legal aid and careers to child care.
Organizers say the reunions have grown from one event in Washington, where the group is based, to a national chain of celebrations that has attracted about six million visitors since they began in 1985.
This year`s two-day celebration in Chicago, which was sponsored locally by the City of Chicago, the Chicago Park District, the Chicago Federation of Labor and the Human Relations Foundation of Chicago, drew about 100,000 people, according to Height.
She says she aims to spread feelings of caring and self-esteem through the community.
”It`s important to take care of health, to eliminate drugs and alcohol,” Height says. ”If we can lift up our traditional values and stress our historic strengths, we can help people understand there is hope. We are a people with a strong church background. We`ve always valued education, and we`re people with strong kinship ties.”
Those values were important elements of Height`s own heritage. Height and her younger sister grew up in Rankin, Pa. Both Height`s parents, James Edward and Fannie, were widowed twice before marrying each other, and their children from those earlier marriages sometimes lived with the family in Rankin.
Height`s father was a building contractor and her mother a nurse. Time left at the end of the work day was spent on family, community and church activities, Height recalls. James served at the Baptist church as deacon, choirmaster and Sunday school superintendent, while Fannie worked with the church missionary society and in local black women`s clubs.
Because of her asthma, Height got a late start on her own activities. She spent hours reading, and, she says, became ”quite a Bible student.”
Although her illness sometimes forced her to sit and sleep upright for two weeks at a time, Height says, she never missed a day of school and always got A`s.
”By the time I was 11 years old, I had outgrown the asthma,” says Height today. ”Then I took an active hand: basketball, glee club, you name it. I really liked being part of something with people.”
In what would become a lifelong pattern, Height joined groups and usually ended up running them. At the church, she chaired the junior missionary group and the junior choir. She joined the YWCA in nearby Pittsburgh, and at 14 was named a state officer for the junior federation of the National Association of Colored Women`s Clubs.
Partly because Height grew up in what she calls a multicultural environment and attended integrated schools, she promoted integration throughout the community. When she noticed that the children in the playround outside the whites-only Rankin Christian Center were often noisy and disruptive, 11-year-old Height approached their teacher about what was wrong. ”I said, `You know, Mrs. Adams, what these children really need is someone who can tell them Bible stories and learn to dramatize the stories and to sing. I could do that,”` Height remembers. ”And blacks did not go to the center at that time, but she could not say no to me. So I went there and told these stories.”
Soon afterward, the center was opened to blacks on Thursdays, ”a big step in those days,” Height adds.
Height did not just enlist in groups, she founded them. She and two friends formed a singing trio called the Jolly Three and held concerts at area churches to raise money for their college educations.
That money helped, but it was Height`s speech on the U.S. Constitution for a 1928 national Elks contest that won her a four-year scholarship-$1,000- for college.
Height graduated at the top of her class from Rankin High School and was accepted at Barnard College in New York when she was 16. She planned to study medicine.
But when Height moved into her half-sister`s New York apartment and tried to enroll at Barnard, the dean informed her that the school`s quota of two black students had been filled.
”She said I was young enough to wait and enter the next year,” Height says. ”I cannot tell you how very traumatic that was.”
Height`s half-brother, William, who was dying of tuberculosis at a New York hospital, urged her to try enrolling at New York University. She had not applied to the school, but the dean there reviewed her grades and quickly admitted her, she says.
Height began studying science, but dropped it when William, who had promised to help her pay for medical school, died. At a loss for a new career- her religion professor told her the church wasn`t ready for women ministers-Height began to study psychology.
While supervising food services for the poor and working with troubled youths at a community center in Brooklyn, Height was asked by a local minister to help organize a black church.
Height began to teach Bible school and her classes attracted many locals to the new church. Her teaching so impressed the minister that when she finished her studies at NYU, he told her he would hire her if he could find the money.
”Remember,” says Height, who never married or had children, ”this was during the Depression, when young men were trying to earn money by selling apples.”
The minister brought Height before church administrators and pleaded for funding. One of them, a white woman, Height recalls, looked hard at her.
”She said, `Are you familiar with Rankin, Pa.?,` ” Height recounts. ”I said yes, and she asked, `Are you that little girl who told Bible stories there?` ” When an astonished Height said she was, the woman offered to pay the salary herself.
”That was a pivotal event in my life,” Height says. ”It launched me. It was my entry into the work force, and every job I`ve had since then, someone has come to me and said, `I understand you can do this, will you work for us?”`
In 1935, the New York City Department of Welfare was next to call on Height, and she spent two years as a caseworker in Harlem.
Meanwhile, Height continued to volunteer for several organizations. She traveled to England as representative of the United Christian Youth Movement, an organization of Protestant groups. While there, Height says she decided to make another change.
”I realized that I worked all day to earn my living, but after that I spent a lot of time doing the things I was interested in,” she says. ”Over my lifetime I`ve come to understand that work is more than a job.”
When she returned to the United States, in 1937, Height accepted a job with the Harlem branch of the YWCA as assistant director of the Emma Ransom House, a place of lodging for black women.
Her work with the YWCA led her to a 5-year stint in Washington, D.C., a four-month teaching position in India and eventually to the YWCA`s national offices in New York.
Height`s work with the YWCA did not end her volunteer activities. While working in Harlem, Height joined the Delta Sigma Theta sorority in 1939 and was elected its president five years later.
Working with sorority chapters nationwide, she continued some of the work she had begun at the Harlem YWCA, lobbying for fair hiring practices and wages for female domestic workers.
She stepped down as the sorority`s president in 1956, only to step up and run the National Council of Negro Women a year later. Her involvement with that organization, which now includes more than 200 community chapters and 31 affiliates nationwide, also began in Harlem.
Height was asked by her YWCA supervisor there to escort Eleanor Roosevelt, who was visiting New York, to a meeting of the newly established council. Height sat in on a speech by its founder, Mary McLeod Bethune. She still recalls that day, Nov. 7, 1937:
”As I was leaving the meeting, Mary McLeod Bethune asked my name. `Come back, we need you,` she said. She put me on the resolutions committee and I`ve been active in the National Council of Negro Women ever since.”
”Through people like Bethune and Roosevelt, I learned the meaning of power,” Height explains. ”It isn`t personal; it`s the collective strength of people working together.”
That belief has permeated her actions, she says. As the YWCA`s founding director of the Office for Racial Justice from 1963 until her retirement in 1977, Height enlisted the organization`s chapters nationwide to turn a 17-year-old interracial charter from paper to reality, desegregating swimming pools, residences and training.
She led the National Council of Negro Women to the forefront of the civil-rights movement, working closely with leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young and A. Philip Randolph.
Her efforts have been enlisted by both Democratic and Republican U.S. presidents, who have appointed her to committees studying women`s, human and civil rights; economic development; and social welfare. In 1989 she received the Citizens Medal Award from President Ronald Reagan. In 1990 President Bush appointed her to the Advisory Council of the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
Although critics once complained that Height was not militant enough in the civil-rights movement, she says her ”quiet activism” has served her purposes well.
”I believe that you have to set your goals and you have to keep going,” she says. ”You may have to compromise on time or something else, but never in direction. You have to keep moving steadily.”
