Daily Inspiration Quote by Dorothy Height

The line lands like a corrective, the kind spoken in rooms where people are tired, underfunded, and tempted by the sugar rush of a single win. Dorothy Height isn’t offering inspiration; she’s issuing a strategic reset. “We have to realize” implies a gap between what people are doing and what they understand about their own work. The struggle isn’t only against segregation or sexism; it’s also against the internal drift toward improvisation, ego, and short-term thinking.

“Building” is the quiet radical verb here. It treats change as infrastructure, not spectacle: committees, training, coalitions, childcare, voter registration, leadership pipelines, institutions that outlast headlines. Height, who spent decades shaping the National Council of Negro Women and working alongside (and often being sidelined by) male-led civil rights leadership, knew how often women were asked to do the sustaining labor without being credited as architects. The phrase subtly reclaims that role: a movement doesn’t just erupt; it is constructed, maintained, repaired.

And “a movement” shifts the center of gravity away from personalities. It’s a warning against mistaking charismatic leaders for progress itself, and against confusing visibility with power. In Height’s era, civil rights victories could be celebrated while the conditions for lasting equality remained fragile. Her sentence insists on duration: not a march, not a moment, but a machine for democracy that keeps running when the cameras leave and when internal conflicts inevitably surface.