This building served as the headquarters of the National Council of Negro Women from 1943 to 1966 after Mary McLeod Bethune, a political activist and educator, founded the organization in 1935 in her nearby apartment and moved it here eight years later. Bethune had founded a school for African American girls in Daytona Beach, Florida, in 1904, and her advocacy for women and children brought her national attention in the 1920s, leading President Franklin D. Roosevelt to appoint her to the National Youth Administration in 1936. As a member of FDR's Black Cabinet, she promoted black federal employment, and during World War II she successfully lobbied President Roosevelt to allow African Americans into the Women's Army Corps while the NCNW under her leadership led blood drives and sold bonds to support U.S. war efforts. During Dorothy Height's tenure as the Council's fourth president from 1957 to 1998, the organization moved to Pennsylvania Avenue, NW. The building now houses a museum and archive of African American women's history. From 1908 until 2005, Confederate Memorial Hall, including a veterans' retirement home, operated two doors away at 1322 Vermont Avenue, and the unusually small house at 1341 Vermont Avenue predates the development of Logan Circle, recalling the modest structures that stood before Boss Shepherd's modernizations of the 1970s encouraged large, fashionable rowhouses.