Group items tagged

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.

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.

The city’s two daily newspapers, the Herald and the Leader, worked hand in hand with respected pillars of the community and decided to ignore the revolution. The press took their orders from the powerful and didn’t report one of the biggest news stories in American history. Lexington had demonstrations, sit-ins and other protests, but the papers didn’t acknowledge their complicity in telling a lie until earlier this month.

The white citizenry of Lexington decided that pretense was preferable to the truth and chose not to point out the elephant in the living room. “Good” white people like Fred Wachs, general manager and publisher of both newspapers, said they wanted change, but didn’t think that anyone demanding it was worthy of an expenditure of newsprint.

The godfathers of Lexington told people where they could and could not live, and could and could not work, and could and could not go to school and yet were not labeled rabble rousers. That honor fell on those who risked death, injury and loss of livelihood to demand a just society.

These are the papers of W.H. and Lizzie B. Fouse, black civic leaders in Lexington, Ky., in the first half of the twentieth century. The collection includes expense ledgers containing records of Dunbar High School, correspondence relating to the Kentucky Negro Education Association and the Kentucky and National Associations of Colored Women, a scrapbook with clippings about racial issues, and personal materials. Much of the personal materials consist of letters of sympathy sent after the death of Lizzie B. Fouse's mother died in 1939. Other materials relate to the YWCA and to the WCTU. There are also miscellaneous photographs, including several of Mrs. Fouse.