The Mary McLeod Bethune Statue at the U.S. Capitol: Background information when reading A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit

The Mary McLeod Bethune Statue at the U.S. Capitol

This article relates to A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit

As Noliwe Rooks rightly asserts in her book A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit, Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune was a woman of many "firsts." Even though she died in 1955, Bethune made another historic first on July 13, 2022, when she became the first Black person to have a state-commissioned statue in the U.S. Capitol's National Statuary Hall Collection. Rooks describes the process of how the monument, created by sculptor Nilda Comas, found its way there and into her heart.

According to Rooks (whose thoughts on the subject can also be found in a 2022 essay for Time), Bethune's statue is chiseled from Italian Carrara marble that comes from the same quarry and vein that Michelangelo used to make his famous sculpture David, and from this Rooks draws an alphabetical-cum-spiritual observation: "Michelangelo's David was the Alpha form shaped from that specific marble, and Comas's Bethune is the Omega." The combined statue and pedestal is eleven feet tall and weighs 6,129 pounds. The inscription, carved into the marble and highlighted in gold, reads:

FLORIDA
Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune
1875-1955
"Invest in the human soul. Who knows, it might be a diamond in the rough."

The sculpture depicts Bethune dressed in a cap and gown, standing in front of a small stack of books. The spines "bear words from ... one of her famous writings, her last will and testament: love, faith, racial dignity, courage, peace and 'a thirst for education,'" according to NPR. Perhaps most striking is the single black rose that Bethune holds in her left hand, which is meant to speak to her work in education but also her belief that for people to truly love each other "required interracial, inter-religious and international brotherhood." The walking stick in her other hand is a sly nod to her close association with President Franklin D. Roosevelt as the only female member of his unofficial "Black Cabinet," as it is modeled after a gift she received from the president.

The statue was chosen to represent Florida in Statuary Hall (which displays two monuments for each of the fifty states) after it removed Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith's statue in late 2021. The process began in 2016 when then-Governor Rick Scott approved a measure to take down the Confederate statue, beginning a statewide search for Florida's next rocklike representative. This entailed a massive review of 3,000 names by the Florida Department of State's Division of Arts and Culture, which were then narrowed down to 130 potential Floridian candidates. Bethune collected 1,233 votes in favor and her monument was thus installed forever in the U.S. Capitol. It is bittersweet that this is the first statue of a Black person to grace our Capitol halls: it is well deserved and a cause for celebration, but why did we have to wait so long?

Photo credit: Architect of the Capitol (via Wikimedia Commons)

Filed under People, Eras & Events

This article relates to A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit. It first ran in the August 21, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.