Right now, it's time for the Way Black History Fact. And Today's Way Black History Fact is sponsored by Major Threads. For innovative, fashionable sportswear, checkmajorthreads dot com. Today, we're going to talk about Mary McLeod Bethune. This is a name that I think that you should know, and I'll tell you why in just a second. But before we get there, Mary McLeod Bethune was the daughter of formerly enslaved parents.
Mary Jane McLeod Bethune became one of the most important Black educators, civil rights and women's rights leaders, and government officials of the twentieth century. The college she founded set educational standards for today's black colleges, and her role as an advisor to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave African Americans an advocate in government. Born July tenth, eighteen seventy five, near Maysville, South Carolina, Bethune was one of the last
of Samuel and Patsy McLeod's seventeen children. After the Civil War, her mother worked for her former owner until she could buy the land on which the family grew caught. By age nine, Bethune could pick two hundred and fifty pounds of cotton a day. Bethune benefited from efforts to educate African Americans after the war, Graduating in eighteen ninety four from Scotia Seminary, a boarding school in North Carolina. Bethune next attended Dwight Moody's Institute for Home and Foreign Missions
in Chicago, Illinois. But with no church willing to sponsor her as a missionary, Bethune became an educator. While teaching in South Carolina, she married a fellow teacher, Albertus Bethune, with whom she had a son. In eighteen ninety nine, the Bethuns moved to Palatka, Florida, where Mary worked at the Presbyterian Church and also sold insurance. Nineteen oh four, her marriage ended, and determined to support her son, Bethune opened a boarding school, the Daytona Beach Literary and Industrial
School for training Negro girls. Eventually, Bethune School became a college, merger with the all male Cookman Institute to form Bethune Cookman College in nineteen twenty nine. It issued its first degrees in nineteen forty three. A champion of racial and gender equality, Bethune founded many organizations and led voter registration drives after women gained the vote in nineteen twenty, risking
racist attacks. In nineteen twenty four, she was elected president of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, and in nineteen thirty five she became the founding president of the National Council of Negro Women. Bethune also played a role in the transition of black voters from the Republican Party the Party of Lincoln, to the Democratic Party during the
Great Depression. A friend of the Eleanor Roosevelt, in nineteen thirty six, Bethune became the highest ranking African American women in government when President Franklin Roosevelt named her Director of Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration, where she remained until nineteen forty four. She was also a leader of FDR's unofficial unofficial Black Cabinet teen thirty seven, but Thun organized a conference on the problems of the Negro and
Negro Youth and fought to indiscrimination and lynching. In nineteen forty she became vice president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or the NAACP, a position she held for the rest of her life. As a member of the advisory board of that In nineteen forty two, she created the Women's Army Corps, soon ensured it was racially integrated. Appointed by President Harry S. Truman, Bethune was the only woman of color at the founding Conference of
the United Nations in nineteen forty five. She regularly wrote for leading African American newspapers, The Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender, and on nineteen On July thirteenth, nineteen twenty two, Bethune became the first African American woman to be represented with a state statue in the National Statuary All Collection
at the US Capitol. And we want to shout her out because we are now working with the National Council of Negro Women, one of the organizations that she founded, and is important for you to know the history behind the founder