Recasting Mary McLeod Bethune’s Legacy: Permanence in the U.S. Capitol and Memorializing the Present

Pacific Historical Review (Summer 2024)

Kim Cary Warren,

Associate Professor

Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education

History of the United States of America; Citizenship and American Identity; Identity Development in the African Diaspora

In early 2018, Florida newspapers ran headlines reading, “Bethune Statue to Replace Confederate General in U. S. State Capitol.” A national push to remove Confederate monuments followed the Charlottesville, Virginia, city council’s decision to put tarps on statues of Robert E. Lee and “Stonewall” Jackson while the nation mourned in the wake of activist Heather Heyer’s tragic murder while protesting a white supremacist rally. After the 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers and the subsequent national outrage, another 168 Confederate symbols across the United States were removed. More than thirty cities as far west as Seattle, as far north as Boston, and as far south as Bradenton, Florida, covered, removed, or proposed to remove Confederate memorials as a gesture toward a larger conversation over the meaning and ethics of displaying such memorials.

In most of these cases, no certain plans developed for storing the statues; and few new statues suddenly appeared as replacements. In Florida, however, the state government made specific plans to replace a statue of a Confederate soldier with a new monument. In fact, the state legislature passed and Governor Rick Scott signed bill SB 310, which called for the removal of the statue of Confederate General Edwin Kirby Smith (1824–1893) that represented Florida in the U.S. Capitol Building’s National Statuary Hall. The bill also called for the statue’s replacement with one of Mary McLeod Bethune (1875–1955), an African American teacher and civil rights activist who lived in Florida for most of her adult life. Perhaps inspired by the Florida statue decision, or perhaps influenced by the increase in national protests against racial violence that surged throughout the 2010s, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution in June of 2021 to remove all Confederate statues from the U.S. Capitol Building. On July 13, 2022, a new, larger-than-life marble statue of Bethune was dedicated in Statuary Hall.

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