Dorothy Height, the leading female voice of the Civil Rights Movement, died this morning of natural causes. She was 98.

Speaking of Height, who led the National Council of Negro Women for 40 years, late activist C. Delores Tucker once said:

"I call Rosa Parks the mother of the Civil Rights Movement," Tucker told the Associated Press in 1997. "Dorothy Height is the queen."

"She was a dynamic woman with a resilient spirit who was a role model for women and men of all faiths, races and perspectives. For her, it wasn't about the many years of her life, but what she did with them," former U.S. Secretary of Labor Alexis M. Herman, a close friend who has been running day-to-day operations at the National Council, told the Washington Post. "She will be greatly missed, not only by those of us who knew her well, but by the countless beneficiaries of her enduring legacy."

Height, an activist in the struggle for civil rights starting in her teenage years, was on the stage (pictured below) at the Lincoln Memorial as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech. She said King spoke longer than he was supposed to but that when he finished, she knew the speech would have a monumental impact "because it gripped everybody." She later said she wished that someone had spoken on women's equality that day.

"Dorothy Height deserves credit for helping black women understand that you had to be feminist at the same time you were African ... that you had to play more than one role in the empowerment of black people," Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) once said, according to the Post.

As a teenager, Height marched in New York, yelling, "Stop the lynching." In the 1950s, she pushed President Dwight D. Eisenhower to move more quickly on school desegregation. She also went on to help coordinate the Civil Rights Movement.

Height became head of the National Council for Negro Women in 1957 and led the group until she was 85. She continued to speak out about inequality well in to her nineties. Former President Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994.

During her six decades on the national stage, Height worked to end racial segregation and fight for gender equality. She worked on the effort to desegregate schools and to give blacks voting rights and better employment opportunities.

"I hope not to work this hard all the rest of my life," Height said in 1997, when she relinquished her role as president. "But whether it is the council, whether it is somewhere else, for the rest of my life, I will be working for equality, for justice, to eliminate racism, to build a better life for our families and our children."

Height was born in Richmond, Va., and the family moved to the Pittsburgh area when she was 4. She had bachelor's and master's degree from New York University and attended the Columbia and New York School of Social Work, after being turned away by Barnard because the school had filled the two spaces it allotted for black women.

Height met educator Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of the National Council of Negro Women, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in 1937 while working at the Harlem YWCA. Height became a leader in both organizations.

Among her favorite quotes was: "If the time is not ripe, we have to ripen the time."

Height often quoted 19th-century abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who said that the three effective ways to fight for justice are to "agitate, agitate, agitate."