DH - Secondary

Title 2

February 20, 2018, the Florida House of Representatives approved House Bill 139 by a vote
of 111-1. Jay Flant, (R, Jacksonville) cast the one abstaining vote.
On March 19, 2018, then Governor Rick Scott signed the bill into law.
On July 10, 2019, on what would have been Dr. Bethune’s 144th birthday, Governor Ron
DeSantis sent a letter to the Architect of the United States Capitol officially requesting that the
statue of General Edmund Kirby Smith in National Statuary Hall be replaced with Dr. Mary
McLeod Bethune. Securing funding and a sculptor were next steps. To that end, The National
Statuary Hall Campaign Kickoff was held on April 20, 2019, at Bethune-Cookman University to
solicit donations toward the estimated $400,000 needed to fund the statue. Nilda Comas was
selected in 2017 from 1,600 artists to sculpt the statue.

Title 3

Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune will be the first African American figure to be honored with a
monument in National Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol and one of only ten women to
appear among the 100 statues (each state is allowed two statues in Statuary Hall). Florida’s
second statue is of physician, scientist, inventor and

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