1875-1955
Educator, Civil Rights Leader

Crusader for Racial Equality.

Early Years.

Teaching Career.

Origins of Bethune-Cookman College.

Civil Rights Leader.

Retirement.

Mary Bethune left Washington, D.C., and retired in Daytona in 1944, when the NYA closed. She resigned as president of the National Council of Negro Women in 1949, at the age of seventy-four. She continued to fight for racial equality until her death in 1955.

Sources:

Rackham Holt, Mary McLeod Bethune (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964);

Elaine M. Smith, Entry on Bethune, in Notable American Women: The Modern Period, A Biographical Dictionary, edited by Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green with Ilene Kantrov and Harriette Walker (Cambridge, Mass. & London: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 76-80;

Emma Gelders Sterne, Mary McLeod Bethune (New York: Knopf, 1957).