On November 23, 1939, Mary McLeod Bethune - a close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt and a director of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Office of Minority Affairs in the National Youth Administration - took part in a panel discussion as part of NBC radio's weekly public affairs broadcast "America's Town Meeting of the Air". The panelists addressed the question, "What does American democracy mean to me?" With her Victorian elocution and a thunderous tone, Bethune reminded her listeners that African Americans had always been willing to die for American democracy but were still shut out from its promise of freedom.