Sterling Allen Brown

Washington, DC

Mary McLeod Bethune (1875–1955) was born to formerly enslaved parents in Mayesville, South Carolina, and rose to become one of America's most consequential educators and civil-rights leaders. With little more than resolve, she founded a school for Black girls in Daytona Beach, Florida, that grew into Bethune-Cookman University, organized the National Council of Negro Women, and advised President Franklin Roosevelt as part of the informal 'Black Cabinet.' Sculpted by Robert Berks and unveiled in Lincoln Park on July 10, 1974, the bronze shows Bethune passing a scroll of her legacy to two children, echoing the inscription's charge, 'Let her works praise her.'

Carroll County, MD · est. 2016

In 1925, two years after Maryland opened a tuberculosis sanatorium at Henryton, a training school for Black nurses was created to help care for its growing patient population. Revised in 1945 to meet licensing standards, it reopened as the Henryton School of Practical Nursing, gaining a nurses' home in 1952 with labs, lecture rooms, and a library. The school closed in 1963.

Sykesville, MD

Across the decades when Maryland's public schools were racially segregated, Black communities were served by separate "colored" schoolhouses — often small, locally built and locally sustained buildings that became the heart of African American education and community life. A schoolhouse like this one near Sykesville would have taught generations of children in one or a few rooms, typically on limited public funding and outsized community effort. Such buildings stood as proof of Black families' determination to secure learning for their children under Jim Crow.

Baltimore, MD

In mid-twentieth-century Baltimore, tennis was still largely divided along racial lines, and Harvey J. Burns, Jr. (1923–1988) devoted himself to opening the game to Black players in his city. Working as a teacher, promoter, and mentor, he coached young people and helped them find a path into competitive tennis at a time when those doors did not open easily. This memorial marks the legacy of a local pioneer who used sport to widen opportunity.