Mary McLeod Bethune is not a name I was familiar with until listening to The First Ladies (Berkley, 2023) by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray.

Hers is a name we all ought to know. She was a civil rights activist born to parents who had once been enslaved. She was also an educator, having started Bethune-Cookman University in Florida.

The book is mostly about the friendship of Bethune and Eleanor Roosevelt. For a Black and white woman to be friends was unheard of; especially one that was so public and out in the open. They both received death threats.

Neither refused to back down from their beliefs. Together they made significant strides in the realm of equality and race relations.

While this is a work of fiction, with the authors taking some liberty with dates and actual occurrences, including conversations, that doesn’t matter. At the end of the book the authors explain all of this.

The book is long. I had to borrow it twice from Libby to finish listening to it.

The title comes from Roosevelt being the first lady of the United States and Bethune being the First Lady of the Struggle—as in the struggle for equal rights for Blacks.

The book makes me want to know more about both of them.