M ary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955) was dedicated to the improvement of Black American lives. This commitment earned her several titles: “The First Lady of the Struggle,” the “First Lady of Negro America,” and the “Female Booker T. Washington.” She was an advisor to President Frankin D. Roosevelt, helped form the Federal Council on Colored Affairs—also known as the Black Cabinet, and started a private school for black students in Daytona Beach, Florida which later became Bethune-Cookman University. She was the only black American woman officially part of the U.S. delegation to create the United Nations charter, and held a leadership position for the American Women’s Voluntary Services.

Bethune was particularly focused on educating females, “I believe that the greatest hope for the development of my race lies in training our women thoroughly and practically.”

Born in a small log cabin near Mayesville, South Carolina on a rice and cotton farm in Sumter County, the fifteenth of seventeen children to former slaves, Mary McLeod first discovered books when she was allowed into a white child’s nursery. When she picked up a book, the white child took it away from Mary, accusing her of not being able to read. Mary knew then that education was the difference between whites and blacks. “The whole world opened to me when I learned to read.”

Her formal education started in a one-room schoolhouse for black children. She walked five miles round trip to school each day—the only child in the family to go to school—and taught her family what she learned. She later attended Scotia Seminary and Dwight L. Moody’s Institute for Home and Foreign Missions in Chicago.

In 1898, Mary McLeod married Albertus Bethune. They first lived in Savannah, Georgia where she had a son and did social work until a visiting Presbyterian minister persuaded them to move to Florida and run a mission school. Her husband left them in 1907. They never divorced.

As a leader, Mary McLeod Bethune helped black women gain access to the polls after the passage of the 19th Amendment that guaranteed women the right to vote. She gathered donations to help with poll taxes, tutored women to pass the voter registration and literacy tests, and planned mass voter registration drives. Bethune served as the Florida chapter president of the National Association of Colored Women and was a part-time employee of the National Youth Administration under Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration. She was specifically tasked with improving black youth’s employment. She also co-found the United Negro College Fund. Mary McLeod Bethune is remembered as “one of the most potent factors in the growth of interracial goodwill in America,” laying the foundation for the modern civil rights movement. She said, “Invest in the human soul. Who knows, it might be a diamond in the rough.”