The Mary McLeod Bethune Statue at the U.S. Capitol: Background information when reading A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit

As Noliwe Rooks rightly asserts in her book A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit, Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune was a woman of many "firsts." Even though she died in 1955, Bethune made another historic first on July 13, 2022, when she became the first Black person to have a state-commissioned statue in the U.S. Capitol's National Statuary Hall Collection. Rooks describes the process of how the monument, created by sculptor Nilda Comas, found its way there and into her heart.

According to Rooks (whose thoughts on the subject can also be found in a 2022 essay for Time), Bethune's statue is chiseled from Italian Carrara marble that comes from the same quarry and vein that Michelangelo used to make his famous sculpture David, and from this Rooks draws an alphabetical-cum-spiritual observation: "Michelangelo's David was the Alpha form shaped from that specific marble, and Comas's Bethune is the Omega." The combined statue and pedestal is eleven feet tall and weighs 6,129 pounds. The ...