If Those Hats Could Talk (1912)
Forrest Gump, sitting on a park bench, has a one-sided conversation with a disinterested nurse and tells her, “Momma always says there’s an awful lot you could tell about a person by their shoes. Where they’re going. Where they’ve been. I’ve worn lots of shoes.” Forrest obsessed over his footwear in much the same way as a fellow Southerner was concerned with her hats, and during her nine decades, both literally and figuratively, she wore any number of them.
The lady who devoted almost a century of her life as a foot soldier for equality was born in a time and place where justice was in short supply. In the belief there would be less racism in the North than in the former capital of the Confederacy, James Height and his wife, Fannie, migrated to the North. The family that included Dorothy, Anthanette, Josephine, and Jessie ended up in Rankin, near Pittsburg. Dorothy was self-conscious about her five-foot-nine-inch height that she reached at age eleven, and her severe asthma led to the prognosis that she would not survive her teens. In addition to her medical troubles, she had to confront Jim Crow, the first gentleman of racism. Dorothy’s first lash of racial bigotry occurred when she was eight years old, and her best friend Sally Hay explained she could no longer play with her because she was a “nigger.” Childhood griefs linger, and at age twelve, Dorothy was denied entrance to a YWCA pool; when she demanded an explanation, the director informed her girls of color were not welcome. A rival basketball team cancelled a competition because Dorothy was not Caucasian. On one occasion, racism came with a silver lining. In 1928, a new principal arrived at the nearly all-white Rankin High, and his directive forbade Dorothy, who usually led the singing at school assemblies, from doing so again. At the first assembly after his order, when the pianist began the alma mater, the students stayed silent. The accompanist tried twice more, with the same result. Finally, the principal motioned Dorothy to the stage, and this time a chorus of youthful voices filled the air. The fact that Dorothy could inspire such solidarity among her white peers in pre-Depression America presaged the greatness that was to follow.
During Height’s senior year, she entered an Elks-sponsored national speech contest on the Constitution, and she was the only non-white in the auditorium except for the janitor. Her topic was the Fourteenth Amendment, intended to extend Constitutional protections to former slaves and their descendants. The jury awarded her first prize: a four-year college scholarship. Barnard College accepted her application, but shortly before classes began, the Dean realized the college already admitted its quota of black students: two. Clutching her Barnard acceptance letter, Dorothy took the subway to New York University who accepted her on the spot. She received a bachelor’s in education and a master’s in psychology. To earn money, Dorothy took odd jobs, such as ironing entertainer Eddie Cantor’s shirts and proofreading Marcus Garvey’s newspaper, The Negro World. She went nightclubbing in Harlem, where she met poet Langston Hughes. Height also became heavily involved in the Civil Rights Movement; whenever there was a lynching in the South, she demonstrated in Times Square, heart and black armband on her sleeve. Height often quoted the nineteenth-century abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who said the three effective ways to fight for justice were “agitate, agitate, agitate.”
Upon graduation, Height worked as a social worker for the New York City welfare department. However, after attending an international youth conference in Oxford in 1937, Dorothy felt she needed to make more of an impact, and left for a position at the Harlem YWCA. One month later, she met Mary McLeod Bethune and Eleanor Roosevelt on the same day. Mrs. Bethune, the daughter of slaves, was hosting a meeting of the National Council of Negro Women, and the First Lady was to be the guest speaker. The twenty-five-year-old Ms. Height had the role of escort for the esteemed guest, but this singular opportunity almost did not happen when Mrs. Roosevelt entered through the service entrance and was making her way on her own. Seeing her honor going up in smoke, Dorothy later recounted, “Who would have thought that Mrs. Roosevelt would park her own car on a Harlem street and come through the service entrance?” Fortunately, Dorothy was able to intercept her. The First Lady gave a rousing speech, and at its close, the ladies serenaded her with “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” After Eleanor’s departure, Mary made her fingers into a fist to impress upon her followers the importance of women working together to eliminate injustice in the dual spheres of racism and sexism. She told her protégées, “The freedom gates are half-ajar. We must pry them fully open.” Dorothy picked up the baton, and Mary’s words became the title of Height’s memoir, Wide the Freedom Gates, published at age ninety-one. The author dedicated it to “my loving mother, Fannie Burroughs Height, and her great expectations.”
The girl who had not been able to dip her toes in the pool of the Rankin Y eventually became the director of its office for racial justice. Her first act was to call attention to the exploitation of black domestic day laborers. The women, who congregated on street corners in Brooklyn and the Bronx, known locally as slave markets, were picked up and hired for fifteen cents an hour by white suburban housewives who cruised the corners in their cars. On Height’s agenda was the push to end the organization’s practice of separate conferences, one for white leaders and one for blacks. Heads of local chapters in the South refused to meet with her, and she spent nights with local African-American families because hotels would not admit black guests. A white police officer threatened her life when she defied his order to wait for a train in the “colored waiting room” rather than on the platform with her white colleagues. In response, her friends surrounded her, and together they entered the train. When one of the leaders of the NAACP heard of the incident, he said, “Dorothy, had you been a black man, you would have been dead.” Through her position, she collaborated with the civil rights movement’s key figures, referred to as the Big Six. Height made seven, but they discounted her contributions because she was female.
Throughout her thirty years at the YWCA, Dorothy spent most of her free time volunteering for the National Council of Negro Women, something she did for the next forty years. She created “Wednesdays in Mississippi,” a 1960s program that brought together Southern and Northern blacks and whites. She organized voter registration drives and set up day-care facilities, school breakfast programs, and job fairs. Ms. Height also initiated “pig banks” that provided livestock for poor families. Another accomplishment was the Black Family Reunion Celebration, a three-day cultural event in Washington, DC, with related events throughout the country, to help mend African-Americans’ fractured families, where the babies’ fathers were often AWOL. Height’s mission was to help her sisterhood combat what she called the “triple bind of racism, sexism, and poverty.” She stepped down as its president at age eighty-five but still made daily visits, using a walker or a wheelchair, as she became infirm. The council celebrated her birthday every year with an “Uncommon Height” gala fundraiser. On her ninetieth birthday, well-wishers such as Oprah Winfrey raised $5 million to pay off the organization’s mortgage on its national headquarters at 633 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, the site of what was once a slave market.
Height’s activism led to her sitting at arm’s length from Dr. King as he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech during the 1963 March on Washington. The photographers airbrushed Dorothy, sporting a patterned hat, out of the iconic photograph and the historic moment. She had appealed to Bayard Rustin, the event’s chief organizer, to allow her to speak, to give women a voice, but the plea proved futile. The only female heard that day was Mahalia Jackson, the gospel vocalist. Ironically, had it not been for Height, there would have been no immortal address. Due to time constraints, each speaker had an allotment of seven minutes; Dorothy made the case that King should be the last at the podium, so his oration could go over time. In 1995, Ms. Height was among the few women to speak at the Million Man March on the Mall, led by Louis Farrakhan, chief minister of the Nation of Islam. Two years later, at eighty-five, she sat on the podium all day, in the whipping wind and rain, at the Million Woman March in Philadelphia. Less than a month later, at King’s request, Dorothy was in Birmingham, Alabama to minister to the families of the four little black girls who had perished in a church bombing. In 1968, Height rushed to the White House, where she and her colleagues tried to advise President Lyndon B. Johnson on how to minimize black protests and rioting in the wake of Dr. King’s assassination. Ms. Height was the warrior woman amongst men; her quest was to make her people realize that racial prejudice and gender prejudice were on the same side of the contaminated coin. With Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, and Betty Friedman, Dorothy helped found the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971.
Dorothy, who had embarked on social activism in her teens, never lost her momentum. Her retirement from her position at the YMCA ended at age sixty-three, but she only did it so that she could don another hat. She became a visiting professor at the Delhi School of Social Work in India. One of her oft-repeated sayings was, “If the times aren’t ripe, you have to ripen the times,” and she forever practiced what she preached.
As was the case with Forrest Gump, Height was present at many of America’s pivotal moments: When President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act, Ms. Height was at the White House to witness the ceremony. In recognition of her seven decades of advocacy for racial equality, the grande dame of the Civil Rights Movement, who always wore her signature hats, received a host of accolades. President Ronald Reagan presented her with the Presidential Citizens Medal, President Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and President Bush gave her the Congressional Medal of Honor. Other tributes were her inclusion in the National Women’s Hall of Fame and a spot on the podium at Barack Obama’s inauguration. On the academic front, Ms. Height received three dozen honorary doctorates from institutions including Tuskegee, Harvard, and Princeton. But there was one academic award, the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree, that resonated: In 2004, seventy-five years after turning her away, Barnard College designated Dorothy an honorary graduate.
In a nod to poetic justice, the woman who left her stamp on history received a postage stamp bearing her image in a wide-brimmed purple hat. The unveiling took place at the Rankin Christian Center, the site of her youthful affront. Dorothy passed away at age ninety-eight, fighting ‘til the end to make the Fourteenth Amendment a right nationally acknowledged. Her spirit lives on in a collection of her 250 hats: the white mink she wore to present First Lady Mrs. Roosevelt the Mary Bethune Humanitarian Award, the rhinestone-encrusted one she wore at a gala of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, and the red, white, and blue one she sported at the Democratic Convention that nominated Barack Obama. If those hats could talk, what a tale they would tell.