A statue of Mary McLeod Bethune, representing the state of Florida, will soon be installed in the National Statuary Hall collection at the U.S. Capitol Building
Tall and well dressed, Bethune was an architect of the early civil rights movement. She was a Black woman with power, with access to the White House, when few Black people were allowed in.
“I discussed with him the problems of my people in many an off-the-record private talk held in the President’s study in the White House,” Bethune wrote in an article titled “My Secret Talks With FDR,” which was published in 1949 in Ebony magazine. “I often expressed to him my impatience with the slowness of the democratic process.”She recalled visiting Roosevelt one evening in 1943.
Bethune’s statue was carved from a large piece of marble quarried in the Italian Alps. “The statue is more than a commemoration,” said