Dorothy Height, the leading female voice of the Civil Rights Movement, died Tuesday. She was 98.

Height marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and led the National Council of Negro Women for 40 years. She continued to speak out into her 90s but had been at Howard University Hospital for some time, according to the Associated Press.

The hospital said in a statement that Height died of natural causes.

President Barack Obama called her "the godmother of the civil rights movement."

Height, he said, was the only woman at the highest level of the civil rights movement and witnessed "every march and milestone along the way."

Height’s death was the second for a major civil rights figure in less than a week. Benjamin L. Hooks, the former longtime head of the NAACP, died Thursday in Memphis at age 85.

Read more at CharlotteObserver.com.
 

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