Civil rights pioneer Dorothy I. Height died on April 20, 2010, at the age of 98. Height was best known as the president of the National Council of Negro Women for 40 years. For a lifetime of working for the rights of African Americans, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, in 1994. This week, President Barack Obama called Height "the godmother of the civil rights movement and a hero to so many Americans."

A Delta Sigma Theta national convention in St. Louis, 1994. Left to right: Dorothy Height, Betty Shabazz (Malcolm X’s widow), and Frankie Freeman.

The Missouri History Museum had the honor of publishing the memoirs of another civil rights leader, Frankie Muse Freeman, in 2002, featuring a foreword by Height. Freeman and Height were longtime friends and members of the same public-service sorority. In her book, A Song of Faith and Hope, Freeman wrote this:

"In 1950, I had taken the significant step of joining a sorority, Delta Sigma Theta…. One of the Deltas I most admired then and have ever since is Dorothy Height, who was national president when I joined the group; I had first met her when I was living in New York City, where she was an executive with the YWCA. Whether she is working on behalf of Delta or the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), which she has served so well as national president, she has always been a persuasive, effective person, in a quiet way. She likes to knit, and I have seen her knitting quietly at a Delta convention—you would almost swear that she was asleep. But she was really listening intently; in fact, at that very convention, she heard a speaker mention something that gave her an idea—and she took that idea back to NCNW and implemented it.

"She is also dedicated and persistent when it comes to things she believes in. Even now, when I stop by NCNW headquarters in Washington, I know that I had better have time to spend. Dorothy will say: 'Oh Frankie, while you are here, would you look over this?'—and I find myself reading a contract or other legal document. But Dorothy has many friends who are glad to do such things for her, because she is so compassionate and has always given so much of herself to so many good causes."

Delta Sigma Theta event in Chicago, ca. late 1970s. Left to right: Lady Carter, Frankie Freeman, Hortense Canady, Dorothy Height, Etta Moten Barnett.

For more information on A Song of Faith and Hope: The Life of Frankie Muse Freeman, click here.