Uncover Mary McLeod Bethune’s Legacy in the Exciting New NMAAHC Exhibit.
The NMAAHC exhibit showcases over 100 images and artifacts celebrating Bethune, the NCNW, and other pioneering Black women activists.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) is celebrating civil and women’s rights pioneer Mary McLeod Bethune with the exhibit “Forces for Change: Mary McLeod Bethune and Black Women’s Activism,” which opened on July 19. Visitors can explore Bethune’s impactful life and legacy through 75 images, 35 artifacts, a multimedia film, and interactive displays. A striking centerpiece of the exhibit is an 8-foot-tall plaster statue of Bethune, adorned with a graduation cap, gown, heels, a pearl necklace, and holding a Black rose.
Born on July 10, 1875, in South Carolina, Mary McLeod Bethune was the youngest of 17 children born to Samuel and Patsy McLeod. The National Women’s History Museum notes that she attended Scotia Seminary, a North Carolina boarding school, and after graduating in 1894, she joined Dwight Moody’s Institute for Home and Foreign Missions in Chicago. Her quest for missionary sponsorship eventually guided her to a career in education after being turned away by several churches.
After marrying educator Albertus Bethune and having their son in 1899, Mary McLeod Bethune moved to Palatka, Florida. Following a divorce in 1904, she founded the Daytona Beach Literary and Industrial School for Training Negro Girls, which later evolved into a college and merged with an all-male institute to become Bethune-Cookman University.
Bethune’s activism for racial and gender equality has significantly advanced the Black community and women’s rights. As the founder of the NCNW, she established an organization dedicated to empowering women of African descent. Today, the nonprofit, with over 330 campuses and more than two million people, continues to offer resources in education, entrepreneurship, financial literacy, healthcare, and social justice.
In addition to founding her organization, Bethune held leadership roles with the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, the Negro Affairs division of the National Youth Administration, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s unofficial “Black Cabinet,” and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
She also spearheaded voter registration drives, campaigned against lynching, established a racially integrated Women’s Army Corps, and was the sole Black woman at the United Nations’ founding conference in 1945. In a historic moment in 2022, Bethune became the first Black American honored with a state statue in the National Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol, replacing Confederate general Edmund Kirby Smith.
In addition to reimagining the “Bethune Room,” the NMAAHC gallery features other Black women activists throughout history, including Stacey Abrams and Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund.
