[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 4]
[House]
[Page 5843]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                     REMEMBERING DR. DOROTHY HEIGHT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from New York (Mr. Rangel) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. RANGEL. I want to appreciate the remarks that Sheila Jackson Lee 
has just made, and I thank my colleagues for giving me this opportunity 
to speak out of order.
  And the reason I rise is that there are very few people that have 
been active in the civil rights movement. They all came after Dorothy 
Height. She was there before Adam Powell, Martin Luther King, Jim 
Farmer, and all of the great civil rights leaders that have made the 
struggle. She's been made a confidante from Franklin Roosevelt to 
President Obama and all of the Presidents that have been in between.
  She gave so much of herself without even talking about color, without 
just talking about women, but most of all in talking about humankind. 
She was a true believer that if America really did what it was supposed 
to do to the brothers and sisters and the citizens that made up this 
great country, then fairness and equity would determine that all people 
are truly treated equally.
  And even though she wasn't born in the city of New York, we are so 
proud that she went to New York University--even though she was turned 
down with a scholarship at Barnard College--that she stayed there and 
she worked in our Harlem YMCA, that she was confidante to Congressman 
Adam Clayton Powell at his church and even counseled his father, who 
was the pastor before him.
  Time is going to record that there have been a lot of people who have 
struggled to make this country all that she can be. And when the final 
word is written, there is no question in my mind that Dorothy Height 
will not just go down as a black civil rights leader, but she will go 
down as a great American who recognized that bringing together this 
country--black, white, Jew, gentile, Catholic, and Protestant--by 
bringing us all together, that she has made this a better world, and 
she's made it a better world because she's made it a better country.

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