Forty Years Without Growing Weary

In 1957, Dorothy Height stepped into the presidency of the National Council of Negro Women in Washington, D. C. , inheriting an organization founded by Mary McLeod Bethune just two decades earlier. She was forty-five years old. She would not step down for forty years. During those four decades, Height stood on the platform at the 1963 March on Washington — one of the only women there — while the nation's attention fixed on the men at the microphone.…