Happy Birthday to civil rights and women’s rights activist Dorothy Height (b. March 24, 1912, in Richmond, VA). She took over the presidency of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) in 1958 and continued the legacy of its then recently passed founder Mary McLeod Bethune. In this work, Height prioritized solutions for the everyday economically rooted problems faced by African American women and communities. For example, she launched a food program called Operation Daily Bread that directly addressed Black hunger by providing fast and accessible food supplies. She also developed self-help programs to provide people with foundations for socio-economic success, including housing, education, childcare, and employment programs. Height also emphasized the importance of understanding histories of social struggle. As she wrote in her memoir: “I fear that too many of our young people know only where we are now, not how we got here nor where we are going . . . I believe that all of us must keep working so that more and more of our children have opportunity, but we also must be sure that our youth recognize the preceding struggle.”
Recommended further reading:
Citations: Tracey A. Fitzgerald, The National Council of Negro Women and the Feminist Movement, 1935-1975 (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1985), 26, 32-33, https://archive.org/details/nationalcouncilo00fitz; Dorothy Height, Open Wide the Freedom Gates: A Memoir (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009), 295, Kindle edition; Adrian Hood, “Portrait of Dr. Dorothy Height taken in June 2008,” photograph (location unknown, June 18, 2008), https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DrDorothyHeight.jpg#/media/File:DrDorothyHeight.jpg.
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