Oct. 3, 1904
Mary McLeod Bethune opened a training school in Daytona Beach, Florida, with “$1.50, faith in God and five little girls.” Discarded crates and boxes served as their desks and chairs.
In two years, the school expanded to 250 students and eventually became an accredited institution, Bethune-Cookman College (now Bethune-Cookman University). She served as a college president, one of the few women in the world to do so.
“Invest in the human soul,” she urged. “Who knows? It might be a diamond in the rough.”
A determined civil rights leader, she decried the lynchings of Black Americans and fought for voting rights and better health care. In 1935, she founded the National Council of Negro Women, and nine years later, she co-founded the United Negro College Fund. President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed her as a national adviser of his “Black Cabinet” to direct the National Youth Administration. She was known as “The First Lady of The Struggle” because of her dedication to the movement.
In 1974, the Mary McLeod Bethune Memorial became the first memorial to honor a Black American built on public land in the nation’s capital. It was also the first portrait statue of an American woman on a public site in the city.
A year later, the National Park Service declared her home in Daytona Beach a national historic landmark. In 2020, Time selected her as one of the most influential women of the past century, and she is now one of two statues representing Florida inside Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol.
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