This guest blog post is written by Beverly Lancaster-Jones, a Senior Account Supervisor at Vanguard Communications.

Today our nation mourns the passing of a true patriot – Dorothy Height. Height was among the coalition of African American leaders who pushed civil rights to the center of the American political stage after World War II, and [...]]]>

This guest blog post is written by Beverly Lancaster-Jones, a Senior Account Supervisor at Vanguard Communications.

Today our nation mourns the passing of a true patriot – Dorothy Height. Height was among the coalition of African American leaders who pushed civil rights to the center of the American political stage after World War II, and she was a key figure in the struggles for school desegregation, voting rights, employment opportunities and public accommodations in the 1950s and 1960s. She was president of the National Council of Negro Women for 40 years, relinquishing the title in 1997.

When I heard the news this morning, I retrieved a box of pictures that I hadn’t looked at since my mother passed almost a year ago. In that box was a picture of my mother making a presentation on Mary McLeod Bethune to Ms. Height. For those of you who may not be history buffs or are simply too young to have reason to know such things—Mary McLeod Bethune was to Dorothy Height what Mahatma Gandhi was to Martin Luther King, Jr. While the Alzheimer’s that eventually took my mother’s life led her to misplace many, many of her possessions that we have never been able to retrieve, this picture of her and Dorothy Height survived the siege of that disease. And now it is one of the many jewels of my inheritance.

But the true wealth of the inheritance that this picture represents for me is my mother’s indomitable decency and how that energy resonated with all like-spirited angels here on earth—like Ms. Height.