working on the presidential campaign for Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, she was invited as a member of his "Black Cabinet." She advised him on concerns of African Americans and helped share Roosevelt's message and achievements with blacks, who had historically been Republican voters since the Civil War. At the time, blacks had been largely disenfranchised in the South since the turn of the century, so she spoke to black voters across the North. Upon her death, columnist Louis E. Martin said, "She gave out faith and hope as if they were pills and she some sort of doctor." Honors include designation of her home in Daytona Beach as a National Historic Landmark, her house in Washington, D.C. as a National Historic Site, and the installation of a memorial sculpture of her in Lincoln Park in Washington, D.C. The 17 ft bronze statue, unveiled in 1974, “is the first monument to honor an African American and a woman in a public park in Washington, D.C." The Legislature of Florida designated her in 2018 as the subject of one of Florida's two statues in the National Statuary Hall Collection. Early life and education Mary Jane McLeod was born in 1875 in a small log cabin near Mayesville, South Carolina, on a rice and cotton farm in Sumter County. She was the fifteenth of seventeen children born to Sam and Patsy ( McIntosh) McLeod, both former slaves. Most of her siblings had been born into slavery. Her mother worked for her former owner, and her father farmed cotton near a large house they called "The Homestead". Her parents wanted to be independent, so they had sacrificed to buy a farm for the family. As a child, Mary would accompany her mother to deliver "white people's" wash. Allowed to go into the white children's nursery, Mary became fascinated with their toys. One day she picked up a book, and as she opened it, a white child snatched it away from her, babbling she did not know how to read. Mary decided then that the only difference between white and colored people was the ability to read and write. She was inspired to learn. McLeod attended Mayesville's one-room black schoolhouse, Trinity Mission School, which was run by the Presbyterian Board of Missions of Freedmen. She was the only child in her family to attend school, so she taught her family what she had learned