On behalf of the EVOLVE Magazines Florida Team, we want to share our collective honor in publishing this special edition of EVOLVE – The Pride of Florida. Every member of our EVOLVE team contributed to this effort because we had a shared passion for what this edition is about – celebrating Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, […]Read More

The National Statuary Hall is one of the most popular rooms in the U.S. Capitol building, visited by thousands of tourists every day and used occasionally for ceremonial events. But when it was designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe – and rebuilt by Latrobe and his successor Charles Bullfinch after it was destroyed by British troops […]Read More

Mary McLeod Bethune Gets Statewide Support for Place in National Statuary Hall When the Great Floridians Ad Hoc Committee of the Florida Division of Historical Resources met in June of 2016 to select candidates to represent Florida in the National Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol the list of names under consideration was long. But […]Read More

Most people never get a chance to make history even once in their lives. For Nilda Comas, that chance has come not once, but twice. The Puerto Rican-born artist is the first Hispanic sculptor chosen to create a piece for the National Statuary Hall, and her subject, Mary McLeod Bethune, will be the first African-American […]Read More

First Steps In March of 2016, Gov. Rick Scott signed a law to replace the statue of Confederate Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith, which had been donated to the U.S. Capitol for display in Statuary Hall in 1922, with a new “Great Floridian.” The search for a new sculpture was conducted by the Florida Department of […]Read More

Before members of the Mary McLeod Bethune Statuary Fund gathered to kick off the campaign to raise money for the placement of a statue of the revered educator and civil rights icon in the U.S. Capitol, the goal to raise $400,000 might have seemed a tall order. But by the time the event on April […]Read More

Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune’s journey to the National Statuary Hall began in Mayesville, South Carolina, where she was born, and runs through Daytona Beach, home of the university she founded. But her life’s influence spans the country, from the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama to the urban streets of Watts, Detroit and from Harlem to […]Read More

Mary McLeod Bethune and the Black Velvet Rose “I never saw a garden so beautiful, roses of all colors. And in the midst of the garden I saw a great big Black Velvet Rose. I never saw a Black Velvet Rose before and I said to myself, ‘Oh! This is the great interracial garden; this […]Read More