Black educator Mary McLeod Bethune honored in Statuary Hall

By MICHAEL WARREN and FARNOUSH AMIRI
Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Civil rights leader and trailblazing educator Mary McLeod Bethune has became the first Black person elevated by a state for recognition in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall. Florida commissioned the project after a grassroots campaign succeeded last year in removing a statue of a Confederate general. Mary McLeod Bethune is perhaps most remembered as the founder of Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach, Florida, which she started as a girls school in 1904. She’s also one of the founders of the United Negro College Fund, which became a financial backbone for predominantly Black higher institutions nationwide. She was born in 1875. She died in 1955, having helped to lay the groundwork for the civil rights movement.