Comment A statue of Mary McLeod Bethune was unveiled Wednesday at the U.S. Capitol, making her the first black American woman in the National Statuary Hall collection. Bethune was a civil rights activist, presidential adviser, and founder of the Daytona School of Literary and Industrial Education for Negro Girls, which became Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach. Her statue represents the state of Florida. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) hosted an unveiling ceremony Wednesday morning, with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.), Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla). ) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) among those in attendance. Since 1864, each state has been allowed to send two statues of distinguished citizens to represent it in the US Capitol, making up the National Statuary Hall collection. Since 2000, states have been able to remove and replace existing statues with new ones. A few states did, but until Wednesday none of those new additions depicted black Americans. Bethune’s statue replaces one of Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith. The change was directed by a state law signed by then-Gov. Rick Scott (R) in 2018. Smith’s statue removed in 2021. Civil rights pioneer Mary McLeod Bethune advised presidents on ‘the problems of my people’ Others will be added to Bethune’s statue in the coming years. Virginia removed its statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in 2020 and plans to replace it with one of civil rights leader Barbara Jones. In 2019, Arkansas decided to replace both of its statues—of white supremacist James Paul Clark and Confederate sympathizer Uriah Milton Rose—with depictions of civil rights activist Daisy Bates and musician Johnny Cash, though both old statues remain in the Capitol. Including Rose, nine statues depicting Confederates are still on display in the Capitol: Joseph Wheeler representing Alabama, Alexander Stephens representing Georgia, Edward Douglass White representing Louisiana, Jefferson Davis and James Z. George representing representing Mississippi, Zebulon B. Vance representing North Carolina, Wade Hamp III representing South Carolina, and John E. Kenna representing West Virginia. Neither Congress nor the Architect of the Capitol, the agency that maintains the statues, has the power to remove them. Under current law, statues representing a state can only be replaced with the approval of that state’s legislature and governor. Although the Bethune statue is the first statue of a black American in the Statuary Hall collection, it is not the first statue of a black American in the Capitol building. There are also statues of Frederick Douglass and Rosa Parks and busts of Martin Luther King Jr. and Sojourner Truth. The last three were commissioned by Congress and do not represent any state. The Douglass statue was a gift from DC Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (DN.Y.) is currently trying to get Congress to commission a statue of Union spy Harriet Tubman. A Maryland effort in 2011 to replace one of the Capitol statues with Tubman failed in the state legislature. The US Capitol was built using slave labor. Bethune was born in a cabin in South Carolina in 1875, the daughter of two formerly enslaved people. She had 16 siblings and was the only one who could go to a missionary school, the only school available to black students there at the time. He then went to seminary in North Carolina. Bethune taught in Georgia, South Carolina and Florida before starting her own boarding school in 1904. In 1936, she began serving as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s director of Negro Affairs for the National Youth Administration. She also served on his unofficial “Black Cabinet” and was a close friend of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. She was a civil rights activist and helped found the United Negro College Fund before her death in 1955.
