On July 18, 1875, Mary McLeod Bethune was born on a cotton farm near Mayesville, South Carolina — the fifteenth of seventeen children of former slaves, the first in her family born free.

She founded the Daytona Literary and Industrial School for Training Negro Girls in 1904 with $1.50, faith, and a plan to sell sweet potato pies to railroad construction workers to fund the operation. The school became the Bethune-Cookman College in 1929. It is still operating.

Bethune organized. She led the National Council of Negro Women, founded in 1935, and transformed it into a political force. She built relationships with Eleanor Roosevelt that became a genuine friendship and a political alliance — through which she pressed the White House on civil rights during the New Deal era. Franklin Roosevelt appointed her Director of Negro Affairs in the National Youth Administration, making her the first Black woman to head a federal agency.

At the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945, Bethune was one of three Black Americans invited to attend as consultants. She was 69. She had been doing this for sixty years.

She died in 1955, leaving her home and papers to the National Council of Negro Women with a deed she titled My Last Will and Testament. The document closed: "I leave you love."