"If the times aren't ripe, you have to ripen the times. We have to realize we are building a movement." -- Civil rights leader Dorothy Height (3/24/1912 - 4/20/2010) who, as President of the National Council of Negro Women for 40 years, was one of the earliest civil rights leaders and the most prominent woman. She is credited for recognizing that the inequality of both women and of African Americans should be considered as a singular problem to be addressed. She was long associated with the YWCA and spearheaded its integration in the early 1960s. Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994, Height was later called the "godmother of the civil rights movement" by former President Obama.
Her call to "ripen the times" is even more urgent today with the assault on our democracy by the Malignant Fascist and his followers. For the second Saturday in a row, many thousands marched across the country in protest of that assault. Dorothy Height would have been proud.
(photo: Height wearing one of her signature hats/ Getty)
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