The role of women in the civil rights movement is extremely important and actually women were central to the civil rights movement.

That's Congresswoman Barbara Lee of California, herself a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement expressing a core truth.

That the movement was powered by women, and because of the time they lived and the kind of work

they did, their stories are rarely memorialized in the same way the stories of men like the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, John Lewis, and Andrew Young are.

There were strong women throughout this movement that nobody knows.

The men had a hard time getting along with each other because they were all young and each

had a different approach to civil rights. They were very high strong and brilliant and competitive young men and it was Dorothy

Height of the National Council of Negro Women that basically kept the peace

amongst the six civil rights organizations and sat in on all the meetings but they didn't let her speak at the March on Washington and she was a great speaker.

Dorothy Hete would go on to live to be 98 years old, still fighting for justice until the end. In his eulogy, then President

Barack Obama paid tribute to her commitment by recounting an episode that took place

just two months before she died in 2010.

Last February, I was scheduled to see her and other civil rights leaders to discuss the pressing

problems of unemployment, Reverend Sharpton,

Benjealous of the NAACP, Mark Morial of the National Urban League.

Then we discovered that Washington was about to be blanketed by the worst blizzard in record,

two feet of snow.

So I suggested to one of my age, we should call Dr. Heighten and say we're happy to reschedule the meeting.

Certainly if the others... reschedule the meeting.

Certainly if the others come, she should not feel obliged.

True to form, Dr. Height insisted on coming, despite the blizzard. never mind that she was in a wheelchair.

She was not about to let just a bunch of men in this is Voices of the Meath.

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