¹ Letter, Eloise Moreland to Dorothy Height, 16 July 1974, National Archive for Black Women's History, Records of the National Council of Negro Women, Series 8, Box 6, Folder 82. Hereafter NABWH 001, followed by series, box and folder.

² McCluskey, Audrey Thomas, “Introduction,” in McCluskey, Audrey Thomas and Smith, Elaine M., eds., Mary McLeod Bethune: Building a Better World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 3–19, 5Google Scholar.

³ Elaine Smith, “Politics and Public Issues: Introduction,” in McCluskey and Smith, 199–206, 203.

⁴ Fairclough, Adam, Class of Their Own: Black Teachers in the Segregated South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 184CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ The plan was first mooted in September 1958. See Minutes of Post-convention Meeting, 16 Nov. 1958, NABWH 001, S3, B1, F13.

⁶ It is not clear if Lincoln Park was proposed as a site by the NCNW or if this was suggested to them. Dolphin G. Thompson, from a local public-relations firm, claims that he had the idea of erecting a statue in Lincoln Park to a famous African American, and then suggested it to the NCNW. “Dolphin G. Thompson, Man behind Bethune Memorial Project,” Washington Sun, 12 July 1974, NABWH 001, S8, B7, F89. It has not been possible to corroborate his story, but he did work with the NCNW during the early years of the Bethune Memorial project.

⁷ Copy from Congressional Record; Public Law 86–484, H. J. Res. 502, 1 June 1960, NABWH 001, S8, B7, F102.

⁸ Letter to supporters, June 1971, informing them of the donation from Women Societies of Christian Service and Wesleyan Guild of Women's Division, Board of Missions of the United Methodist Church, NABWH 001, S8, B4, F57.

⁹ Copy from Congressional Record, 17 Aug. 1959, NABWH 001, S8, B7, F102.

¹⁰ Congressional Record – Senate, CR-1962-1005; 5 Oct. 1962, 22461–62.

¹¹ Congressional Record – Extensions of Remarks, CR-1971-0722; 22 July 1971, 26911. See also “Dr. Bethune: Remarkable Woman,” Herald-Journal, 28 July 1971, 3.

¹² In 1943 Bethune successfully challenged allegations from Representative Martin Dies that she was a communist. Hanson, Joyce Ann, Mary McLeod Bethune and Black Women's Political Activism (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 187–88Google Scholar. Copy from Congressional Record, 19 July 1971, NABWH 001, S8, B7, F105.

¹³ He would go on to make a model of John F. Kennedy for Washington, DC's Kennedy Center.

¹⁴ The shortlist also included Inge Hardison and James P. Lewis.

¹⁵ Letter from David Finley, chairman, Commission of Fine Arts, to D. G. Thompson, 24 May 1961, Folder Mary McLeod Bethune Monument 1960 to 1973, Box 99, Project Files, Entry A1 17A, Records of the Commission of Fine Arts, Record Group 66 (RG 66); National Archives Building, Washington, DC (NAB). Hereafter Bethune, Box 99, RG 66, NAB.

¹⁶ In fact, Barthé had produced a number of monumental sculptures. Bethune Memorial – Discussion on Tuesday, 18 June 1963; Bethune, Box 99, RG 66, NAB. There was some input from an African American on the artistic dimensions of the project. The NCNW hired architect David R. Byrd, who retained Hilyard Robinson, an African American architect, as a design consultant. After Byrd left Washington in 1966, Robinson became primary architect for the project. National Park Service, Cultural Landscapes Inventory, 2003 (revised edn, 2009); Lincoln Park, National Capital Parks – East (hereafter NPS 2009), 41.

¹⁷ Compare to Anne Beadenkopf's oil painting (which now hangs in the Bethune Council House in Washington, DC) from 1953, and Mary McLeod Bethune by Betsy Graves Reyneau. Henkes, Robert, Portraits of Famous American Women: An Analysis of Various Artists’ Renderings of Thirteen Admired Figures (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997), 27–35Google Scholar.

¹⁸ This was Berks's medium of choice and perhaps a reason the NCNW decided to commission him to make its sculpture.

¹⁹ It is referred to by Ruffins and Monk, and discussed in more detail by Savage. However, Romano and Raiford's collection of essays on civil rights memorialization, for example, does not mention Bethune. O. J. Dwyer's insightful essay on the topic overlooks it, despite his discussion of the ways in which women's activism has been commemorated and misremembered. Ruffins, Faith Davis, “‘Lifting as We Climb’: Black Women and the Preservation of African American History and Culture,” Gender & History, 6, 3, (Nov. 1994), 376–96, 385CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Monk, Janice, “Gender in the Landscape: Expressions of Power and Meaning,” in Anderson, K. and Gale, F., eds., Cultural Geographies (Melbourne: Longman, 1999), 154–72, 155Google Scholar. Savage, Kirk, Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 265Google Scholar. Romano, Renee and Raiford, Leigh, eds., The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006)Google Scholar. Dwyer, O. J., “Interpreting the Civil Rights Movement: Place, Memory, and Conflict,” Professional Geographer, 52 (2000), 660–71, 664Google Scholar.

²⁰ Young, James, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 14Google Scholar.

²¹ See, for example, Bodnar's study of the conflict between vernacular and official memories. Bodnar, John, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

²² On the Freedmen's Memorial see Savage, Kirk, Standing Soldier, Kneeling Slave: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Holzer, Harold, Emancipating Lincoln: The Proclamation in Text, Context, and Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²³ Savage, Standing Soldier, 119.

²⁴ Dorothy Height, Audio Recording Transcription, Dedication, Lincoln Park, 10 July 1974, NABWH 001, S15, SS5, F86, S1.

²⁵ Dorothy Height, Audio Recording Transcription, Dedication.

²⁶ “Bethune Statue Updates History,” Afro American, 13 July 1974, NABWH 001, S8, B7, F89.

²⁷ When the plans were discussed by the National Capital Planning Commission some on the committee questioned whether Lincoln should be moved, with one member joking, somewhat inappropriately, “He might not like what he sees the other way.” National Capital Planning Commission Meeting, Open Session, 7 April 1967, Folder April–June 1967, Transcripts of Proceedings and Minutes of Meetings, 1924–99, Box 100, Records of the National Capital Planning Commission, RG 328, NAB.

²⁸ Dorothy Height, Audio Recording Transcription, Dedication.

²⁹ “I Leave You Love, I Leave You Hope,” fundraising leaflet, n.d., NABWH 001, S8, B2, F17.

³⁰ “I Leave You Love.”

³¹ Bethune Memorial – Discussion on Tuesday, 18 June 1963.

³² Savage, Monument Wars, 265.

³³ Roscoe Lee Brown, Audio Recording Transcription, Dedication, Lincoln Park, 10 July 1974, NABWH 001, S15, SS5, F86, S1. Unsurprisingly, the speeches in 1974 did not examine any of the ambiguity that Douglass felt about both the Freedmen's Memorial or Lincoln, whom he referred to as the “white man's president.” Savage, Standing Soldiers, 119.

³⁴ Blight, David, “‘For Something beyond the Battlefield’: Frederick Douglass and the Struggle for the Memory of the Civil War,” Journal of American History, 75, 4 (March 1989), 1156–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 1160, 1165.

³⁵ Brown, Audio Recording Transcription.

³⁶ On Lincoln's reputation and public memory see Peterson, Merrill D., Lincoln in American Memory (New York: Oxford University Press 1994)Google Scholar; and Schwartz, Barry, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

³⁷ Schwartz, Barry, Abraham Lincoln in the Post-heroic Era: History and Memory in Late Twentieth-Century America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 115Google Scholar.

³⁸ “The Mary McLeod Bethune Memorial,” 18 June 1974, Land Use Coordination Files, National Capital Region, quoted in NPS 2009, 42.

³⁹ Executive Committee Meeting Minutes, 12–14 September 1958, NABWH 001, S3, B2, F36.

⁴⁰ Congressional Record – House, CR-1960-0330, 30 March 1960, 6975.

⁴¹ Height quoted in Congressional Record – House, CR-1960-0330; 30 March 1960, 6975.

⁴² For a close reading of the Last Will see Smith, Elaine M., “Mary McLeod Bethune's ‘Last Will and Testament’: A Legacy for Race Vindication,” Journal of Negro History, 81, 1/4 (Winter–Autumn 1996), 105–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴³ Letter from Roger Baldwin to Bethune Memorial [Committee] NCNW, 28 Sept. 1970, NABWH 001, S8, B1, F2.

⁴⁴ Carl Albert, Audio Recording Transcription; Dedication, US Capitol, 10 July 1974, NABWH 001, S15, SS5, F88, S1.

⁴⁵ Letter from Frieda Armstrong, 30 Nov. 1970, NABWH 001, S8, B5, F73.

⁴⁶ Smith quoted in White, Deborah Gray, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 154Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ Flyer, c.1972, NABWH 001, S8, B10, F215.

⁴⁸ Margaret McGlynn, “The Lady Who Left Us Hope,” Look, 9 Feb. 1971, NABWH 001, S8, B9, F197.

⁴⁹ Task Force on Dedication, Minutes of Meeting, 27–29 Dec. 1973, NABWH 001, S8, B14, F260.

⁵⁰ Invitation to Black Women's Institute Bethune Memorial Symposia, 1974, NABWH 001, S8, B6, F75.

⁵¹ Press release, n.d., NABWH 001, S8, B6, F77.

⁵² Du Bois, W. E. B., The Souls of Black Folk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 8Google Scholar.

⁵³ These tensions have continued to inform the commemoration of African Americans, perhaps most notably in the King, Martin Luther Jr. Memorial on the Bruyneel, Mall. Kevin, “The King's Body: The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial and the Politics of Collective Memory,” History & Memory, 26, 1 (Spring–Summer 2014), 75–108Google Scholar. See also Browne's discussion of commemorations of Crispus Attucks and attempts to “leverage African American entrance into the American story by so rewriting it that inclusion would not come at the cost of their identity, difference, or their own unique past.” Browne, Stephen H., “Remembering Crispus Attucks: Race, Rhetoric, and the Politics of Commemoration” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 85 (1999), 169–87, 173CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁴ McCluskey, “Introduction,” 7.

⁵⁵ Savage, Monument Wars, 10.

⁵⁶ “I Leave You Love.”

⁵⁷ Letter from Lena Horne and Leontyne Price to supporters, April 1971, NABWH 001, S8, B4, F57.

⁵⁸ Memo from Height to organization co-sponsors, 10 June 1974, NABWH 001, S8, B6, F75.

⁵⁹ Bethune herself was active in the preservation and promotion of African American history, serving as president of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. She believed that knowledge about the black past could inculcate black pride, which was crucial to African American advancement. See Bethune, Mary McLeod, “Clarifying Our Vision with the Facts,” Journal of Negro History, 23, 1 (Jan. 1938), 10–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁰ Harris, Robert L. Jr., “Coming of Age: The Transformation of Afro-American Historiography,” Journal of Negro History, 67, 2 (Summer 1982), 107–21, 108CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶¹ Dwyer, “Interpreting the Civil Rights Movement,” 663.

⁶² Letter from Frieda Armstrong, 30 Nov. 1970, letter from Robert Held, 30 Dec. 1971, NABWH 001, S8, B5, F73.

⁶³ Letter from Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm to NCNW members, Nov. 1970, NABWH 001, S8, B4, F56.

⁶⁴ Flyer, Bethune Memorial Fund Drive, n.d., c.1962, NABWH 001, S8, B2, F17.

⁶⁵ Living memorials became increasingly popular in the US after World War II. See Shanken, Andrew M., “Planning Memory: Living Memorials in the United States during World War II,” Art Bulletin, 84, 1 (March 2002), 130–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁶ Letter, Hilyard Robinson to Dorothy Height, 19 June 1963, NABWH 001, S8, B10, F217.

⁶⁷ Letter, Dorothy Height to Shirley Chisholm, 23 June 1970, NABWH 001, S8, B9, F197.

⁶⁸ Jaffe, Harry S. and Sherwood, Tom, Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington, D.C. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 19, 119Google Scholar.

⁶⁹ Letter, Anna Roosevelt Halsted to Aerol Arnold, 24 Sept. 1970, NABWH 001, S8, B4, F56.

⁷⁰ “Lincoln Park Looks at Crime,” Washington Post, 8 July 1971, NABWH 001, S8, B10, F217. At a planning meeting eight years earlier, it had been noted that in the area surrounding Lincoln Park and to its south there was “redevelopment,” in which black people were being “displaced.” Bethune Memorial – Discussion on Monday, 17 June 1963, Bethune, Box 99, RG 66, NAB.

⁷¹ For a discussion of Washington in the 1960s and 1970s see, for example, Jaffe and Sherwood; Gillette, Howard, Between Justice and Beauty: Race, Planning, and the Failure of Urban Policy in Washington, D.C. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hopkinson, Natalie, Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

⁷² Letter, Robert F. Kreinheder to T. Sutton Jett, 24 Feb. 1967, Folder Lincoln Park Reconstruction April 1967, Box 87, Project Files, Entry A1 17A, Records of the Commission of Fine Arts, Record Group 66, NAB.

⁷³ These changes were overseen by the NPS and were funded by a million-dollar grant from the Downtown Parks for the Bicentennial Program, established in anticipation of the 1976 Bicentennial. NPS 2009, 19.

⁷⁴ On the freeway dispute see, for example, “Freeway Site Dispute Goes to White House,” Capitol Hill News, Feb. 1962, Bethune, Box 99, RG 66, NAB.

⁷⁵ Letter, Chisholm to NCNW members, Nov. 1970.

⁷⁶ “Task Force Report on Special Activities,” c. Dec. 1973, NABWH 001, S8, B14, F260.

⁷⁷ “Planning Memo,” 29 June 1974, NABWH 001, S8, B6, F75.

⁷⁸ “Bethune Statue Unveiled before Thousands,” Afro American, 13 July 1974, NABWH 001, S8, B7, F89.

⁷⁹ “Drums, Flutes Spark Welcome,” Washington Post, 11 July 1974, B1.

⁸⁰ Further research needs to be done on the reception and continued role of the memorial, both in terms of a local community and more broadly.

⁸¹ NPS 2009, 5.

⁸² One notable example is the statue of Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York, which was erected in 1899.

⁸³ Daugherty, Ellen, “Negotiating the Veil: Tuskegee's Booker T. Washington Monument,” American Art, 24, 3 (Fall 2010), 52–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁴ McCluskey, “Introduction,” 67.

⁸⁵ Ellison, Invisible Man, quoted in Daugherty, 74.

⁸⁶ de Schweinitz, Rebecca, “The ‘Shame of America’: African American Civil Rights and the Politics of Childhood,” in Goddard, Jim, McNamee, Sally, James, Adrian and James, Allison, eds., The Politics of Childhood: International Perspectives, Contemporary Developments (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 50–70, 53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁷ Bethune Memorial – Discussion on Tuesday, 18 June 1963; Height, Dorothy, Open Wide the Gates of Freedom (New York: Public Affairs, 2003), 214Google Scholar.

⁸⁸ An image of black childhood later immortalised in Norman Rockwell's 1964 painting The Problem We All Live With.

⁸⁹ de Schweinitz, Rebecca, If We Could Change the World: Young People and America's Long Struggle for Racial Equality (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2009), 147Google Scholar. Joan Scott on “relationships of power” quoted at ibid.

⁹⁰ Murray quoted in Bindman, David and Gates, Henry Louis Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume IV, Part 1 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2012), 229–30Google Scholar.

⁹¹ Janice Monk, “Gender in the Landscape: Expressions of Power and Meaning,” in Anderson and Gale, Inventing Places, 123–38.

⁹² Ibid., 126, 124.

⁹³ NPS 2009, 61.

⁹⁴ Fairclough, Class of Their Own, 226.

⁹⁵ Bethune Memorial – Discussion on Tuesday, 18 June 1963.

⁹⁶ For a useful discussion of Aunt Jemima/Mammy and Jezebel imagery see Harris, Michael, Colored Pictures: Race and Visual Representation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), chapters 3 and 4Google Scholar.

⁹⁷ Hanson, Mary McLeod Bethune, 41–42.

⁹⁸ Marschall, Sabine, “How to Honour a Woman: Gendered Memorialisation in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” Critical Arts: A South–North Journal of Cultural & Media Studies, 24, 2 (2010), 260–83, 262, 271CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹⁹ NPS 2009, 19.

¹⁰⁰ The extent to which the viewer is given this impression depends on the angle from which the memorial is viewed.

¹⁰¹ Letter from Berks to Dorothy Height, 27 Oct. 1961, NABWH 001, S8, B1, F13, emphasis added.

¹⁰² Time commemorative issue, 10 July 1974, NABWH 001, S8, B2, F17.

¹⁰³ John H. Murphy III, “Bethune Memorial Unveiled as 98th Birthday Observed,” Baltimore Afro-American, 17 July 1973, 8.

¹⁰⁴ Hanson, 96. See also Smith, “Introduction,” 131–35.

¹⁰⁵ White, Too Heavy, 201.

¹⁰⁶ Height quoted from Report of Consultation of Problems of Negro Women, President's Commission on the Status of Women, 19 April 1963. Daniel Geary, “The Moynihan Report: An Annotated Version,” The Atlantic, 14 Sept. 2015.

¹⁰⁷ White, Too Heavy a Load, 201.

¹⁰⁸ “Memories of Mary McLeod Bethune,” Washington Post, 12 July 1974, D1.

¹⁰⁹ Bethune Memorial – Discussion on Tuesday, 18 June 1963. Height recounts in her autobiography that Berks used a composite sketch for the boy but wanted a life model for the girl, which suggests that he placed particular importance on this figure. Height, Open Wide the Gates, 214.

¹¹⁰ White, 180–81.

¹¹¹ Fitzgerald, Tracey A., The National Council of Negro Women and the Feminist Movement, 1935–1975 (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1985), 49Google Scholar.

¹¹² Task Force on Dedication, Minutes of Meeting, 27–29 Dec. 1973, NABWH 001, S8, B14, F260.

¹¹³ Ruffins, “Lifting as We Climb,” 378. See also Johnson, Joan Marie, “‘Ye Gave Them a Stone’: African American Women's Clubs, the Frederick Douglass Home, and the Black Mammy Monument,” Journal of Women's History, 17, 1 (Spring 2005), 62–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹⁴ Collier-Thomas, Bettye, “Towards Black Feminism: The Creation of the Bethune Museum-Archives,” Special Collections: Women's Collections, Libraries, Archives, and Consciousness, 3 (Spring–Summer 1985), 43–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Bethune and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History see Jardins, Julie Des, Women and the Historical Enterprise in America: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Memory, 1880–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), chapter 5Google Scholar.

¹¹⁵ Letter from Dorothy Height to NCNW members, 1 June 1973, NABWH 001, S8, B10, F213.

¹¹⁶ Copy from Congressional Record, 19 July 1971, NABWH 001, S8, B7, F105.

¹¹⁷ “Memories of Mary McLeod Bethune”; “Bethune Dedication to Draw 100,000,” Washington Post, 10 July 1974, C1.

¹¹⁸ Valk, Anne, Radical Sisters: Second Wave Feminism and Black Liberation in Washington, D.C. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 43Google Scholar.

¹¹⁹ “Memories of Mary McLeod Bethune.”

¹²⁰ Gillis, John R., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 3Google Scholar.

¹²¹ Letter from Height to Shirley Chisholm, 23 June 1970, NABWH 001, S8, B9, F197.

¹²² Height, Audio Recording Transcription.

¹²³ This still seems to be the case, as it is the NCNW which leads the annual birthday celebration in Lincoln Park. At the ceremony in 2015 the author observed that the audience was predominantly made up of black women.

¹²⁴ Hanson, Mary McLeod Bethune, 104.

¹²⁵ Ibid., 199.

¹²⁶ White, Too Heavy a Load, 158; 206.

¹²⁷ McCluskey, “Introduction,” 7.

¹²⁸ Rosenzweig, Roy and Thelen, David, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 149Google Scholar.

¹²⁹ Letter from Height to President of Bethune-Cookman College, 3 May 1973, NABWH 001, S8, B2, F16.

¹³⁰ Covering letter from Height to Mr Udall for progress report as presented to the Secretary of the Interior, 25 May 1965, NABWH 001, S8, B10, F209.

¹³¹ Kammen, Michael, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1991), 3Google Scholar.