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The Life of Dr. Mary McLeod-Bethune
Excerpts from:
BETHUNE-COOKMAN COLLEGE 1904-1994: THE ANSWERED PRAYER TO A DREAM
BY SHEILA Y. FLEMMING, Ph.D. On
July 10, 1875, two years before the end of Reconstruction, Mary Jane
McLeod was born to two former slaves, Samuel and Patsy Macintosh
McLeod, near Maysville, South Carolina. She was the fifteenth
of seventeen children; most of her brothers and sisters were born in
slavery. Once her family was reassembled from various
plantations after slavery, her parents acquired five acres of land
and built a family home known as the "Homestead".
Her mother continued to work for her former owner, and her father
cultivated cotton on their land. Young Mary Jane, as was the
custom in the cotton regions of South Carolina, was in the fields
along with the adults.
The time spent working in the cotton fields in Maysville helped
shape Mary McLeod's keen work ethic and values regarding the
importance of the use of the hands in labor and success. But
Mary McLeod knew that God intended more for her than working in the
cotton fields. She had a burning desire to learn how to read
and write and was not happy until she was allowed to attend
Maysville's one room schoolhouse. McLeod became the prize
student of the teacher, Emma Jane Wilson, who recognized her
outstanding skills. Miss Wilson recommended McLeod for a
scholarship to attend Scotia Seminary near Concord, North Carolina.
Upon graduation from Scotia in 1894, McLeod was awarded a
scholarship to Dwight Moody's Institute for Home and Foreign
Missions in Chicago. This rising young scholar had dreamed of
going to Africa to minister to the spiritual and educational needs
of her ancestors. However, this future "foremost woman of
her race in the United States" was informed that there were
"no openings for Negro Missionaries in Africa".
Mary McLeod was not one to have gone that far to be discouraged from
her "missionary spirit-the spirit of doing things for
others". Following a year at Moody's Institute she
returned to Maysville to become Miss Wilson's assistant at the
Presbyterian Mission School. Restless and unrequited in her
ambition, she requested and received from the Presbyterian Board of
Education an appointment at the Haines Institute in Augusta,
Georgia. Here she honed her programmatic educational
philosophy from the dynamic Lucey Craft Laney. It was at the
Haines Normal and Industrial Institute that McLeod gained experience
in a predominately female setting with primary, grammar, elementary
normal and industrial courses. Laney also helped create a city
hospital. The lessons McLeod learned from her one year's
experience at Haines served her well when she established her own
school.
Sometime between 1897 and 1898, McLeod was transferred by the
Presbyterian Board to Kendell Institute at Sumpter, South Carolina.
Here she continued to teach and render social services. But
most importantly, she met Albertus Bethune, a former schoolteacher
turned haberdasher. They were married in early May 1898; on
February 3, 1899, she gave birth to Albertus McLeod Bethune Jr., in
Savannah, Georgia. Their relationship vacillated between his
desire to make money and her dream of continuing her mission work.
Moreover, she now had an added responsibility-raising a son.
This and mission work won out over settling down to homemaker.
While living in Savannah, Mrs. Bethune met Reverend C.J. Uggans, a
Presbyterian pastor from Palatka, Florida. He offered her the
opportunity to start a school in that city. At Palatka, she
started a community school and worked in the jails two and three
times a week, and in the sawmills and among the young people in
clubs. Bethune stayed in Palatka five years, until she was
encouraged to go to Daytona by Reverend S.P. Pratt who informed her
that the area was fertile ground for her missionary spirit.
Having received an education at Maysville Presbyterian Mission
School, Scotia Institute, and Moody's Bible Institute, having gained
teaching experience at her primary school with her mentor Emma
Wilson, and having arrived in Daytona Beach in 1904 and established
the Daytona Literary and Industrial School for Training Negro Girls,
Bethune labored the next twenty years, dividing her time and energy
between making the school a success and building for herself a
national reputation.
Mary McLeod Bethune became a public leader in the second decade of
the twentieth century. She led a drive to register black
voters in Daytona Beach which earned her a visit from the local Ku
Klux Klan. Moreover during this period, Bethune was elected
president of the State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs.
During four years in office, she organized scattered clubs of black
women throughout the Southeast to combat school segregation and the
lack of health facilities among black children. In 1924,
Bethune became the eighth president of the prestigious National
Association of Colored Women's clubs (NACW). Among her
accomplishments, during her first four years as president, was the
acquisition of a national headquarters in the nation's capital.
Even greater recognition was bestowed upon her as a leader in
education. In 1928, she attended the Child Welfare Conference
called by President Calvin Coolidge. During Herbert Hoover's
administration, she was again summoned to Washington to attend the
National Commission for Child Welfare. According to biographer
Rackham Holt, she was "the expert on educational boards, able
to supply the facts on the Negro institutions" that received
federal aid. Bethune likewise served on the Hoover Commission
on Home Building and Home Ownership. In 1933 she was appointed
to the Planning Committee established by the Federal Office of
Education of Negroes in the spring of 1934. In addition, she
was able to carry on her duties as president of her Daytona Beach
school, and to organize the National Council of Negro Women in New
York City. Bethune's increasing Involvement in national
conferences on education, child welfare, and home ownership, as well
as her reputation as a moving spirit in the black women's club
movement, brought her into contact with a widening circle of
influential people which eventually included the Roosevelts.
Subsequently her recognition as a "leader" in the
"black world", and her affiliation with the architects of
the New Deal reform program, led to her service as an advisor on
minority affairs in the Roosevelt administration.
Bethune's appointment as advisor on minority affairs in the National
Youth Administration (NYA) is an interesting story.
Undoubtedly, as a result of her activities in the women's movement
in the 1920s and 1930s, she attracted the attention of Eleanor
Roosevelt, who invited her to a luncheon at her New York home for
representative leaders of the National Council of Women of the
United States. It was at this social gathering that Bethune
met Sara Delano (Mrs. James) Roosevelt, mother of President Franklin
D. Roosevelt. According to Bethune, the friendship that grew
from this initial meeting, "became one of the most treasured
relationships of my life." Subsequently, she developed a
"close" friendship with the Roosevelt women probably led
to her government appointments.
A series of events in the early 1930s led to a large meeting of
black leaders later in the decade in Washington, D.C., to chart the
social, political, and economic destiny of millions of black
Americans. The events were the election of President
Roosevelt, the appointment of Mary McLeod Bethune as director of
minority affairs in the NYA, and the advent of the Great Depression.
In 1937 and again in 1939, with the approval of Aubrey Williams, NYA
executive director, Bethune issued calls for national conferences on
the problem of black Americans. She established the
conferences' theme when she wrote to the president that, "until
now, opportunity (had) not been offered for Negroes themselves to
suggest a comprehensive program for the full integration into the
benefits and the responsibilities of American democracy."
Delegates from around the nation sent recommendations to Roosevelt
and to Congress, which they considered fundamental to resolving the
problems facing "the Negro" and its youth. Many of
these problems were compounded by the Depression and racism.
The two National Conferences were perhaps, the pinnacle of Bethune's
public career. When the NYA was abolished in 1943, she
returned to Daytona Beach to devote herself to her beloved
community, family, and school.
Known for her reputation as an educator, public figure in
government, and black women's club activist, Bethune was also a
Business woman. While much of her energy was devoted to
keeping the College solvent, she also provided a better living
condition for her parents and an education for her son and grandson.
Two axioms of Bethune's philosophy, "not for myself, but for
others," and "I feel that as I give I get," were
confessed to Charles S. Johnson. But she was not one to rely
upon chance for her economic security. She held a one-fourth
interest in the Welricha Motel at the Bethune Volusia Beach, Inc., a
resort purchased in 1943 to provide recreational facilities for
black Daytonans, was located on a two-and-one-half-mile stretch of
oceanfront property jointly owned by Bethune, George W. Engram Sr.,
and Joseph Nathaniel Crooms and his wife, Wealthy.
Bethune also held capital stock in the Afro-American Life Insurance
Company of Jacksonville and the Central Life Insurance Company of
Tampa. Her association with the latter company dates back to
1923 when thirteen men, led by Tampa realtor and mortician Garfield
D. Rodgers, offered Bethune the opportunity to join them in the
insurance business. She held capital stock in the Pittsburgh
Courier too.
In addition to these ventures, Bethune invested in real estate
mainly in the neighborhood of the College. The revenue from
these investments enabled her to have a comfortable life for herself
and her son and grandson. Also, Bethune used extra
earnings from selling insurance to pay off the mortgage on the
"Homestead" in Maysville, and bought a modern home for her
parents.
Bethune had been engaged in activities connected with World War II.
As early as 1942, she lobbied the U.S. War Department to commission
black women officers in the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC),
later the Women's Army Corps (WAC). In 1944, she became the
national commander of the Women's Army for National Defense, an
all-black women's organization founded on November 15, 1942, by
Lovonia H. Brown to seek "opportunities for service..., share
in this fight for democracy..., and to provide an instrument through
which our women could serve in this great crisis, with dignity and
pride...". Their motto, "Working for Victory,
Planning for Peace," was echoed in Bethune's greeting at its
first national meeting: "Today,...we are aware of the profound
and worldwide significance of this war and the postwar era, that is
rapidly emerging." The actions taken by Bethune during
the war demonstrated her patriotism for a nation willing to fight
racism abroad, but not practicing democracy at home.
Bethune was also involved in the postwar "planning for
peace." On April 25, 1945, W.E.B. DuBois, imminent
sociologist at Atlanta University, Walter White of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and Bethune were
sent to San Francisco by President Harry S. Truman as consultants to
the organizing meeting of the United Nations. At the
conference, these eminent African Americans interacted with people
of color from European colonial territories in Africa and Asia,
supporting their demands for independence. Disappointed with
the results of the deliberation, Bethune issued a statement that:
"San Francisco is not building the promised land of brotherhood
and security and opportunity and peace. It is building a
bridge to get there by. We still have a long way to go."
Bethune was invited by President Dumarsais Estime of the Republic of
Haiti to celebrate the 1949 Haitian Exposition and became the first
woman to be given the Medal of Honor and Merit, Haiti's highest
award. The "foremost woman of her race in the United
States"; was again rewarded when President Truman asked her to
represent the nation at the inauguration of President William V.S.
Tubman of Liberia in 1949. Bethune finally realized her dream
of going to Africa, not as a missionary, but as a representative of
the U.S. government. She was awarded one of Liberia's most
prestigious awards- the Commander of the Order of the Star of
Africa. Caux, Switzerland, was Bethune's last overseas trip.
In 1954 she attended the World Assembly for Moral Re-Armament, an
organization which subscribed to the principles Bethune had lived by
- "absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness,
and absolute love."
One anonymous writer stated that Mary McLeod Bethune 'lived five
full lives of service because her one life had been multiplied
fruitfully and unwaveringly in five different phases of human
endeavor.." These were: (1) : "the urgency of reform
in the many affairs of her world, particularly those of her
people", (2) "Bethune-Cookman College... the
extension of her sacrifice and service", (3) "the
National Council of Negro Women, uniting women of color to ... seek
social and political involvement and progress", (4)
Bethune-Volusia Beach... a lighthouse to recreation..." and,
(5) "a spiritual-cultural heritage to generations yet unborn
... the Mary McLeod Bethune Foundation." Her home,
"The Retreat" was made a National Historical Landmark By
the National Park Services in 1975, a fitting recognition by the
nation she served so well, and a people she helped so unselfishly.
Mary McLeod Bethune must have been gratified to see the political
and social changes that occurred during her lifetime. Born
into a family of ex-slaves, she lived long enough to witness the
unraveling of the "separate but equal" doctrine by the
U.S. Supreme Court decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, on May 17, 1954.
On this occasion she wrote in her weekly Chicago Defender column:
There can be no divided democracy, no class government, no half-free
county, under the constitution. Therefore, there can be no
discrimination, no segregation, no separation of some citizens from
the rights which belong to all.... We are on our way. But
these are frontiers which we must conquer... We must gain full
equality in education ...in the franchise... in economic
opportunity, and full equality in the abundance of life.
Her statement reflected her firm belief in American democracy and
included her lifelong agenda for African Americans-education for
all, the franchise for all and economic opportunity for all.
On May 18, 1955, Bethune died of a heart attack.
Alone in the cotton fields of Maysville, she saw the vision which
demanded her life; alone she ... took that first train ride to
Concord, N.C.; Scotia and larger development; alone she ferreted
those early years which gave rise to Bethune-Cookman College; and
though many now follow loyally ... she must stand at the head of
those who grope eagerly for the vision that they may carry on
faithfully long after she has gone. Traveling the treadmill of
Service! But she is not tired; she is still dreaming.
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