Bethune is perhaps most remembered for founding the school now known as Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach, Florida, which she started as a girls school in 1904.
WASHINGTON — Civil rights leader and trailblazing educator Mary McLeod Bethune on Wednesday became the first Black person elevated by a state for recognition in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall
“To have her statue here is quite phenomenal, absolutely, as a reminder of what our democracy is about,” said granddaughter Evelyn Bethune. Bethune led the “Black Cabinet” of President Franklin D. Roosevelt as the highest-ranking Black government official, pushing him to diversify the defense industry and later helping draft President Harry Truman’s executive order desegregating the armed forces, said Ashley Robertson Preston at Howard University, a Bethune biographer.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said that “in the face of the ignorance, the cruelty and the prejudice of others, she refused to surrender to bitterness, cynicism, or despair.” Books stacked at the statue’s feet are inscribed with some of the core values from her last will and testament: love, hope, faith, racial dignity, a thirst for education, courage and peace.
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