Civil rights activist Dorothy Heights dies

Legendary civil rights leader Dorothy Height, who spent most of her life battling for the empowerment of women and blacks and who had the ear of U.S. presidents from Eisenhower to Obama, died Tuesday. She was 98. She died of natural causes at Howard University Hospital in Washington, D.C. In 1963, Height was the only woman on the speaker's platform when Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech. But she wasn't on the program for the March on Washington even though she was the nucleus of the meetings held by the mostly male civil rights leaders who planned it. Height told NPR in 2003 that the experience was uplifting despite the fact that a gospel singer was the only woman heard from the podium that day. "My being seated there had some very special meaning because women had been trying to get a woman to speak on the program," Height said, "but we were always met by the planners with the idea that women were represented in all of the different groups, in the churches, in the synagogues, in the unions, organizations and the like. So the only voice we heard of a woman was that of Mahalia Jackson."