November of 2016, the New York Urban League commissioned me to F 2016 Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955). Mary McLeod Bethune was a prominent educator, political leader, and social visionary whose early twentieth-century activism for Black women and civil rights laid the foundation for the modern civil rights era. Inspired by Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Josephine St. Pierre-Ruffin, Bethune mobilized African American women's organizations to challenge racial injustice and demand first-class citizenship. Her friendship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt led to her becoming the Director of the National Youth Administration's (NYA) Division of Negro Affairs. Bethune became the most prominent African American in the Franklin Roosevelt Administration through the NYA. She was also chair of the informal Black Cabinet of senior African American officials in the Roosevelt administration. In 1949, President Harry S. Truman was appointed to lead the U.S. delegation to Liberia to observe the inauguration of President William V.S. Tubman. In 1951, she served on President Truman's Committee of Twelve for National Defense. Mary McLeod Bethune died on May 18, 1955, at 79. She lived long enough to see the U.S. Supreme Court strike down de jure school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education. Still, she died seven months before the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which ushered in the modern Civil Rights Movement, partly inspired by her activism.