February 13 - Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955)

Today, we honor Mary McLeod Bethune, who was one of the 20th century’s most powerful and celebrated advocates for civil rights and suffrage.

Bethune turned her sights toward women’s suffrage in the early 1900s, when there was little role for African-American women, especially in the South. In 1912, she joined the Equal Suffrage League, an offshoot of the National Association of Colored Women. In an era when even African-American men couldn’t vote because of Jim Crow laws, Bethune watched as white-dominated voting rights and suffrage organizations marched and protested nationwide.

Following the 1920 passage of the 19th amendment, Bethune rode a bicycle door-to-door raising money to pay the 'poll tax,' a tax imposed by white lawmakers to suppress black voting. Because a literacy test was also required, she conducted night classes to teach reading. When 80 members of the Ku Klux Klan threatened to burn her school, Bethune held an all-night school-front vigil with a groundskeeper and some of her students. The Klan backed down, and Bethune led a procession of 100 African Americans to the polls to vote for the first time in the Daytona mayoral election.