Dorothy Height

CTL-E-5964 · Person · other · 1912–2010

VERIFIED evidence grade — build store (JSON graph)

Combined Graph record U-07200 · provenance: build store (JSON graph), record CTL-E-5964.

Dorothy Height (Dorothy Irene Height, born March 24, 1912, Richmond, Virginia; died April 20, 2010, Washington, D.C., aged 98) was, in the phrase attached to her across the movement, its godmother. Raised in Rankin, Pennsylvania, she was admitted to Barnard College in 1929 and turned away under its quota for Black students; she took her bachelor's in education and her master's in psychology at New York University instead. On the Harlem YWCA staff she pushed the YWCA's national integration and founded its Center for Racial Justice. In 1937 she met Mary McLeod Bethune and joined the National Council of Negro Women, becoming its fourth president in 1957 and holding the post for forty years, until 1997. She helped organize the 1963 March on Washington — she sat on its platform, though the program gave her no speech — and ran the Wednesdays in Mississippi project joining Northern and Southern women. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2004.

The record

• Also known as: Dorothy Irene Height

Notes

Staged 2026-10-16 under CTL-GOV-006 (Scan Tail Wave 2 — 747 Program, Wave 9; second Scan Tail packet at the founder's 40-record size). Gate A (2026-10-16): no Dorothy Height entity in the live graph at 3,603 entities (exact / normalized / alias + token containment); ID CTL-E-5964 free. Supply: 747 Supply Ledger, Tier 4 — corpus scan tail tranche, ranks #751–#1400 (corpus-gap-candidates-2026-10-15.json ranked clean survivor #1150). The scan supplied the NAME STRING ONLY; no fact in this record is sourced to it (CTL-GOV-004). SCOPE GATE: PASS — the NCNW's defining president and the movement's central organizer across six decades; core scope. Vital status: DECEASED — died April 20, 2010, aged 98 (BET; National Women's History Museum). Tribute treatment in the Curator's Judgment. STATISTICS (sourced, dated): NCNW presidency: 1957–1997, forty years (National Women's History Museum) — the figure carried here, superseding looser datings in some secondary accounts. Presidential Medal of Freedom 1994; Congressional Gold Medal 2004. Organized the 1963 March on Washington's coalition work (NWHM). MEDIA: photo HELD (Dorothy Height portrait named as candidate; no file-page verification in this pass); chart FILLED (charts/chart-ctl-e-5964-dorothy-height.svg); video HELD (no matching-entity CTL Short or verified-rights archival video staged); audio HELD (no rights-cleared matching-entity audio staged). MEDIA LAYER (staged 2026-10-16; full per-asset PHOTO-001 records + embed specs in the packet's staged JSON, Drive packet folder): map = N/A (Non-place record; no map attaches at the entity layer.) | visual_assets = HELD: | chart = FILLED (CTL-created SVG (black / deep red / gold) built only from this record's sourced facts) | video = HELD (No matching-entity CTL Short in the Shorts Link Map catalog (checked by name and variants), and no official/em) | audio = HELD (No audiobook excerpt or author recording with a CTL rights basis was staged in this pass.)

Relationships

• Mary McLeod Bethune — related to
  Height met Bethune in 1937, joined her National Council of Negro Women, and succeeded her line as its fourth president (1957–1997); the succession is documented, and no schema succession predicate exists.
• National Council of Negro Women — affiliated with
  The Congressional Record tribute records that Height began as an NCNW volunteer at age 25 — a connection that stands independently of the disputed presidency end year recorded on CTL-E-6292. Closes the blocked edge documented in Scan Tail Wave 2.

Referenced by

• National Council of Negro Women — led by → this record

Sources

• National Women's History Museum, "Dorothy Height" biography (accessed 2026-10-16) — the museum's record: the March 24, 1912 Richmond birth, the Barnard quota turn-away, the NYU degrees, the YWCA integration work, the 1937 Bethune meeting, the NCNW presidency, and the honors — https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/dorothy-height (primary source · build store)
• BET, "This Day in Black History: March 24, 1912" (accessed 2026-10-16) — Black-press corroboration of the biography and the April 20, 2010 death at 98 — https://www.bet.com/article/9zh0tq/this-day-in-black-history-march-24-1912 (build store)

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Record CTL-E-5964 · Combined Graph record U-07200 · CultureTechLens Knowledge Graph · 2 sources · 3 mapped relationships.
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Researched and maintained by the CultureTechLens research program · CultureTechLens Combined Graph, Release 2026-11-04. Corrections are public: the corrections log.

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