On September 4, 1875, Mary McLeod Bethune was born in Mayesville, South Carolina, the fifteenth of seventeen children of formerly enslaved parents. She was the first in her family born free. She became the most influential Black educator in American history and served as a senior government official during the Roosevelt administration.

Bethune attended the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, the only Black student in her class, hoping to become a missionary. The Presbyterian Mission Board told her they had no openings for Black missionaries in Africa. She returned south and taught in a series of schools before deciding to found her own. In 1904, with $1.50 in cash, she opened the Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls in Daytona Beach, Florida. She raised money by selling pies and sweet potatoes door to door. Within two years she had 250 students.

She merged the school with the Cookman Institute in 1923 to form Bethune-Cookman College, which she led for decades. She founded the National Council of Negro Women in 1935 and served as its president until 1949. From 1936 to 1944 she directed the Division of Negro Affairs in the National Youth Administration under Franklin Roosevelt — the highest federal office held by a Black woman up to that point.

She built all of this under Jim Crow laws that in several Southern states barred Black women from owning property in their own names, denied them the right to vote until 1965 in practice, and subjected them to constant organized violence.

She died in 1955. A statue of her stands in Lincoln Park in Washington, D.C. — the only monument to a Black woman or any woman of color on federal parkland in the capital.