Betty McLeod Bethune is an American educator and activist for the defence of citizens’ rights. Born into a family of former slaves, she has, from her childhood, a taste for knowledge that pushed her to enrol in the local school, where she learns to read and write. This opens the doors to higher education, she became a teacher and set up a school for black students which became Bethune-Cookman University. The statue erected in her memory in Washington, D.C. was the first to represent an African-American in the American capital.