Honoring our Heroes By Closing Opportunity Gaps
By Tina Dove
From my earliest childhood, I was told that my education would provide the tools necessary to save my life, and that the pursuit of a high quality education would be extremely valuable. I later realized that I had an obligation as a woman of color to pass along this life-saving gift to others by becoming a high school teacher. One of my role models in education was Mary McLeod Bethune. Like me, Mrs. Bethune was a strong, duty-bound woman of color. She was a fierce champion of civil and human rights, the founder and president of the National Council of Negro Women and the founder of a school for African-American girls in Florida now known as Bethune-Cookman University.
In the late 1930s, Dr. Charles Spurgeon Johnson, a sociologist specializing in race relations and the first black president of Fisk University, interviewed Mrs. Bethune. The purpose of this interview was to ascertain what contributed to Mrs. Bethune becoming a leader for gender equality, despite a difficult upbringing in South
