Quote by Mary McLeod Bethune: “We have a powerful potential in our youth, and we must have the courage to change old ideas.”

Progress cannot be inherited — it has to be actively chosen by each generation. Young people carry energy and possibility, but it takes courage from everyone — young and old — to challenge inherited assumptions and make space for new ways of thinking and being. Fear of change is the greatest enemy of a generation's potential.

Bethune delivered this sentiment in the final years of her life, the same year the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision declared racial segregation in schools unconstitutional. The civil rights movement was beginning to take its most organised form, and the role of education as a tool of both liberation and resistance was sharply in focus.

American educator and civil rights leader who founded the Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls in 1904, which eventually became Bethune-Cookman University. She served as an advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and founded the National Council of Negro Women in 1935, and was one of the most influential Black women in American public life of the twentieth century.