US civil rights activist dead

WASHINGTON - Dorothy Height, who as longtime president of the National Council of Negro Women was the leading female voice of the 1960s civil rights movement in the United States, died Tuesday. She was 98.

As a teenager, Height marched in New York's Times Square shouting, "Stop the lynching," and she continued actively speaking out on civil rights into her 90s.

In the 1950s and 1960s, she was the leading woman helping the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other leading activists orchestrate the civil rights movement.