Dorothy Height, an icon for civil rights as well as women's rights, was celebrated with a Google doodle on Monday on what would have been her 102nd birthday. She died in 2010.
Height "stood on the same stage as Martin Luther King Jr. as he told of his dream, was often the lone woman at strategy sessions during the peak of the civil rights struggle, and for 40 years was 'laser-focused' on advancing the rights of African American women," The Los Angeles Times reported.
Height was a staunch civil rights activist, and collaborated on strategy with King and others during the height of the movement in the early 1960s. She led the National Council of Negro Women for 40 years, from 1957 to 1998. She also helped found the National Women's Political Caucus in 1971, The LA Times also reported.
Height, who lived to 98 years old, received the Congressional Gold Medal in 2004.
"We African American women seldom do just what we want to do, but always what we have to do," her inscription on the medal read.
"When you read about the civil rights movement, you read more about the great men. The backbone of the civil rights movement was made up of women, children and youth," Height once said.
"Her fingerprints are quietly embedded in many of the transforming events of the last six decades as blacks, women, and children pushed open and walked through previously closed doors of opportunity," wrote Marian Wright Edelman, an American activist for the rights of children and a champion against the Second Amendment.
