Recasting Mary McLeod Bethune’s Legacy: Permanence in the U.S. Capitol and Memorializing the Present

Promoters intended the 1974 installation of a Mary McLeod Bethune statue in Lincoln Park to reconcile frustration that D.C. residents had expressed with another statue, one that they thought of as a condescending President Abraham Lincoln freeing an enslaved man. In the 1876 “Freedmen’s Memorial” (or the “Emancipation Group”), also in the park, Lincoln stands over an African American man, who expresses little agency in his own emancipation. Notably, the Lincoln statue group was largely viewed as heroic when it was originally installed in 1876. President Ulysses S. Grant and his cabinet members proudly dedicated the “Emancipation Group” as a testament to Lincoln as the iconic Emancipator.

Even in 1876, praise for the “Emancipation Group” was not universal. In his keynote speech at the dedication, Frederick Douglass noted the contradictions represented by the statue: “Truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory…Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man.” Douglass continued to list Lincoln’s political shortcomings; specifically, that nineteenth-century abolitionists had not given Lincoln the amount of credit that many contemporary Americans had. Lincoln, he said, had been “ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of this country.” The conclusion of Douglass’s speech acknowledged that Lincoln should be remembered for freeing the slaves, although inherently within the context of his higher priority of saving the union: “Though he loved Caesar less than Rome, though the union was more to him than our freedom or our future,” Douglass said, “under his wise and beneficent rule we saw ourselves gradually lifted from the depths of slavery to the heights of liberty and manhood.”⁸

Over the next century, reflecting the criticisms in Douglass’s speech, some Washingtonians continued to argue that the depiction of an anonymous African American man at Lincoln’s feet was too passive and submissive, hardly a role model for modern black Americans. They wanted an image of strength and a symbol of African American pride. Douglass himself had prophetically noted in a letter to the editor of the National Republican that there was room in the park “for another monument.”⁹ Still, it took nearly another century, fifteen years of fundraising and negotiation with Congress, and several architectural designs for the idea that Douglass had planted in 1876 to come to fruition. In 1974, a statue of Mary McLeod Bethune, designed by Robert Berks, was installed at the opposite end of the park, thanks in large part to the nation’s largest black women’s club, the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW).

The NCNW, which Bethune had founded in 1935, had received authorization from Congress as early as 1958 to raise funds for a bronze memorial. The women’s club wanted a new statue to stand in sharp contrast (both symbolically and geographically) to the men at the other end of the park.¹⁰ As historian Jenny Woodley argues, “The Bethune Memorial was to be a symbol of what African Americans had achieved and what they had done for the country.” Woodley continues that for Bethune’s successors, most notably Dorothy Height, the long-standing president of the NCNW, “this was so important because this story of black contribution was missing from the capital’s monumental landscape and therefore from the nation’s history.”¹¹ The statue would both memorialize Bethune’s legacy and, more broadly, serve as an acknowledgement of the role black Americans had played in shaping the country.

When Bethune’s statue was finally unveiled on July 10, 1974, it was more of a compromise to protesters who wanted to remove the “Emancipation Group” statue than it was a tribute to Bethune.¹² Nonetheless, the NCNW and other supporters saw the dedication as a long-awaited victory. Unlike the freed slave at Lincoln’s feet, Bethune had emerged from a generation of African Americans born into freedom, who were able to achieve much more than their recently emancipated parents. Bethune came of age in the late nineteenth-century South, but it was in the twentieth century that she remade herself as a Washingtonian rather than a Southerner, a paid federal worker rather than a voluntary clubwoman, and a political agent rather than an educator. To onlookers, Bethune’s statue represented modern, dynamic, self-asserting African Americans of the twentieth century.

Even though Bethune’s statue forced new attention onto black women, it also reminded onlookers of the complicated ways in which black women have been ignored in the larger national narrative of the United States. The process of getting the 1974 Bethune statue is reflective of the fierce resistance that the NCNW faced in their efforts to incorporate African American and women’s history into the national narrative. It took an extraordinarily long time to raise funds and install the statue—a decade and a half passed between the decision to create a permanent memorial to the “First Lady of the Struggle” and its realization. Certainly, Bethune’s legacy still shone in 1958 when the NCNW started on the memorial project, a legacy that included the NCNW, the largest black women’s club in the United States; her school, Bethune-Cookman University, which Bethune had started as a one-room school with just $1.50 in its capital fund; and Bethune’s individual and group archives of black women’s history, originally housed at the NCNW headquarters and the Bethune Foundation in Florida. However, Bethune’s life and work had become overshadowed by pressing and more visible civil rights campaigns in subsequent decades, including sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and large protest marches.

In the context of the Civil Rights Movement, fundraising for a memorial to Bethune might have been a straightforward, achievable goal. With a Joint Resolution, Congress had already approved the land inside of Lincoln Park in Washington, D.C., seemingly the largest barrier to the project.¹³ Yet, as Woodley argues, the NCNW faced particular challenges during the early years of fundraising because the civil rights efforts of the 1950s and 1960s demanded more immediate support than a project to memorialize efforts of the past. Even leaders of the NCNW felt conflicted when asking for donations because they were engaged in their own urgent civil rights activities, in addition to partnering with Martin Luther King, Jr. and other prominent leaders. As NCNW president Dorothy Height explained, the mood of the country in the 1960s “did not permit placing before people the choice of helping Martin Luther King and others against completing the monument.”¹⁴

Supporters of the NCNW criticized the organization’s fundraising efforts for a variety of reasons. Some did not want to fund the statue because they wanted to support projects that honored Bethune’s legacy in other ways, including providing food, shelter, and other necessities for people in need. Mrs. Louis Loeven wrote on the back of the appeal letter from Representative Shirley Chisholm, “I have given money to buy pigs for the poor farmers of the Southern States. Not to put up monuments…Yes, for pigs no for monuments.” Loeven underscored her points by underlining them with both red and black pens.¹⁵ A Pennsylvania woman also criticized the effort, pointing to the “dire need” among economically poor African Americans. Although she had “great regard” for Mary McLeod Bethune, she thought that Bethune would want a more practical monument, such as housing, “not cement or stone monument sculpture.”¹⁶ Another woman, claiming that she had already “allocated a rather large percentage of my tithing to [the NCNW’s] cause” appeared angry because she thought that her donations were being used to “feed people in Mississippi that need help.” She continued, “If however, you are building statues, count me out.”¹⁷ Other letters pointed to the desire of donors to earmark their “small contributions” to “feed hungry children,” “train Negro officials,” and help with elections.¹⁸ Some pointed to the general economic challenges of individual Americans living in the middle of the century, while others refuted the notion that contributions would help “combat hunger and malnutrition in this country.”¹⁹ Additional letters criticized the expense of the statue and advised the NCNW to “set the example for careful spending.”²⁰ In some ways, Bethune’s legacy, in the form of this statue, became as controversial as some of the positions on integration, literacy, and civil rights that she took while she was alive.

During the dedication, NCNW leaders and other supporters reminded audiences that Bethune’s legacy included consistent protest, and they pointed to the ways in which the statue disrupted a persistent narrative that black freedom was solely dependent upon Lincoln as Emancipator. Bethune’s lifetime of protest continued through her statue, whose installation forced Lincoln’s statue to be turned 180 degrees so that he is looking at Bethune, rather than having his back positioned against her. The turn also forced a visual interaction between the Bethune and Lincoln statues, symbolized by the extension of both leaders’ left hands offering their gifts, and their right hands resting on support for their beliefs about liberation: the Emancipation Proclamation for Lincoln and a cane representing social uplift for Bethune. Bethune often held canes or walking sticks—not because she needed them for stable mobility but to signal social uplift because the canes were gifted by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and other prominent people.

What was at stake for the NCNW was their modern narrative about freedom. The NCNW wanted the world to know that black women had a long history of claiming freedom for themselves, just as Bethune had during her lifetime. Through the elaborate dedication ceremony, the NCNW’s speakers indeed disrupted the status quo. For example, U.S. Representative Shirley Chisholm, who sponsored a 1970 bill to preserve land for the Bethune statue and who co-chaired the fundraising committee in the early 1970s, stated that the statue honored Bethune as a symbol of the larger project of civil rights for black Americans. “The Memorial,” she wrote, “will serve as a manifesto that black Americans have not only earned the right to the necessities of daily living, but to their heritage as well. It will be the first memorial to black people on public land in the nation’s capital.”²⁵ Indeed, it would be the first statue of a woman and of a black person to be dedicated on federal land in Washington, D.C.; and if occupying the position of first was not disruptive enough, the position of the Bethune statue and the pivoting of Lincoln’s statue provided the corrective that the NCNW wanted.

In anticipation of the 1974 dedication of Bethune’s statue, the Washington Post reported that one hundred thousand spectators were expected to arrive in Washington, D.C., to witness the ceremony and participate in celebration events. The actual number of spectators was smaller—eighteen to twenty-thousand people—but even so, the District police had to impose parking restrictions around Lincoln Park. The Sheraton Park Hotel, where the NCNW had set up temporary headquarters, filled its 1,500 rooms.²⁶ As the New York Times reported, spectators “poured into the Nation’s Capital…to ‘live the legacy’ of Mary McLeod Bethune, the noted educator, humanitarian, presidential advisor and champion of the masses of people.”²⁷ The Chicago Defender reported that the new statue held both political and spiritual importance: “Her rise to eminence as a single social force in the stirring drama of life, her triumph over poverty and discrimination form an unforgettable chapter in America’s social history. She had an abiding hope in the democratic dream and its remitting toil. She consecrated her life to that holy mission.”²⁸

Following the dedication were two days of celebration and remembrance aimed at honoring the historical corrective that Bethune’s statue represented. Events included a twenty-four-hour vigil, a march to the park, commemorative receptions, luncheons and banquets, a Bethune Memorial Symposia, a musical tribute at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and a showing of a thirty-minute film, Last Will and Testament: The Bethune Legacy. Emphasizing Bethune’s own words, actor Cicely Tyson also read Bethune’s essay on which the film was based, “My Last Will and Testament.”²⁹

Notable honorees at the events included the Mayor-Commissioner of the District of Columbia, Walter E. Washington; the architect and sculptor Robert Berks; former NCNW presidents Dorothy Boulding Ferebee and Vivian Carter Mason; civil rights leaders Betty Shabazz and Coretta Scott King; and an honor guard with representatives from each state.³⁰ During the evening Kennedy Center program, opera singer Margaret Tynes spoke highly of the statue’s dedication, stating, “The black heroes like Frederick Douglass were remote from me when I was growing up. We didn’t see them. But Mary McLeod Bethune was there. She used to come to my town to speak. My father was a self-educated man, a minister, and so what that great lady said was very important to him.”³¹ Poet Nikki Giovanni, who read her poem, “Ego Tripping” at the event, had more tempered enthusiasm, saying, “Kids my age don’t really know who Mary McLeod Bethune was. We see her in books called ‘Famous Neee-groes.’” Giovanni was thirty-one at the time, representing a younger generation than the groups of women that the Washington Post reporter referred to as “middle-aged or older.” Still, another attendee, Carol Curry, aged twenty-three, saw the event as “an assertion of the strength of women.”³²

Other moments during the dedication program explicitly linked Bethune’s statue to that of Lincoln, showing how the new memorial served as a corrective to Lincoln’s narrative. For example, the NCNW emphasized the role of Charlotte Scott, an emancipated enslaved woman, who had donated the first $5 for the “Emancipation Group” in 1873. They reminded onlookers that this significant donation was made only two years before Bethune had been born, which propelled Bethune to know “the story of slavery” as she had “lived to champion the unfulfilled true meaning of emancipation.”³³ Underscoring connections between the two statues, actor Roscoe Lee Browne read Frederick Douglass’s 1874 keynote speech and thus reminded contemporaries of Douglass’s point—that there was, in fact, room in the park for another statue.³⁴

The dedication weekend drew many supporters who traveled far and wide to participate, but it is also important to consider a group of community members who did not have to travel to the dedication ceremonies: residents in Lincoln Park’s neighborhood. In 1963, when fundraising for the Bethune statue was fully underway, the neighborhood surrounding Lincoln Park was comprised largely of African American residents; but by the time the statue was dedicated in 1974 the racial demographics of the neighborhood had shifted. Local resident Steve Allen remarked that it was strange that Bethune’s statue would be dedicated in the park because “Black people are leaving this neighborhood every day, not because they want to, but people with money are buying all the houses around here.” One group of African American residents reacted differently from Allen, however, by informally organizing a gathering of 150 people from the neighborhood about twelve hours before the official program began. Charles Jackson reported that residents did not necessarily want to participate in a program where “everybody will be all dressed up and everything. So we decided to come out here tonight and welcome Mrs. Bethune in our own way.” With conga drums, flutes, tambourines, and gongs, the group performed as a band like it had many times before in the park. “We bring the instruments out about every two weeks,” stated Jackson. He continued, “This performance is really off schedule, but this is a special night since we got this new lady in the neighborhood.”³⁵

Despite the range of initial responses, the 1974 Bethune statue corrected the Lincoln-as-Emancipator narrative for many constituency groups for many decades. Indeed, not until 2020 did a group of protestors reignite the argument to remove the Emancipation Group altogether, at which point there was so much concern for the Emancipation Group statue that law enforcement erected a fence around the statue to protect it.³⁶ Nevertheless, Lincoln’s statue remains at one end of the park while Bethune’s remains at the other, a testament to both Bethune as the subject of the statue and to the fundraisers and supporters who demanded and then commissioned the memorial. More broadly, Bethune’s statue serves as a reminder of the corrective work that monuments stimulate in the public memory.

In 2022, Mary McLeod Bethune’s legacy would once again be used as a historical corrective to redirect public memory—this time, in the U.S. Capitol Building. In 1922, Florida had selected Confederate General Edwin Kirby Smith to represent the state in the National Statuary Hall, in an effort to memorialize Florida’s oft-forgotten contributions to the Civil War. The Smith statue stood for one hundred years, before its replacement by a new monument in the form of Bethune.

Florida participated early in the Civil War—in fact, it was the third state to secede from the Union. However, with its relatively small population of 140,000 people and meager industrial resources, the state was not generally regarded as a powerful, southern contingent. As historian Elna Green has noted, in “contrast to other Atlantic seaboard states, Florida was a mere adolescent at the outbreak of the Civil War.”³⁷ More recently, a Florida writer more succinctly described the state as the “smallest tadpole in the dirty pool of secession.”³⁸ The choice of General Smith for Statuary Hall reflected Florida’s attempt to attach itself to the national narrative that glorified southern secession. Smith’s pedestal was inscribed, “Florida’s memorial to her most distinguished soldier.”

In fact, however, Smith’s only major contribution to the war effort was that he was the last Confederate with a major field force to surrender his troops at Galveston, Texas, on June 2, 1865. Whether he was last because he held out for an extended time or because he simply had not received the news that the war had been over since May 9th is not clear. Smith fled to Cuba after the war, only to return after denouncing his allegiance to the Confederacy. He rounded out his career outside of Florida in his new home as an educator in Tennessee. Smith’s last, potentially embarrassing career details were overlooked by the legislature, since glorifying Smith allowed Florida to link itself to the Lost Cause narrative. The racial climate in the United States in the 1910s and 1920s was such that it allowed for nostalgia for the antebellum South, the release of the film Birth of a Nation in 1915, and a resurgence of white supremacist activities, including Ku Klux Klan membership. During this period, Florida lawmakers wanted to be included in the pervasively sentimental Civil War narrative, and so Smith’s statue was installed to represent Florida’s bravery and nobility—until the state legislature decided to take him down.³⁹

Nearly a century after the dedication of Smith’s statue, Florida was eager to change its role in the national narrative—this time, by bringing more attention to its cultural contributions rather than its role in the Civil War. In the wake of white supremacist violence in the 2010s in Charlottesville, Charleston, and other southern cities, lawmakers pushed forward with three candidates who might replace Smith’s statue. Passing on Everglades conservationist Marjory Stoneman Douglas and Publix grocery store chain founder George Washington Jenkins, the legislature decided on a statue of Mary McLeod Bethune in tribute to her having started a school for African American girls in 1904, which now remains as Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach, Florida.

For Florida, a state trying to craft an appealing, modern image as a premier vacation and retirement destination in the late twentieth century, it has been important to make dramatic shifts away from Lost Cause mythology. Historian Chanelle Rose explains that Florida’s reputation is enhanced by a “tourist progressive mystique,” making the state a “premier vacation destination.”⁴⁰ Floridians consider their state complex and diverse in priorities, a place that both restricts voting and fixes unequal access to the polls, for example. Amid Florida’s efforts to attract tourists and retirees, representatives found Bethune to be a much more acceptable symbol for the state.

Indeed, U.S. Representative Kathy Castor (FL14) had been pushing for the monument change since 2015 and gained bipartisan support and voter input for the decision.⁴¹ In February of 2018, Castor issued a statement declaring the vote to change the statue a victory for the state of Florida: “I believe that the State of Florida should be represented in the US Capitol by an outstanding Floridian who represents our diverse population and the essence of our dynamic Sunshine State. Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune’s life’s work as an educator and civil rights leader serves as an example for all Americans of someone who fought for equal rights, high quality education, respect for our veterans, and perseverance.”⁴² Castor continued to rally the cause of change, including taking the sculptor, Nilda M. Comas, on tours in Washington, D.C., to show her the existing statue of Smith in the Capitol Building along with the 1974 Bethune statue, located one mile away.⁴³ This time, rather than the NCNW, it was Bethune-Cookman University spearheading the fundraising for the creation and subsequent installation of the new statue.

Comas worked on the 2022 Bethune statue in her studio in Pietrasanta, Italy, using Carrara marble. The heavy, white stone with gray and gold veining, statuario marble, was the last of its kind taken from artist Michelangelo’s cave.⁴⁴ Comas produced the statue of eleven feet and 6,129 pounds for the Capitol Building and created a companion bronze statue for Daytona Beach’s Riverfront Esplanade from earlier models.⁴⁵ The office of the Architect of the Capitol, which maintains responsibility for all of the statues in the U.S. Capitol Building, describes the statue as “an imposing, mature Bethune looking slightly downward, as though at a child.” The description highlights her “benevolent smile” and her “determined yet gentle demeanor.”

The iconography of the statue is significant. Bethune holds a walking stick in her right hand, signaling social uplift, and a single, black marble rose in her left. The rose represents both a rare black velvet rose in a garden that she toured during a 1927 European trip and by extension, her students, whom she benevolently referred to as her “black roses.”⁴⁶ Bethune is dressed in academic regalia, including a mortarboard cap and tassel to remind onlookers that she had become one of the first black women to head a university in the United States even though she herself never completed a college degree. The regalia represents her commitment to literacy, education, and the multiple honorary doctorate degrees that she received during her lifetime.⁴⁷ Comas’s design focuses on Bethune’s legacy as an educator, but not simply as a maternal teacher—rather, as a scholar adorned in graduation regalia. The statue signals intelligence and accomplishment and diverts attention toward the memory that Bethune herself wanted enshrined as her legacy (fig. 2).

During the dedication of the 2022 Bethune statue, Representative Castor reiterated the importance of Bethune as a symbol of a contemporary Florida, stating, “I am proud to be a Floridian this morning, because the people of the state of Florida have sent the great educator and civil rights leader Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune to represent our dynamic and diverse state—the first to be represented by a Black American in National Statuary Hall.” Employing the legacy of Bethune to highlight progressive aspects of the state’s history, Castor praised Bethune for her civil rights work and lifetime dedication to service. Acknowledging the national tumult that led to the decision to replace Smith’s statue with Bethune’s, Castor added, “We lift her up today at a time of competing ideologies to help heal and unify through her example.”⁴⁸

Other prominent individuals added their voices of approbation. Lawrence M. Drake II, interim president of Bethune-Cookman University, stated that “Our hearts are rejoicing today seeing our founder and namesake take her rightful place among the most distinguished Americans.” A year earlier, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi referred to the statue replacement as “trading a traitor for a civil rights hero.”⁴⁹ Sociologist James Loewen added that the “United States gains by the exchange. The Capitol loses a war criminal and gets a humanitarian who founded a college and played a major role in what we might call ‘the long Civil Rights Movement.’”⁵⁰ A 2017 political cartoon by Bill Day forecasting the impact of the exchange of statues aptly reflects Florida’s correction narrative (fig. 3). In the cartoon, Bethune’s figure is a forward-looking, fur-adorned, cane-holding educator, stateswoman, philanthropist, humanitarian, and civil rights activist. Smith’s figure, on the other hand, is absent from a pedestal that simply lists his name and his military allegiance. The empty pedestal remains, as if to remind viewers of a sudden amputation of something that once was there but should no longer be there.⁵¹

Despite the success of the 1974 and 2022 statue installations, corrective narratives do not always resolve past harms, as previous scholars have shown. As Leigh Raiford and Renee Romano contend, installing statues opens new chapters in defining what we should remember rather than making static what we should remember. Memory is a process, an action created by onlookers, cartoonists, and representatives. In the case of the 2022 Bethune statue, for example, onlookers were compelled to think that the displacement of a statue of a Confederate soldier would reconcile Florida’s complicated and racialized past. But it is not so simple. Memories invoke elements of contemporary politics and political discourse. Therefore, remembering is not about recording the past. Instead, it is an ongoing and contested political project.⁵²

The building, taking down, and changing of physical memorials is as much about creating a memory of the past as it is about memorializing the moment of the installation or replacement. Don Mitchell referred to such changes in buildings and monuments as construction of “cultural landscapes.”⁵³ Pierre Nora highlights the continuous aspect of construction by stating, “Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon.” Memory is tied “to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past.” Nora reminds readers that memorial statues create a dialectic, an opportunity to change or update one’s ideas about the past, not to define them statically. In other words: “Memory…remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformation, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived. History, on the other had is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer.”⁵⁴

In the landscape of American culture, statues are perpetually meant to remind the public of civic pride and an individual’s accomplishment. Raiford and Romano explain that memories might be personal and individual, but they can also could be collective and shared by many. They are never static because memory “is distinct from, though not necessarily in opposition to, what is usually described more formally as history.”⁵⁵ Those who established the memorials are what Reiko Hillyer calls the “guardians of memory.”⁵⁶

Within this framework, the taking down and putting up of statues signals to both individuals and communities not that we should remember but what we should remember. The 1974 and 2022 Bethune statues represent a correction to a national narrative that had institutionalized a white man’s heroicism and Confederate nostalgia, respectively. For modern audiences challenged by competing memories of the American past, Bethune’s statues are supposed to advance an antiracist, pro-education narrative that she embodied during her lifetime. Installing Bethune’s statue in a public place, especially in the nation’s capital, represents more than the past, it also represents the present moment.

Thus far, this article has focused on how others employed Bethune for their own purposes—building the two Bethune statues in order to respond to previous monuments. But Bethune was not the passive object of the politicians, clubwomen, and others who promoted her image. Rather, she had spent years working carefully to raise her own visibility and to shape the way she would be remembered—an effort in which she was highly successful. This section travels backward in time to the decades before the two Bethune monuments, to highlight Bethune’s efforts to raise the profile within the capital of both black Americans and herself, and to add an element of permanence to this increased visibility.

Bethune’s choice of Washington, D.C., as her home base was no accident and held symbolic weight. She knew that African Americans had a longstanding and significant role in the history of the capital and in the fight for racial justice at the national level. Washington, D.C., had allowed for legal slavery since its declaration as the new capital in 1791; it also held significant free black populations throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These early black residents left a lasting and visible impact on the city—both in the buildings they built and in the cultural institutions they founded. By 1900, Washington had one of the largest percentages of black residents compared to other cities in the nation. The Compromise of 1850 ended the slave trade in the capital, but slavery itself did not end until the 1862 District of Columbia Emancipation Act. Since that time, the population of African Americans in D.C. has continued to grow. The population of African Americans in 1930 was only 27 percent (132,000 out of 487,000 residents) but rapidly grew to 35 percent (281,000 out of 802,000 residents) by 1950.⁵⁷ In 2021, the combined percentage of those identifying as “Black or African American, alone,” and “Two or More Races” totaled 48.8 percent, almost three percentage points above those reporting their race as “White, alone,” or 45.9 percent.⁵⁸

By 1935, Bethune’s life and work were largely based out of Washington, D.C. Amid the rapid growth of the city’s black population from 1930 to 1950 and in light of D.C.’s symbolic importance as the nation’s capital, it made sense for Bethune to anchor her reform work there. In Washington, Bethune and the NCNW fought for fair housing and jobs legislation and expanded voter registration among African Americans. She also earned an appointment by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as the Director of Negro Affairs for the National Youth Administration (NYA). With this appointment, “Mary McLeod Bethune took Washington by storm,” historian Elaine Smith argues. She transformed her eight-year appointment at the NYA into a full-time job with personnel to lead, funds that allowed for the development of large projects, and a means to help the NYA become one of the most effective agencies addressing the needs of black Americans during the New Deal era.⁵⁹

At the NYA, Bethune occupied a privileged echelon with about twenty other women administrators of New Deal programs. Heading her own division made Bethune the highest-ranking black woman in federal government, and it put her in charge of a budget totaling nearly $610,000 (more than most other Washingtonian African American administrators controlled). By the time Bethune ascended to federal authority, the country was experiencing another surge of racial strife and overt prejudice. It would be nearly two more decades before the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the legal doctrine of “separate but equal.” Within that context, Bethune’s work from her Washington base is even more compelling to consider. A contemporary reflected, “No black in this town got a government job without going through Mrs. Bethune.”⁶⁰ Columnist Edward Lawson argued that Bethune held an important strategic position in Washington because she “managed to bring together for unified thought and action all the Negroes high in government authority.”⁶¹

Bethune recognized the importance of visible racial and gender rights campaigns in Washington itself, and she used her positions within the NYA and as head of the NCNW as platforms.⁶² While there were few Jim Crow laws in Washington in the twentieth century, racism and segregation persisted, and the city became an obvious site for protest and agitation. Bethune’s activism included recruiting African Americans into military service and national defense programs, opening avenues for black pilots in the military, and using overt racial preference in her hiring decisions. She convened major conferences, sometimes under the auspices of the NYA, and sometimes under broader themes that reflected her level of influence in Washington. An example is the 1938 White House Conference on Governmental Cooperation in the Approach to the Problems of Negro Women and Children. She also frequently coordinated with Eleanor Roosevelt to bring NCNW representatives into the White House to call for more black female administrators in upper-level government positions. Although Colonel Oveta Culp Hobby was appointed over Bethune as director of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WACs), Bethune put herself in charge of inspecting conditions for the military’s black enlisted women, and pushed the Army to reach its target quota of 10 percent.⁶³

In addition to making her work in Washington visible, Bethune also wanted to bring an element of permanence to her efforts. This was her motivation when she purchased a townhouse at 1318 Vermont Avenue, where she could both live and conduct the business of the NCNW. She later repeated this strategy when she helped the National Association of Colored Women—the organization she had left in 1935—to purchase their own permanent headquarters in Washington. Bethune held regular meetings of the Black Cabinet at the Vermont Avenue townhouse, ensuring her position as a leader among African American leaders. The residence, or Council House, served the pragmatic purpose of providing a safe place for meetings, as well as a site from which she could walk to the White House and thus avoid the embarrassing situation of being refused service by white taxi drivers—an experience that happened often enough that Eleanor Roosevelt often preempted the possibility by sending a private car to pick her up for their meetings. In 1963, the NCNW house would be used as a rallying point for national organizations and individuals who made the March on Washington.

Decades later, the NCNW moved to an even more prominent location in the city, a transition that reflected Bethune’s philosophy of visibility. In December 1995, the NCNW used equity from Bethune’s original Council House to purchase its current headquarters at 633 Pennsylvania Avenue, a location even more deliberately affiliated with the White House address of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Congresswoman Diane Watson of California reported that her mother had once told her how the NCNW had purposefully bought the 6th and Pennsylvania office partly because “you can see the Capitol in the background.”⁶⁴ The Council House, along with her university and other properties bearing her family name, are reminders that Bethune’s Washington work employed strategies of protest and agitation that married visibility with permanence. Bethune was frequently the most vocal, and often only, African American woman and the front of such campaigns.

Through these strategies, Bethune sought not only to address specific civil rights issues but also to raise her own visibility and that of African Americans more generally in the capital and the nation itself. Arguably, it is this visibility that was enshrined in the two monuments. This effort becomes all the clearer when we look at Bethune’s successful effort to codify her legacy in words, publishing a well-known essay that I call her auto-eulogy.

Mary McLeod Bethune’s efforts to increase the visibility of black women in the capital are evident in both Bethune monuments. It is reasonable to believe that Bethune would have delighted in the way her 1974 statue is placed on the same plane as a president’s and in the way the 2022 statue forced a removal of a Confederate. The evidence of her delight is revealed in Bethune’s own words that she put down in an essay a few months before she died on May 18, 1955. Bethune wrote “My Last Will and Testament,” and arranged for it to be published in Ebony magazine after her death. It appeared exclusively in that venue on August 10, 1955.⁶⁵ Bethune wrote that she feared that death would come for her before “the greatest of my dreams—full equality for the Negro in our time—is realized.”⁶⁶ She had long been proud of her meteoric rise from the illiterate and poverty-stricken sharecropping fields of South Carolina of her youth to the position as college president and national and international stateswoman. In addition to her auto-eulogy, Bethune had taken other measures to ensure that she would be remembered long after her death, including setting up the Mary McLeod Bethune Foundation, a fundraising unit; and an archive at Bethune-Cookman University for her papers, “for research, interracial activity and the sponsorship of wider educational opportunities” and for several drafts of unfinished autobiographies. But finally, through “My Last Will and Testament,” Bethune was able to explicitly outline her own legacy on her own terms.

Elaine Smith argues that Bethune’s essay blends her dual priorities of “‘faith and works’ or the spiritual and pragmatic,” but I argue that the essay does more than that.⁶⁷ If viewed as a final assessment of her life and a summation of what she planned to leave behind, the essay represents the most concentrated culmination of Bethune’s definition of her own legacy, a combination of emotional and spiritual strength that she represented in her own life and a charge to continue the work that she had started. The essay is meant to be read as Bethune’s last publication. It is her final communication. A detailed primer, “My Last Will and Testament” instructs readers on how Bethune wanted generations to remember her.

The significance of the essay is in its didactic tone as well as in the character of its nine maxims—an extraordinary bolster of emotional and spiritual support combined with a charge to live a life of service. The essay is not a reflection on Bethune’s achievements, but rather, her sense of historical importance wrapped in rhetorical humility. Bethune does not point to a legacy that the public and scholars have used since 1955 to reframe her life. She mentions her retirement from the NCNW, but does not assess its work, her promotion and reliance on collective action throughout her career, or the work of any of the organizations that she had dedicated her life to starting, maintaining, or leading. She gives a nod to “great leaders among us today,” but she does not anchor her importance to them or her famous alliances with the Roosevelts and other government leaders. She does not even point to the infamously tiny endowment of $1.50 with which she started her school.

Instead, she states, “If I have a legacy to leave my people, it is my philosophy of living and serving.”⁶⁸ She continues, “Perhaps in them there is something of value. So, as my life draws to a close, I will pass them on to Negroes everywhere in the hope that an old woman’s philosophy may give them inspiration.”⁶⁹ Despite gestures at humility, Bethune’s essay makes a big and final claim about the “meaning of my life’s work.” She, alone, is the protagonist, which is why each maxim starts in all capital letters, “I LEAVE YOU.…”⁷⁰ She is the one who can leave the “love” that she has modeled as “interracial, interreligious, and international.” Hers is the “hope” for “a better world” built upon the foundation of “ceaseless striving and struggling of the past.” She wills the “challenge of developing confidence in one another” to eliminate economic “separatism.”

A lifetime educator, Bethune correlates black Americans’ ability of “making greater use of the privileges inherent in living in a democracy” to the “educational level of the Negro population” at “its highest point in history.” She wills the use of power to reflect her “first concern that this power should be placed on the side of human justice.” Bethune claims, “Without faith, nothing is possible” and that “[o]ur greatest Negro figures have been imbued with faith.” Known for having given credit for her security in life to her faith, Bethune gives her readers an inheritance of faith, along with the sufferings and sacrifices of preceding generations including herself as a building of the “foundations of the progress of our people.” Bethune’s insistence that her “color has never destroyed my self-respect nor has it ever caused me to conduct myself in such a manner as to merit the disrespect of any person” provides for readers an inheritance of racial dignity. Reflecting a sense of global feminism that Bethune developed in the latter part of her life, she reminds readers that the “problem of color is worldwide” although she really calls on the minority of 15 million black people to live “side by side with a white majority” and to have a “desire to live harmoniously” or “learn to deal with these people positively and on an individual basis.” Reminding readers of her federal work as an administrator in the National Youth Administration of the New Deal era, Bethune’s final bequest focuses on a “responsibility to young people.”

The auto-eulogy achieved Bethune’s final goal of leaving a visible and permanent legacy for future generations. “My Last Will and Testament” was published posthumously, as promised, by Ebony in 1955 and has been republished in that venue periodically since then. Scholars have also reprinted parts of the essay. Notably, the NCNW convinced the artist of the first Bethune memorial statue in Washington, D. C. to include the maxims on the 1974 Bethune statue.

Sociologist Patricia Hill Collins argues that black women’s voices have been pushed outside of areas of legitimate inquiry and have “remained in outsider-within locations.”⁷¹ However, both the 1974 and 2022 Bethune statues challenge that tradition of exclusion because they both include her own words, her own voice—permanently inscribed and within a location of political power. On the 1974 statue, the bronze plaque bordering the sides of the base are the words from Bethune’s final essay, “My Last Will and Testament”:

The 2022 statue also showcases Bethune’s words represented by a pile of seven books inscribed with her gifts to future generations:

With her own writing inscribed on both statues in Washington, D.C., Bethune got the last word.