Statue of Mary McLeod Bethune to be first of an African American placed in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol building

29th November 2021   ·   0 Comments

By C.C.Campbell-Rock
Contributing Writer

Mary McLeod Bethune will be immortalized in American history when an 11-foot marble statue of the educator is installed in the National Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol Building in 2022.

Bethune will be the first woman and first African-American depicted in Statuary Hall, adjacent to the Capitol Rotunda. Bethune’s statue will replace a nearly 100-year-old bronze sculpture of Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith.

There are four other Black people represented in other parts of the Capitol: Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Rosa Parks.

The National Statuary Hall Collection is comprised of statues donated by individual states to honor persons notable in their history. The entire collection now consists of 100 sculptures contributed by 50 states.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis officially requested in 2019 — on the 144th anniversary of Bethune’s Birthday — that she represent Florida in the national statue collection, according to National Public Radio (NPR).

Nilda Comas, a Hispanic master carver and Fort Lauderdale native flew to Italy in 2020 to begin working on Bethune’s statue. She beat out 1600 applicants to capture the image of the legendary civil rights activist and co-founder of Bethune-Cookman University in Dayton, Florida.

Much more than an educator, Bethune was an advisor to four presidents, founder of the National Council of Negro Women, co-founder of the United Negro College Fund, and the only Black American to help form the United Nations.

From her humble birth in a log cabin in Maysville, South Carolina, in 1875, the 17th child of formerly enslaved parents, Samuel and Patsy McLeod, Mary Ann McLeod Bethune, rose to national and international acclaim.

More than an educator, Bethune left a legacy of civil rights activism, educational achievement, and public policy accomplishments.

Some say Bethune was an excellent salesperson; others say she’s a saint. What is undisputed is her ability to make her visions come true.

The first in her family to read and write, and the only one to attend college, Bethune received a scholarship to the Scotia Seminary (now Barber-Scotia College), a school for girls in Concord, North Carolina. After graduating from the seminary in 1893, she went to the Dwight Moody’s Institute for Home and Foreign Missions (also known as Moody Bible Institute) in Chicago. Bethune completed her studies there two years later. Biography.com

Bethune wanted to be a missionary in Africa. Instead, she returned to the South and began her career as an educator. She married fellow teacher Albertus Bethune in 1898.

Believing that education provided the key to racial advancement, Bethune founded the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute in 1904, an all-girls private boarding school with $1.50 and five students, including her son Albert Bethune.

In 1923 the school merged with Cookman Institute of Jacksonville, Florida, founded in 1872. The Cookman Institute was the first institution of higher education for Blacks in the State of Florida.

The merged school was the Daytona-Cookman Collegiate Institute. In 1931, the College became accredited as a junior college. On April 27 that year, the administrators officially changed the name to Bethune-Cookman College to reflect the leadership of Dr. Bethune.

In 2007, Bethune-Cookman achieved university status, having added a graduate program and became Bethune-Cookman University.

Along the way, Dr. Bethune became a national and international figure. A close friend of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Bethune led the President’s Federal Council of Negro Affairs or Black Brain Trust or “The Black Cabinet,” (a term Bethune coined) from 1933 to 1945.

“The Black Cabinet worked on lynching legislation, attempts to ban poll taxes in the South, welfare, and they worked with New Deal agencies to create jobs for unemployed African Americans. By mid-1935, there were 45 African Americans working in federal executive departments and New Deal agencies. The cabinet also helped draft the presidential executive orders that ended exclusion of African Americans in armed forces and defense industries during World War II. The influence of the Black Cabinet grew from the unprecedented access of Mary McLeod Bethune to the President and the first lady. The work of the cabinet ultimately laid the political foundation of what would become the modern civil rights movement,” according to the National WWII Museum.

In 1935, Bethune was appointed director of the Division of Negro Affairs in the National Youth Administration (NYA) and became the first black female administrator in the federal government under Roosevelt’s WPA.

As Director, Bethune was the highest-paid African American in government at the time—with a $5,000 salary. Under her guidance as Director, NYA employed hundreds of thousands of young African American men and women and established a “Negro College and Graduate Fund” that supported over 4,000 students in higher education.

The NYA also helped black youth who couldn’t afford to attend college. Bethune’s office collaborated with local schools, hospitals, and organizations, such as the YWCA, to provide girls with training in nursery schools, home economics, gardening, cafeteria work, nursing, clerical skills, and factory jobs.

The NYA also sponsored residential training centers on and near black colleges’ campuses in thirteen states.

Bethune also founded the National Council of Negro Women in 1935, co-founded the United Negro College Fund in 1944. She was the only African American woman to help the U.S. delegation that created the United Nations charter in 1945.

While Bethune seldom gets credit for helping to integrate the U.S. military, as a special assistant to the Secretary of War for the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, she was responsible for helping establish a training school and recruiting Black women for army officers training. Bethune was named honorary General of the Women’s Army for National Defense.

After the Women’s Army, Auxiliary Corps entered active duty status in July 1943, Bethune served as an advisor for the new Women’s Army Corps. As an advisor to the WAC and WAND, she successfully lobbied President Roosevelt to end segregation in veteran rehabilitation centers. She frequently briefed the President on instances of violence against Black service members in the South.

NYA’s education fund set up The National Youth Administration’s Civilian Pilot Training program at six HBCUs (Tuskegee Institute, Howard University, Hampton Institute, North Carolina A&T, Delaware State, West Virginia State College, Lincoln University of Missouri, and Harlem Airport in Chicago). It provided the instructors and the Army Air Corps Program foundation to train African-Americans to fly and maintain combat aircraft.

The results were the much-feted Tuskegee Airmen Corps, which helped win the air battle during WWII.

A bronze replica will be on display permanently in Daytona Beach in addition to the new marble statue moving to Statuary Hall.

There are three other statues of Mary McLeod Bethune in the U.S. The educator stands tall on a pedestal in front of the B-C-University School of the Performing Arts.

The Mary McLeod Bethune Memorial by sculptor Robert Berks was erected in Lincoln Park in D.C. on July 10, 1974, on her 99th Birthday by the National Conference of Negro Women. It was the first memorial to honor an African American built on public land in Washington, DC. It was the first portrait statue of an American woman on a public site in the city.

On Saturday, November 20, 2021, A nine-foot bronze monument honoring civil rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune was unveiled Saturday by Jersey City officials.

The statue completes the brand new park that bears her name and is the first statue in the city to honor an African American woman. Bethune Park is across the street from the Bethune Community Center.

Bethune Center Director Alvin Pettit, the statue’s sculptor, drew inspiration for the Jersey City sculpture from a younger version of Bethune. “As an artist, I am grateful to have been given the opportunity to create such a lasting contribution to the city in which I have called home for 30 years,” he said.

Mary McLeod Bethune died in 1955, but the statues ensure her legacy never will.

Two years before she died, she wrote, “I leave you love. I leave you hope. I leave you the challenge of developing confidence in one another. I leave you respect for the use of power. I leave you faith. I leave you racial dignity.”

This article originally published in the November 29, 2021 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.