But so many others, who led equally courageous lives, are less well-known. Mary McLeod Bethune, the founder of the historically Black Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach, Florida, led a similarly storied life, yet many people remain unaware of the details surrounding her efforts on behalf of Black civil rights. Without Bethune's tireless work championing the rights of Black people, the famed Tuskegee Airmen may not have existed. She, along with Eleanor Roosevelt, played a vital part in the integration of the pilot program that ultimately led to America's first Black military airmen.
Born in to formerly enslaved parents in South Carolina, Bethune was the 15th of 17 children and the first to be born free. From an early age, she dreamed of attending school. Tasha Youmans, dean of Bethune-Cookman university library, told AccuWeather that although Bethune had a strong desire to learn from an early age, she was denied because of the color of her skin. At age 11, she was finally able to attend school at a Presbyterian church and ultimately graduated from seminary with dreams of becoming a missionary but was, once again, thwarted by racism.
With no church to sponsor her missionary work, she married Albertus Bethune and decided to become an educator. She moved to Florida where, in , McLeod Bethune opened a boarding school to teach young women who, like her, wanted an education. The discrimination Bethune faced throughout her life pushed her to champion racial and gender equality whenever she encountered it. In , she became the founding president of the National Council of Negro Women.
Roosevelt was enacting his New Deal programs aimed at helping people. Bethune was also the only female member of Roosevelt's influential " Black Cabinet. Yet it was her friendship with first lady Eleanor Roosevelt that ultimately led to the desegregation of pilot training programs in the United States and the eventual integration of Black men into the military.
Bethune began leveraging her friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt to lobby for integrating the government-sponsored Civilian Pilot Training Program and to bring the program to the campuses of historically Black colleges and universities. Due to her efforts, West Virginia State College became the first Black school to adopt an aviation program and receive its first military airplane in That precedent led to the authorization of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama later that year.
