Mary McLeod Bethune

Mary McLeod Bethune (1875 to 1955) was an American educator and civil rights leader. She was born near Mayesville, South Carolina, the fifteenth of seventeen children of parents who had been enslaved, studied at Scotia Seminary and a missionary training institute in Chicago, and taught at schools in Georgia, South Carolina and Florida. Her year at the school run by Lucy Craft Laney shaped her belief in educating Black girls and women. In October 1904 she opened a school for Black girls in Daytona, Florida, with five girls and her son as its first pupils. It grew through her tireless fundraising and a merger with the Cookman Institute into Bethune-Cookman College, where she served as president. Beyond the school she founded the National Council of Negro Women in 1935, led a division of the National Youth Administration, advised President Franklin D. Roosevelt as part of the group known as the Black Cabinet, and held an official position with the American delegation at the conference that created the United Nations charter.