Black educator Mary McLeod Bethune honored in Statuary Hall

WASHINGTON (AP) — Civil rights leader and trailblazing educator Mary McLeod Bethune on Wednesday 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 Edmund Kirby Smith, among the last Confederate generals to surrender after the Civil War. Bethune joins John Gorrie, a pioneer in air conditioning and refrigeration, in representing Florida.

Bethune was born in South Carolina in 1875, seven years after the ratification of the 14th Amendment, with its guarantee of equal protection under the law for all in the United States. She died in 1955, having helped to lay the groundwork for the civil rights movement.

“To have her statue here is quite phenomenal, absolutely, as a reminder of what our democracy is about,” said granddaughter Evelyn Bethune.

Mary McLeod Bethune is perhaps most remembered for founding the school now known as Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach, Florida, which she started as a girls school in 1904. She also was one of the founders of the United Negro College Fund, which became a financial backbone for predominantly Black higher institutions nationwide.

After forming a strong friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt, Bethune became director of the Negro Affairs Division for the National Youth Administration, a New Deal-era program.

Bethune led the “Black Cabinet” of President Franklin D. Roosevelt as the highest-ranking Black government official, pushing him to diversify the defense industry and later helping draft President Harry Truman’s executive order desegregating the armed forces, said Ashley Robertson Preston at Howard University, a Bethune biographer.

“She was the Oprah of her time. She was the...