Dorothy Height

Debosmita Ghosh
VI D
 Dorothy Height
Dorothy Irene Height was a US civil rights and women’s
rights activist. She became an influential leader in the fight
for social equality. She headed organizations that sought to
improve the circumstances of and opportunities for African
American women.

Birth: 24th March 1912 (Virginia, United States)

Died: 20th April 2010 (Washington DC, United
States)

Education: NYU Steinhardt School of Culture,

Education, and Human Development
Columbia University
Dorothy Height
Contributions
• Dorothy Height was the first person to consider the
discrimination of ‘dark-skinned’ African-Americans
against ‘fair-skinned’ Americans and men against women
as a whole.
• She was the first person to unite all the American
women(regardless of race, creed, skin colour etc.) to fight
for their rights and equality(for dark-skinned).
• Ms Height not only focused on giving African-American
equal rights, but also gave attention to the issues of
unemployment, illiteracy and voting-denial faced by the
African-American women.
• She helped organise the rally (for the legendary speech ‘I
have a dream’ by Martin Luther King Jr) that brought about
250000 people to the National Mall.
• She helped the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW)
win grants to provide vocational training and assist African-
American women in opening businesses.
 Dorothy Height
Why I chose Ms Height?
Most civic activists consider the issues of ‘dark-skinned against fair-skinned’ and ‘men
against women’ as separate issues. Dorothy Height was the first person I read of to consider
these discriminations as one and work against them as one.
I, myself, have a negative outlook against all kinds of discrimination. I believe that as we
all are humans, each individual must treat the others as equal and not discriminate against
them for being different. As far as I read about Ms Height, she shared the same thoughts as
mine, and was therefore, easy for me to identify myself with.
Also, I have seen in some instances that women are still considered, in modern times
too, to be inferior than men and even if they do/did many notable works, they aren’t
recognised much for it. So instead of choosing the many men activists of the same era, I
chose her.
This is why, I chose Ms Height.
 An incident showing discrimination
I had read a story last month:-
Few couple of years back, there was a lady who was young and bright, bold and idealistic. She was
studying for her Master’s degree and the Bangalore IISc(now known as Tata Institute). She had never
faced helplessness, injustice or discrimination in her life before.
After completing her post-graduation, she was very eager to go abroad to do her doctorate in
Computer Science. She had already been offered scholarships from the universities of USA and had
not thought about a job in India.
One day, after reaching the hostel after a long day outside, she saw an advertisement on a
noticeboard. It was a standard job-requirement notice from a famous automobile company named
TELCO. It stated that the company required young and bright engineers, who were hardworking and
had excellent academic background.
But at the bottom, there was a small note saying, ‘LADY CANDITATES NEED NOT APPLY’.

This is only a part of the story – But it is still an example of gender discrimination