...Mary McLeod Bethune Mary McLeod Bethune was a motherly figure to her people that consumed the majority of her lifespan cultivating and toiling to certify that African-Americans received the humanoid entitlements and basic rights they deserve. She was an activist, philanthropist, guide, and an educationalist that devoted many decades to battle for civil rights and enhance the African-American community. She was a firm believer that the key to battle misfortunes and hardships that were enfeebling African-Americans was tutelage and education. Bethune undertook and triumphed voluminous superb responsibilities in order to make a significant, encouraging influence on humanity and elevate her community. Bethune was conceived July 10, 1875 in Mayesville, South Carolina to Samuel and Patsy McLeod, who were former slaves that attained land once they were unchained from enslavement. Mary Jane McLeod Bethune was the fifteenth of seventeen children and grew up in a home chock-full of destitution and paucity. Since she was a child, she toiled on the cotton field and assisted her mother with doing laundry for white folk. The poverty that her family endured prevented her from pursuing an education. Bethune went through an occurrence that stimulated her to break the cycle in her community and befit into a cultivated African-American woman. While distributing the laundry she washed with her mother to a white client, Bethune picked up a book and began to look at it. A white child became infuriated...
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...One would most likely see this perspective from the stories written and shared by the Black males. But this experience was shared by the Black women as well and their actions, their perspectives, and choices helped shape what would be a liberating movement in a fight for Civil Rights and equality. In the fight for Civil Rights - they were pushing for reforms on two fronts: Civil Rights for being African-American and equal rights for women. They inhibited two minority platforms - that of women and that of being African-American. They fought for it however and as a result, African American women today enjoy freedoms and opportunities that those before them did not. One of the key figures in the African American women’s movement was Mary McLeod Bethune. Something of a Matriarch, she possessed a dynamic and even aggressive personality. Not particularly well read, she was a forceful speaker who could grasp and absorb ideas that gave support to her own interests (Holt, 1964). She was a pioneering figure for civil rights and education, working to provide education and opportunities to African-Americans believing that education is the route to progress and empowerment. She was born to former slave parents in 1875 and joined them working in the...
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...be as strong and influential as their male counterparts. They worked hard to alternate the rights of women, as well as the other people in the United States who were also being denied the rights that they so rightfully deserved. Though women from all races worked together to achieve and influence change, some things caused a divide in women, such as race, social class, and political and religious views. Reconstruction was the period of time directly following the Civil War when America was letting the southern states back into the Union, and America was being repaired after the Civil War. While America was getting things back to normal, women were trying to gain their voting rights, and gain equality for African Americans in the southern part of the country. During Reconstruction, the 14th Amendment was ratified and it granted all Americans equal rights. The 15th Amendment was also ratified, and it granted African American men the right to vote. White southerners accepted the fact that slavery was no longer legal, but they definitely did not accept the fact that both whites and blacks would have the same rights that they had. They also feared that there would be a middle-class black society, which did, in fact, come to be and allow black men to vote and hold office. Amongst equal rights, another problem that white southerners were concerned about was black men becoming sexual predators and targeting white women. All of these inaccurate perceptions led to the Ku Klux Klan being...
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