Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune

Photographed by Brandon Cross, January 7, 2026

1. Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune Marker

Click or scan to see
this page online

Touch for directions.

Coast.

South

Region,

America,

state,

Hemisphere,

World,

Anglosphere.

Spain,

Culture,

America,

South.

Another marker is no longer nearby.

Photographed by Brandon Cross, January 7, 2026

2. Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune Marker - wide view

Dr. Bethune famously started the Daytona Literary and Industrial Training Institute for Negro Girls on October 3, 1904 with $1.50, vision, an entrepreneurial mindset, resilience and faith in God. She created “pencils” from charred wood, ink from elderberries, and mattresses from moss-stuffed corn sacks. Her first students were five little girls and her five-year-old son, Albert Jr. In less than two years, the school grew to 250 students. Recognizing the health disparities and lack of medical treatment available to African Americans in Daytona Beach, she also founded the Mary McLeod Hospital and Training School for Nurses, which at the time was the only school of its kind that served African American women on the east coast.

Daytona Normal would continue to increase in popularity, and merged with the Cookman Institute of Jacksonville, Florida in 1923 and became

Photographed by Brandon Cross, January 7, 2026

3. Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune Statue

This original bronze work of art was created by Puerto Rican native Master Sculptor Nilda M. Comas,… It was created as a model for the three-ton marble sculpture she won the commission to carve of Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune that was installed on July 13, 2022, in National Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., one of two figures chosen to represent the state of Florida. - City of Daytona Beach

Bethune-Cookman College.

A champion of racial and gender equality, Bethune founded many organizations and led voter registration drives after women gained the vote in 1920, risking racist attacks. In 1924, she was elected president of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, and in 1935, she became the founding president of the National Council of Negro Women. Bethune also played a role in the transition of Black voters from the Republican Party—“the party of Lincoln”—to the Democratic Party during the Great Depression. A friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, in 1936, Bethune became the highest ranking African American woman in government when President Franklin Roosevelt named her director of Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration, where she remained until 1944. She was also a leader of FDR’s unofficial “black cabinet.” In 1937 Bethune organized a conference on the Problems of the Negro and Negro Youth, and fought to end discrimination and lynching. In 1940, she became vice president of the National Association

courtesy Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, circa 1943

4. Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune

for the Advancement of Colored Persons (NAACP), a position she held for the rest of her life. As a member of the advisory board that in 1942 created the Women’s Army Corps, Bethune ensured it was racially integrated. Appointed by President Harry S. Truman, Bethune was the only woman of color at the founding conference of the United Nations in 1945. She regularly wrote for the leading African American newspapers, the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender.