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une was a pioneering American educator and civil rights leader. Born Mary Jane McLeod on July 10, 1875, in Mayesville, South Carolina, the daughter of former slaves, Bethune won scholarships to attend Scotia Seminary in Concord, North Carolina (now Barber-Scotia College), and the Institute for Home and Foreign Missions in Chicago (now the Moody Bible Institute). In 1904, she moved to Daytona Beach, Florida, to found her own school. Her one-room school house became the Daytona Normal and Industrial School for Negro Girls before merging with Cookman Institute for Boys in 1923. The merged school later affiliated with the United Methodist Church and became the historically-black college named in her honor, Bethune-Cookman College (now Bethune-Cookman University). In 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Bethune the director of the National Youth Administration's Division of Negro Affairs, making her the first black woman to head a federal agency. She also founded the National Council of Negro Women and was an active member of the National Association of Colored Women until her death in May 1955. Date Created Around 1905 Place North America > United States of America > Florida > Daytona Beach Time 1900 AD - 1949 AD Topic Social sciences > Political science > Civil & political rights Social sciences > Education > Schools & their activities; special education Additional Subjects African American girls ; African Americans--Segregation ; Bethune, Mary McLeod, 1875-1955 ; Women ; Women's history Type of Item Prints, Photographs Physical Description 1 negative: black and white; 4 x 5 inches Institution State Library and Archives of Florida External Resource http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.wdl/ftasa.4013

Mary McLeod Bethune was a pioneering American educator and civil rights leader.

In 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Bethune the director of the National Youth Administration's Division of Negro Affairs, making her the first black woman to head a federal agency.

Women'S Clubs are voluntary organizations that were originally formed by women who had been denied access to the major institutions of America's democratic civil society.

Working women formed working girls' clubs and small-town women formed civic improvement associations. In bigger cities, women organized citywide and neighborhood women's clubs and women's educational and industrial unions. Ethnic, church-based, African American, and settlement house women's clubs were founded across the country.

Although women continued to belong to literary, social, and charitable clubs, the majority of women's clubs organized after the Civil War had specific civic and political agendas. The specific purposes of each club differed according to the type of club and its stated purpose.

A prominent form of voluntary organization in the United States from the nineteenth century through the mid–twentieth century, fraternal associations are self-selecting brotherhoods and sisterhoods that provide mutual aid to members, enact group rituals, and engage in community service.

Synthesizing primary and secondary evidence, this article documents that African Americans historically organized large numbers of translocal fraternal voluntary federations. Some black fraternal associations paralleled white groups, while others were distinctive to African Americans.

In regions where blacks lived in significant numbers, African Americans often created more fraternal lodges per capita than whites; and women played a much more prominent role in African American fraternalism than they did in white fraternalism.

From its start as the WAAC in 1942 until the end of World War II in 1946, only two black women from Kentucky would join the Women's Army Corps and go on to become officers, Anna Clarke and Mary A. Bordeaux (from Louisville), who was a member of the first Officer Candidate Class at Fort Des Moines and eventually was assigned to WAC recruiting duty in Chicago, Illinois.

Anna Mac Clarke was a pioneer, part of a unique group of women who came together for one purpose, to help their country win a world war. She and her sister WAACs would also fight another war at home; that of racism, and they, as one unified force, began to break down the barriers of her race and gender which would eventually lead to the civil rights movement of the late 1940s, up through the 1960s. Anna Mac would never know the full impact her efforts to right injustice would have on things that we take for granted today, not only in the military, but in the civilian world as well.

The Women's Armed Services Integration Act gave women permanent military status in the regular army or reserves.

To work for the economic, moral, religous and social welfare of women and youth. To protect the rights of women and youth. To raise the standard and quality of life in home and family. To secure and use our influence for the enforcement of civil and political rights for African Americans and all citizens. To promote the education of women and youth through the work of the departments. To obtain for African American women the opportunity of reaching the highest levels in all fields of human endeavor. To promote effective interaction with the male auxiliary. To promote inter-racial understanding so that justice and good will may prevail among all people. To hold educational workshops biennially at the Convention.  

Lexington's Sayre School

an unusually powerful position for a southern girl in the 1860's when any woman demonstrating intellect was considered a "bluestocking" doomed to spinsterhood.

Their resulting divorce in 1878 was the turning point in all of the Clay women's lives. According to laws at the time, a woman held no claim to house or property

two major camps. There were those who sought to modernize and professionalize established ideologies of racial advancement, solidarity, and uplift through a New Negro progressivism.... Others.. questioned, if not the very idea of racial solidarity itself, then at least the obligation of racial allegiance and respectability, and instead touted a radical individualism and independence from all but the most personal allegiances to 'art' or 'self' or some other self-generated ideal."

transition between the politics of respectability and New Negro Modernism

In fact, black women have long been regarded as the backbone of the black church. But their extensive and significant contributions are made as lay leaders, not as religious heads of churches.