Book Review: Black Women, United and Hell-Bent on Doing God’s Work: Dr. Dorothy Height’s longevity and 40-year tenure as head of the National Council of Negro Women made her perhaps the best-known Black female activist in America, respected by Whites and revered by Blacks. When she died in April at age 98, The Washington Post referred to her as “a founding matriarch of the American civil rights movement whose crusade for racial justice and gender equality spanned more than six decades.”In a sense, however, she was just the latest in a long line of Black church ladies who turned their zeal for God into the justification and engine for the campaigns against racial and gender injustice, as well as for social progress for African-Americans.
Dr. Bettye Collier-Thomas, a professor of history at Temple University and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, has labored in this voluminous work to write such women into history where they belong.
