To Be EQUAL  

The Urban League in Washington:  

Bringing Reinforcements

by Marc H. Morial

President and CEO, National Urban League

Marc H. Morial, President of the National Urban League, is the former two-term Mayor of New Orleans, former President of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and author of the weekly column,  TO BE EQUAL, that appears in MaximsNews.com.

             NEW YORK - 30 March 2004 / www.MaximsNews.com / -  Fate conspired to be kind to the National Urban League last week.

For it was our great good fortune that we opened our long-ago-scheduled, first-ever Legislative Policy Conference in Washington, D.C. on the very day, March 24, that an American legend, Dorothy I. Height, received a singular American honor:  the Congressional Gold Medal.

Thus, some considerable number of the nearly 300 Urban Leaguers who had come to the nation’s capitol for our two-day gathering rushed from our morning meetings to be at the Capitol Rotunda, when Height, 92 years old that day, was honored for her seven decades of work in the civil rights and women’s movements expanding opportunities for all Americans. 

President Bush, summarizing the extraordinary length and range of her activities—from marching on picket lines to protest the evils of Jim Crow in the 1930s, to a central place among the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, to her continuing work promoting AIDS education—told the throng on Capitol Hill that “today, we recognize a citizen who has helped extend the promise of [the nation’s] founding to millions.  We recognize a hero.”

Similar sentiments were heard from Representative Diane Watson, Democrat, of California, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat, of New York, who co-sponsored the legislation that led to unanimous Congressional approval for the award, and numerous other prominent figures

True to form, Dorothy Height did not dwell upon the extraordinary achievements which have won her not only the highest honor Congress can bestow but also so much acclaim from so many other public and private American institutions.

Rather, she referred to them obliquely and in a way that made it seem as if she were simply obeying the call to improving the life of the community all Americans should heed.

“As I look back through all the years,” she said, “I always had the desire to make life better, not only for myself but for others.  I think that when you do that, what you find is that you are not alone.  

"If you keep moving along, you will find you will increasingly have people to join you.  That for me has been the driving force.  I believe there is so much people can do if we work together. 

"I have spent most of my life working in that direction, and it keeps you moving.” 

Height added that she accepted the award “on behalf of the millions of people, particularly women, whose work goes unnoticed.”

  The grace of her remarks—and the determination not to let her audience lose sight of the work yet to be done and the wrongs that need correcting is a characteristic of Dorothy Height we at the National Urban League know well; for she’s been a “contributor” to the League’s work since her college years in New York in the 1920s. 

Indeed, when the Urban League honored Height (for the second time in our history) at our annual conference last August in Pittsburgh, her speech, like the one of last week, was not mere reminiscence of an extraordinary life.  

Instead, it was a speech that used a discussion of the past to focus the audience’s attention on the great deal that remains to be done. 

That’s why Fate was so kind to us in “scheduling” these two events side by side, for there’s no better representative than Dorothy Height of the importance and the power of “civic engagement” that was the wellspring of our Legislative Policy Conference. 

We Urban Leaguers went to Washington to do what American citizens do:  to walk the august halls of Congress to meet with our Representatives and Senators in both parties and members of the Administration to discuss our concerns and their concerns and our common concerns.  

We met them as a large group, and then broke up into small groups to visit with our individual representatives from Illinois, and Pennsylvania, and Georgia, and nearly every other state in the Union.

We brought no specific requests, but articulated our concerns about the economy and jobs, and about educational and civil rights issues.  

As our first such gathering, we felt it most important for Urban Leaguers who follow the model of Dorothy Height in local communities across the country and their representatives to come to know each other better.

In other words, you might say that Fate conspired to underscore in dramatic fashion that we can be reinforcements for the kind of work Dorothy Height has been doing for decades.

This was the most important “statement” our presence in Washington last week made:  that we will be back every year in this kind of concerted fashion because we recognize that, as important as voting is, it’s also important that “we the people” represent ourselves equally well in all facets of the political process—in the halls of Congress, and our state legislatives, and our city and town councils—to influence the decisions being made which affect America.

That, I think, is ultimately the best way to honor Dorothy I. Height.