April 2010

President Obama delivered a beautiful eulogy for civil rights matriarch Dorothy Height today. Dorothy passed away last week at age 98.

An excerpt from the eulogy:

“It’s an unambiguous record of righteous work, worthy of remembrance, worthy of recognition. And yet, one of the ironies is, is that year after year, decade in, decade out, Dr. Height went about her work quietly, without fanfare, without self-promotion. She never cared about who got the credit. She didn’t need to see her picture in the papers. She understood that the movement gathered strength from the bottom up, those unheralded men and women who don’t always make it into the history books but who steadily insisted on their dignity, on their manhood and womanhood. She wasn’t interested in credit. What she cared about was the cause. The cause of justice. The cause of equality. The cause of opportunity. Freedom’s cause.

And that willingness to subsume herself, that humility and that grace, is why we honor Dr. Dorothy Height. As it is written in the Gospel of Matthew:

‘For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.’

I don’t think the author of the Gospel would mind me rephrasing: ‘whoever humbles herself will be exalted.’”

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