Mary McLeod Bethune: “What Does American Democracy Mean to Me?”

( 1939 ) Commentary by Michael J. O’Neal, Ph.D.

Glossary

battlefields of France an allusion to World War I
Booker T. Washington founder of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama
Crispus Attucks a man of African and Native American descent who was killed in the Boston Massacre prior to the Revolutionary War
George Washington Carver a prominent black scientist and educator
Marian Anderson a singer who gave an open-air concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on Easter Sunday 1939
Paul Laurence Dunbar the first black poet to achieve national recognition

Mary McLeod Bethune (Library of Congress)

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