On August 10, 1875, Mary McLeod Bethune was born near Mayesville, South Carolina, the fifteenth of seventeen children of formerly enslaved parents. She was the first in her family born into freedom.

In 1904, with five dollars in savings and a rented house — she later recalled that her first desks were packing crates, her first ink was elderberry juice — she opened the Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls in Daytona Beach, Florida. The school occupied land she initially could not purchase because she was Black. She negotiated a lease, then organized fundraising drives that included selling pies and chicken suppers to workers at the nearby railroad construction site. She built on it anyway.

By 1923, the school had merged with the Cookman Institute to become Bethune-Cookman College, a fully accredited institution that still operates today as Bethune-Cookman University. At the time of the merger, it had dormitories, a hospital that served the local Black community, a teacher training program, and a farm.

Bethune understood that the school was only one instrument. She became advisor to four presidents — Coolidge, Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman. She founded the National Council of Negro Women in 1935. She served as director of the Division of Negro Affairs in the National Youth Administration under FDR, the highest government position held by a Black woman to that point. She was present at the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945 as a consultant, one of the few Black women in attendance.

Franklin Roosevelt called her "Dr. Bethune" and meant it as a courtesy title. She had no doctorate at the time — she had received honorary degrees, but her formal education ended at Moody Bible Institute. She accepted the title and used it. She later received honorary doctorates from several institutions. She had built an institution herself. The degree was almost beside the point.

She died in 1955 in Daytona Beach, in a house on the campus she had built. Her "Last Will and Testament," published shortly before her death, is one of the great documents of twentieth-century American political thought: I leave you love. I leave you hope. I leave you the challenge of developing confidence in one another.