Mary Jane McLeod Bethune was an American educator, philanthropist, humanitarian, womanist, and civil rights activist. Bethune founded the National Council of Negro Women in 1935, established the organization's flagship journal Aframerican Women's Journal, and presided as president or leader for a myriad of African American women's organizations including the National Association for Colored Women and the National Youth Administration's Negro Division.
Portrait by Carl Van Vechten, 1949
The cabin in Mayesville, South Carolina where Mary Jane McLeod was born
Mary McLeod Bethune with girls from the Literary and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls in Daytona, c. 1905
Marian Anderson, celebrated contralto, and Mary McLeod Bethune, Director of Negro Affairs in the National Youth Administration, at the launching of the SS Booker T. Washington with unidentified workers who helped construct the first Liberty ship named for an African American at the California Shipbuilding Corporation's yards by Alfred T. Palmer
In his twelve years in office, United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt did not appoint or nominate a single African American to be either a secretary or undersecretary in his presidential cabinet. Denied such an outlet, African American federal employees in the executive branch began to meet informally in an unofficial Federal Council of Negro Affairs to try to influence federal policy on race issues. By mid-1935, there were 45 African Americans working in federal executive departments and New Deal agencies. Referred to as the Black Cabinet, Roosevelt did not officially recognize it as such, nor make appointments to it. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt encouraged the group. Although many have ascribed the term to Mary McLeod Bethune, African American newspapers had earlier used it to describe key black advisors of Theodore Roosevelt, Taft, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover.
Roosevelt's black advisors in 1938
