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Civil Rights Leader Dorothy Height Dies at 98

Dorothy Height, who as longtime president of the National Council of Negro Women was the leading female voice of the 1960s civil rights movement, died Tuesday. She was 98.

Height, who continued actively speaking out into her 90s, had been at Howard University Hospital for some time. The hospital said in a statement she died of natural causes.

As a teenager, Height marched in New York's Times Square shouting, ''Stop the lynching.'' In the 1950s and 1960s, she was the leading woman helping the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other activists orchestrate the civil rights movement.

It was the second death of a major civil rights figure in less than a week. Benjamin L. Hooks, the former longtime head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, died Thursday in Memphis at 85.

The late activist C. DeLores Tucker once called Height an icon to all African-American women....
Read entire article at NYT