About Us

The National Council of Negro Women, Inc. (NCNW) was founded in 1935 by Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, one of America’s most inspirational daughters. The first in her family not to be born into slavery, she became one of the most influential women of her generation. The daughter of former slaves, Mary Jane McLeod Bethune became one of the most important black educators, civil and women’s rights leaders and government officials of the twentieth century.  Born on July 10, 1875 near Maysville, South Carolina, Bethune was one of the last of Samuel and Patsy McLeod’s seventeen children. Bethune benefited from efforts to educate African Americans after the war, graduating in 1894 from the Scotia Seminary, a boarding school in North Carolina later attending Dwight Moody’s Institute for Home and Foreign Missions in Chicago, Illinois.

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As an Educator In 1904, Bethune opened a boarding school, the Daytona Beach Literary and Industrial School for Training Negro Girls. Eventually, Bethune’s school became a college, merging with the all-male Cookman Institute to form Bethune-Cookman College in 1929. It issued its first degrees in 1943.

As a National civil rights pioneer and activist. Champion of African American women’s rights and advancement. Advisor to Presidents of the United States. A friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, in 1936, Bethune became the highest ranking African American woman in government when President Franklin Roosevelt named her director of Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration, where she remained until 1944. She was also a leader of FDR’s unofficial “black cabinet.”