FIRST-TIME AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY, LITERATURE CLASSES NO LONGER OFFERED DUE TO LACK OF ENROLLMENT BY MEERA SHROFF graphic by SAMANTHA LEVINE
Mary McLeod Bethune was one of the most influential African American educators and political activists of the 1900s. She was a successful businesswoman, a political advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt, a teacher who opened a boarding school to educate African American girls, the vice president of the NAACP from 1940 to 1955, the founding president of the National Council of Negro Women, and as director of the Division of Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration, she was the first black woman to head a department of a federal agency. Despite her lengthy list of accomplishments, Bethune, along with hundreds of other accomplished African Americans in U.S. history, is only briefly mentioned during Whitman’s Honors U.S. History unit on the Civil Rights Movement. While Bethune is included in Whitman’s AP U.S. History course, the AP course description doesn’t include her as a prominent figure that the course has to cover. In fact, the AP curriculum mandates the course covers only one influential African American activist: Martin Luther King Jr. While most AP U.S. History classes discuss other African American figures, they aren’t required to. However, Northwood High School’s African American history class covered Bethune and other pioneering African Americans in depth. The eye-opening class, once taught by social studies content specialist Tracy Oliver-Gary,
