Dorothy Height

I have realised that my bloggeration has been somewhat male-centred so far. Fourteen of my 63 posts so far have had the name of a man (or a couple of men) at the top whilst only one has had the name of a woman: Gillian Duffy (you remember, the lady that Gordon Brown labeled a bigot before a quick retraction). I have had ignored the Danielles, the Dianas, the Denises, the Delias, the Deidres, the Dawns, the Daisys, the Delilahs, the Daphnes and the Dorothys. This post is a shift from the male-dominated direction that my blog has been driving in as I pause to take notice of a woman worthy of notice.

Dorothy Height was born in 1912, an African-American woman born into a racist American society that wouldn't see the Civil Rights Act for another 52 years. As a child her colour was used to prevent her using a swimming pool; as a young adult she was refused admittance to Barnard College because they had already used up their two token places for black students. Frustrated and angered by injustice, she didn't let this stand in the way of her achieving academic success. In her early 30s she met a 15-year old Martin Luther King. At the time she had no idea what King would become and what his name would come to stand for, but as the years passed and as she worked tirelessly alongside him barriers of inequality towards African-Americans and women were slowly broken down.

Unlike King she lived to see America turn from a place that treated African-Americans as second class citizens to a nation led by an African-American man. In April this year, at the age of 98, Height died. At her funeral Barrack Obama stood and paid tribute to a woman he said "deserves a place [in the history books]. She never cared about who got the credit. What she cared about was the cause: the cause of justice; the cause of equality; the cause of opportunity: freedom's cause."

A selfless woman who fights for equality against the odds is truly a great woman. Her own words attest to this: "Greatness is not measured by what a man or woman accomplishes, but by the opposition he or she has overcome to reach their goals". Her words on the progress we have made and the battles still to fight held true in 1964 and still hold true in 2010: "We have come a long way, but too many are not better off". Men and women like Dorothy are all too scarce.