Excluded at the March on Washington, Dorothy Height Went on to Become the “Godmother of the Civil Rights Movement.” See How She Built a Movement with Women at the Center.

As one of the only women planning the March on Washington, Dorothy Height organized the logistics, mobilized the crowds, and was never given the microphone. What she built in response helped shape the modern women’s movement.

On August 28, 1963, more than 250,000 people gathered on the National Mall for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Dorothy Height (1912–2010) was there, not in the crowd, but seated on the platform, steps from the podium. She spent months helping organize the march, working alongside the “Big Six” civil rights leaders as the only woman on the Council of the United Civil Rights Leadership team. She organized complex transportation logistics, mobilized crowds, and, as president of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), she represented the only women’s organization recognized on the march’s program (1). Despite her involvement, she was not invited to speak.

Height and Anna Arnold Hedgeman, the only woman on the march’s administrative committee, asked repeatedly for women to be included among the speakers at the march (2). In her essay, “We Wanted the Voice of a Woman to Be Heard,” Height recalled, “Nothing that women said or did broke the impasse blocking their participation. I’ve never seen a more immovable force. We could not get women’s participation taken seriously” (3).

Within days of the march, the NCNW convened a meeting called "After the March, What?" (3). Height described this meeting as a turning point: “The women became much more aware and much more aggressive in facing up to sexism in our dealings with the male leadership in the movement” (3). A few months later, the NCNW invited Pauli Murray to speak at their Leadership Conference. Her speech, “The Negro Woman in the Quest for Equality,” captured the feeling many women had about being snubbed from the march. “The blatantly insensitive treatment of black women leaders was a new awakening,” Height wrote, as it elevated sexism into the conversation of equality (3). Building off the pre-existing desire for an “NAACP for women,” these meetings laid the conceptual groundwork for the 1966 formation of the National Organization for Women (NOW) (4).

A Career Built from the Inside Out

Height's approach to change was institutional. She believed that lasting progress required working within organizations and reshaping them from the inside.

Born in Richmond, Virginia, Height grew up and attended school in Pennsylvania. She excelled as a student, and, after winning a national public speaking contest, received a four-year college scholarship (5). After being admitted to Barnard College in New York, she was denied entry. In 1933, she completed her master’s degree in educational psychology at New York University. She began her career at the Harlem Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) in 1937, where a chance meeting with NCNW founder Mary McLeod Bethune redirected the course of her life (6). Bethune recognized Height's potential and pulled her into a wider world of advocacy. Height rose through the YWCA's national leadership, eventually founding and directing its Center for Racial Justice, and leading the full integration of YWCA chapters across the country (6).

In 1957, she became president of the National Council of Negro Women, a position she held for four decades. Under her leadership, the NCNW became a significant advocacy group, with Height herself frequently appearing before Congress and advising key political figures such as First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and President John F. Kennedy, President Lyndon B. Johnson, President Jimmy Carter, President Ronald Reagan, President George H.W. Bush, President Bill Clinton, President George W. Bush, and President Barack Obama (7). In 2004, President Bush presented her with the Congressional Gold Medal in recognition of her work, commenting “she's told every President what she thinks since Dwight David Eisenhower” (8). Throughout her life, she served on committees such as the President’s Committee on the Employment of the Handicapped, the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, and the Council to the White House Conference, to advocate for equal employment, education, and economic opportunities for all Americans (5).

Wednesdays in Mississippi

In the summer of 1964, a coalition of major civil rights groups organized Freedom Summer, bringing white college students from the North to Mississippi to register Black voters, staff Freedom Schools, and challenge the state's entrenched segregation. Three civil rights workers were murdered, and thousands were intimidated, beaten, or arrested during voter registration drives. It was under these conditions that Height and Polly Cowan, a philanthropist and activist who had become a close collaborator, organized a program called Wednesdays in Mississippi (WIMS).

The idea took shape at an off-the-record meeting in Atlanta in March 1964, where Height had convened women's organization leaders from the South's most volatile cities. At the close of the meeting, Clarie Collins Harvey, a prominent Black businesswoman from Jackson, Mississippi, stood and asked Height and the NCNW to come to them like a "long-handled spoon, reaching down and stirring us up, bringing us together in ways that we could never do by ourselves" (9).

Height and Cowan took that invitation and built a program around it. That summer, teams of Northern women, carefully assembled to be racially diverse, religiously mixed, and visibly middle-class, flew into Jackson each week, traveled to surrounding communities to meet with local women, and returned home by Thursday (9). The program was, by design, quiet.

Teams trained in nonviolent civil disobedience, rehearsed how to dress, and how to answer questions (9). They wore white gloves. They attended church on Sunday. Height understood that a respectable appearance offered real protection in Mississippi's volatile climate. Over two summers, the teams met with roughly three hundred women (9). As Height later wrote, "an amazing number of local white women came forward, quietly and often apprehensively, to join our project" (9).

WIMS was the only civil rights program of the era organized by women, for women, under the auspices of a national women's organization (9). It gave Northern women firsthand access to the Freedom Schools and other Freedom Summer projects, making them more effective fundraisers when they returned home. And it offered something harder to quantify to the Black women they visited: the knowledge that others, across lines of race and region, saw them and cared. "None of us who were part of WIMS that summer returned home unchanged," Height wrote in her memoir (7).

The Quiet Revolution

Height spent much of her career operating in rooms where women were marginalized, in movements where Black women were expected to wait their turn, and in institutions that were slow to recognize what she was building. She operated strategically within those constraints, focusing on what could actually be accomplished. Again and again, she identified women not as beneficiaries of the movement, but as one of its most effective instruments.

"We must not lose sight of the quiet revolution that women are involved in," she wrote (7). For Height, that revolution was quiet only in method, not ambition.

Note on the title: President Obama referred to Height as "The Godmother of the Civil Rights Movement" in his statement upon her death in April 2010.

Sources:

1. “Dorothy I. Height” U.S. National Park Service. Updated July 15, 2020. Accessed May 19, 2026.
2. “Planning the March” National Museum of American History. Accessed May 19, 2026.
3. Dorothy Height. "We Wanted the Voice of a Woman to Be Heard." In Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights–Black Power Movement, edited by Bettye Collier-Thomas and V. P. Franklin, 83–92. New York: New York University Press, 2001.
4. Carol Giardina. "MOW to NOW: Black Feminism Resets the Chronology of the Founding of Modern Feminism," Feminist Studies 44, no. 3 (2018): 736-65.
5. “Dorothy Height” Archives of Women's Political Communication, Iowa State University. Accessed May 19, 2026.
6. Santi Elijah Holley. "The woman who quietly changed the face of the civil rights movement," National Geographic, February 26, 2026.
7. Dorothy Height. Open Wide the Freedom Gates: A Memoir. PublicAffairs, 2005.
8. George W. Bush, Remarks on Presenting the Congressional Gold Medal to Dorothy I. Height, The White House, March 24, 2004.
9. Debbie Z. Harwell. "Wednesdays in Mississippi: Uniting Women across Regional and Racial Lines, Summer 1964," The Journal of Southern History 76, no. 3 (August 2010): 617-54.

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Meredith Herndon | Read More

Meredith Herndon is the writer and editor for the Smithsonian American Women's History Museum.