Mary McLeod Bethune

Chelsea

By the time she was nine years old, Mary McLeod could pick 250 pounds of cotton a day; that would make about five hundred T-shirts today. Although Mary was born in 1875, after slavery, for many black Americans, bondage didn’t end with the Emancipation Proclamation or after the Civil War.

Even after they were freed, Mary’s parents, Patsy and Samuel McLeod, worked for years for their former master. Eventually, they earned enough money to buy five acres of the land made profitable only by their labor; on that land, Mary’s father and brothers built the cabin in which she would be born. After Mary’s birth, her parents continued to work in the fields; her mother also took in white people’s washing, including that of her former master’s family. Mary would go with Patsy as she made laundry deliveries. In white people’s homes, Mary wondered about the toys and books white kids had, once asking herself if “the difference between white folks and colored is just this matter of reading and writing.” On one visit, a white child told her that she wasn’t supposed to read and should not touch the books. “When she said to me, ‘You can’t read that—put that down,’ it just did something to my pride and to my heart that made me feel that someday I would read just as she was reading,” Mary later said.

It wasn’t until almost two decades after the Civil War that Mary’s hometown of Mayesville, South Carolina, had a school open to black students. Emma Wilson, a black missionary who founded the school, asked the McLeods if they wanted to send their children. They could afford to send only one, and they decided on Mary. She walked five miles each way to make it to class and home again. After school, she would often teach her family what she had learned that day, then do her homework by candlelight.

Impressed by Mary, Ms. Wilson selected her to receive a scholarship to further her studies at Scotia Seminary in North Carolina. Mary left home when she was thirteen years old. After graduating from Scotia, she received a scholarship to the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. Mary dreamed of being a missionary in Africa. But when she applied, the Presbyterian Mission Board rejected her application, informing her that there were no opportunities for black missionaries in their programs. Mary decided to return to Mayesville and took a job teaching at the school she had once attended. She would go on to teach at several schools across the South; while working in Augusta, Georgia, she met Albertus Bethune, whom she would marry in 1898.

The Bethunes moved to Florida in 1899, and Mary started selling insurance to support her family. Five years later, Mary realized a long-held ambition: She opened her first school, the Daytona Literary and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls. Without the support of a church or wealthy benefactor, Mary had to raise the funds to build and support the school herself, while working on its curriculum and hiring faculty. She purposefully opened her school in a poor neighborhood of a city where Jim Crow segregation was the law and a state where black Americans were routinely lynched. Surrounded by racist violence, she wanted to give black children a chance to get the education she believed all children deserved.

Initial enrollment at Mary’s school was five girls, each of whom paid fifty cents a week. Within two years, there were 250 students. She also began offering night classes for black adults, particularly women, who wanted to learn to read and write. She would later focus on teaching exactly what was needed to pass the literacy tests required to vote.

“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 must gain full equality in education… in the franchise… in economic opportunity, and full equality in the abundance of life.”

—MARY MCLEOD BETHUNE

As demand grew, Mary realized she needed more space—something that would require more money than she could raise through tuition, or selling homemade pies, another job she took on to support the school. She began raising money from wealthy white families, asking for donations from those who came to Daytona for the winter months. Looking for additional support, she also traveled the country; she won over the Gambles, the Rockefellers, and the Carnegie Foundation. Mary then leveraged her wealthy white supporters to fight for full accreditation so her school could offer middle and high school.

In 1920, the Ku Klux Klan threatened Mary, but she made it clear she and her school weren’t moving. In 1923, Mary began the process of merging her school with the Cookman Institute for Men in Jacksonville to form what is now Bethune-Cookman University. Mary became the first black woman to serve as president of a historically black college and university (HBCU), and Bethune-Cookman remains the only HBCU founded by a black woman.

Even though she is best known for her work in education, Mary confronted racism and segregation anywhere she saw them. When hospitals in Daytona refused to care for black patients, she opened the McLeod Hospital and the McLeod Training School for Nurses. Not until the 1960s would black patients be legally integrated into Daytona’s public hospital system. Even then, black patients continued to receive substandard care.

After the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, Mary led voter registration drives, working to register black women to vote. The hateful, racist attacks she encountered during her drives only made Mary more determined to work on a national level to champion black women. In 1924, she was elected president of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, where she was vocal in her support for expanding vocational training to black Americans. This put her at odds with Ida B. Wells, the great journalist, advocate, and anti-lynching activist, who criticized Mary’s narrow focus. Wells argued that “to sneer at and discourage higher education would mean to rob the race of leaders which it so badly needed… all the industrial education in the world could not take the place of manhood.”

In 1935, Mary founded the National Council of Negro Women to help connect black women and organizations across the country. In 1936, at Eleanor’s encouragement, President Franklin Roosevelt appointed Mary as director of the Division of Negro Affairs at the National Youth Administration, a New Deal agency focused on providing work and education to young Americans. (By the end of her life, Mary would have worked for or served on committees under five American presidents.) In 1938, she helped organize the first National Conference on Negro Women at the White House, and two years later, she was elected the vice president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

During World War II, Mary served as assistant director of the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), which served to facilitate women’s official involvement in the war effort. She ensured that the WAC would be open to black women and that units would be integrated—at least on paper. In practice, only some WAC units accepted black women. (The army itself wouldn’t adopt a policy of integration until 1948, after the war, and wouldn’t enforce that policy for many years to come.) Mary also fought to include black pilots in the Civilian Pilot Training Program, a government-sponsored effort to increase military preparedness, and lobbied government officials, including President Roosevelt, on behalf of black women who wanted to enlist in the military. She would later organize the first officer candidate schools for black women to provide the training needed to earn an officer’s commission.

During this period, Mary was again the target of the Ku Klux Klan and other racists for championing black Americans’ rights and opportunities. Once again, she ignored their attacks and continued her work. She cofounded the United Negro College Fund, which has since supported more than 450,000 college students.

Toward the end of her life, Mary wrote her last will and testament. The words are inscribed on the side of her memorial statue in Washington, D.C. I remember visiting the statue in high school and reading her words: “I leave you love. I leave you hope. I leave you the challenge of developing confidence in one another. I leave you a thirst for education. I leave you a respect for the use of power. I leave you faith. I leave you racial dignity. I leave you a desire to live harmoniously with your fellow men. I leave you a responsibility to our young people.”

HILLARY

Her memorial statue was unveiled on July 10, 1974, which would have been Mary’s ninety-ninth birthday. Approximately eighteen thousand people from all over the country came to witness this historic occasion. At the unveiling, Cicely Tyson read Mary’s last will and testament, and Representative Shirley Chisholm spoke about how Mary had inspired her. The statue was the first monument of a black woman to be placed in a public park in Washington, D.C.—and, sadly, one of very few still to this day.

In 2018, amid a national outcry over the continued existence of monuments to Confederate traitors, the Florida legislature voted to replace the statue of Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith in the National Statuary Hall Collection at the U.S. Capitol Building with one of Mary McLeod Bethune. She became the first black American chosen by any state to be commemorated in the collection.