She started a private school for African-American students which later became Bethune-Cookman University. After working on the presidential campaign for Franklin D. Roosevelt in , she was appointed as a national advisor and worked with Roosevelt to create the Federal Council on Colored Affairs, also known as the Black Cabinet.
Mary credited them both with inspiring her work toward equality. McLeod recalled noticing racial inequality as a child, observing that the Black community had access to less material wealth and opportunity. Mary picked up a book, and one of the Wilson girls admonished her with "Put down that book, you can't read.
When she was twelve, McLeod saw a white mob attack and nearly hang a Black man. The man had refused to blow a match out for a White man and then had shoved him to the ground. As McLeod watched, the mob nearly hanged the Black man, stopped at the last moment by the sheriff.
McLeod recalled later learning about both the terrifying effects of White violence and the value of allying with some White people, those she called "calm men of authority". The school was five miles from her home, and she walked there and back.
Not all her siblings attended, so she taught her family what she had learned each day. Her teacher, Emma Jane Wilson, became a significant mentor in her life. She helped McLeod attend the same school on a scholarship, [ 18 ] which McLeod did from to Told by the Presbyterian mission board, where she applied to become a missionary, that Black missionaries were not needed, she planned to teach, as education was a prime goal among African Americans.
