Mary McLeod Bethune

Mary Jane McLeod was born in Mayesville, South Carolina, on the tenth of July 1875, the fifteenth of seventeen children born to formerly enslaved parents. She was the only one of her siblings to attend school. After missionary education at Scotia Seminary and the Moody Bible Institute she returned to the South to teach.

In 1904 she founded the Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls in Daytona Beach, Florida — beginning with five students, a rented cottage, and a dollar fifty in capital. The school merged with the Cookman Institute in 1923 to become Bethune-Cookman College and is today Bethune-Cookman University. Bethune served as its president for many of the years between 1923 and 1942.

She was the most politically connected Black woman of her generation. She founded the National Council of Negro Women in 1935 to coordinate the work of Black women's organizations across the country. She served as Director of Negro Affairs in the Roosevelt administration's National Youth Administration from 1936 to 1944 — the highest position held by any Black woman in the federal government to that date — and was a member of the Black Cabinet, the informal advisory group of Black officials who shaped New Deal racial policy.

She advised four U.S. presidents (Coolidge, Hoover, Roosevelt, and Truman) and was the only woman of color present at the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945.

She died in Daytona Beach on the eighteenth of May 1955, age seventy-nine. Her statue stands in the National Statuary Hall of the United States Capitol — the first Black American and the first woman of color so honored.

She is honored here as the educator who built an institution from a dollar fifty.