36
Mary McLeod Bethune
Enter to Learn, Depart to Serve
The girls huddled together in the darkness, peering over the windowsills of Faith Hall. They watched, barely able to breathe, as more than one hundred men on horseback and on foot, all of them with white sacks cinched over their heads, paraded behind a burning cross down Second Avenue toward the campus gates. Entering the school grounds, the Klansmen encircled the building, the trample of horse hooves and human feet thundering into the silent night. A single shrill scream pierced the stillness, followed by another and another as the girls broke into panic, crouched inside the dark hall.
Suddenly, cutting through the hysteria, a voice rose calm and steady, singing the lyrics of a comforting hymn. One by one the terrified girls joined in, singing, “Be not dismayed whate’er betide, God will take care of you,” as the hooded men marched out the campus gates.1 Later that night, the last of her students comforted and tucked into bed, Mary McLeod Bethune continued to repeat the hymn to herself as she lay awake. She thanked God again and again for protecting her students and her school.
An Education and a Mission
Legend has it that Mary McLeod was born with her eyes wide open. “She’ll see things before they happen,” the midwife said as she handed the infant to her mother. Mary was the fifteenth of seventeen children born to former slaves Samuel and Patsy McLeod. Most of her siblings had been born into slavery, but by the time Mary came into the world, her parents were free. Her mother worked as a cook for her former master, and her father farmed cotton. They lived in a tiny log cabin near Mayesville, South Carolina.
Although she was born into freedom, Mary saw plenty of evil with her own young eyes. On a birthday trip to town one year she witnessed an angry crowd of white men lynch an innocent black man. She also suspected her father was routinely cheated when his cotton was ginned, baled, and weighed, but since she couldn’t read the numbers on the scales, she couldn’t prove it.
That all changed the year Mayesville’s Presbyterian Trinity Church opened a school for black children and Mary was allowed to attend. The next time she accompanied her father to the cotton gin, she was able to read, write, and calculate well enough to observe that the scales registered something different than the white man claimed. When she quietly corrected the overseer, noting that the scales read 480 pounds, rather than 280 pounds, he paused for a moment, looked Mary straight in the eye, and then agreed that he had made “a mistake.” It was a small victory but an important one to young Mary.
Nearly the whole town turned out to the Mayesville depot to see Mary off in 1887 when she departed for Scotia Seminary in North Carolina. She stayed at Scotia on full scholarship for five years and from there went directly to Chicago, where she was admitted to the Mission Training School at the renowned Moody Bible Institute. Of the approximately one thousand students at Moody, Mary was the only African American.
During her two years at Moody, Mary stayed focused on her goal: to serve as a missionary in Africa. But when the time came for her to apply to the mission board of the Presbyterian Church, she was bitterly disappointed with their answer: there were no openings for “Negro missionaries” in Africa.
Missionary to America
Mary wasn’t one to wallow in disappointment for long. Realizing that foreign missions work was out of the question, she refocused her attention on a new mission: the education of American black children. “Africans in America needed Christ and school just as much as Negroes in Africa. . . . My life work lay not in Africa, but in my own country,” she later acknowledged.2
Newly married, with an infant son of her own (her husband eventually abandoned the family and returned to South Carolina in 1907), Mary relocated her family to Florida, first to Palatka, where she ran a small school, and then to Daytona. With $1.50 as a down payment on a two-story rental building, Mary opened the Daytona Literary and Industrial School for Training Negro Girls in 1904. She had six female students, plus her own young son. Discarded boxes and packing crates from the nearby businesses were used as desks and chairs. Mary’s own seat at the head of the classroom was a barrel turned upside down.
At the end of a long day of teaching, Mary baked sweet potato pies to sell early the next morning on the construction lines in order to supplement the funds needed for the school. She also wrote leaflets that described the school’s mission to distribute on street corners in the business district, and she often went door-to-door in the evenings, fund-raising nickel by nickel and dollar by dollar.
Mary’s school for girls grew quickly. In just over two years, more than one hundred girls were enrolled, many of them boarders. She also taught adults in the evenings and held a Bible study on the weekends. When it was time to scout out a new, larger property to accommodate her growing student enrollment, Mary found the perfect spot: a lot adjacent to the town dump, on the fringe of the black neighborhood. Known by the locals as Hell’s Hole, the price for the lot was two hundred fifty dollars, far more than the five dollars Mary had in savings. Still, by then Mary had acquired a reputation for honesty and hard work, and the landlord took her at her word when she assured him she would raise the rest.
In addition to relentless fund-raising, Mary also established a board of trustees comprised of some of the area’s most upstanding white male citizens. She set her sights on James Gamble, co-founder of Procter and Gamble, who wintered one town over from Daytona. Upon meeting her in person, Gamble admitted that when Mary had written him, he assumed she was a white woman. But when he visited her classroom a few days later, he and four other guests were so impressed by what she had accomplished with so little that all five men agreed to serve on her board.
In October 1907 the Daytona Literary and Industrial School for Training Girls officially opened its brand-new building on the grounds of the former Hell’s Hole. Although Faith Hall was largely unfurnished and partially unfinished, with a dirt floor, unplastered walls, and no indoor plumbing, the school was up and running. Its motto was inscribed in two parts in the main hall: “Enter to learn” over the front door, and “Depart to serve” over the back door.
On Sundays, Mary hosted community meetings that were initially associated with the temperance movement and attended by blacks only. But as Mary’s popularity and fame grew, the audience was soon comprised of a mix of both blacks and whites. Conversation often centered on race relations, and guests were encouraged to sit wherever they wanted, a practice that was decidedly radical for the time. Mary never submitted to Florida’s rigid segregation laws; she simply invited all visitors, black or white, to sit wherever they pleased.
The Daytona girls’ school continued to grow, and by 1911 some of its first enrollees were doing high school work. When she suggested to the board that the school aim for secondary accreditation, Mary was met with strong opposition. The board believed eight grades were adequate for the education of black children. Mary, appalled that the board still did not understand her philosophy—that what was good for one was good for all—threatened to close the school and start anew elsewhere. Later that night, Mr. Gamble knocked on her door and insisted that as chairman of the board, he would support her no matter what.
In 1923 the girls’ school merged with the Cookman Institute for Men to become the coeducational Bethune-Cookman College. The college, which was one of the few places where African American students could pursue a college degree, is still in existence today, enrolling more than 3,500 students on an eighty-acre campus in Daytona Beach. Mary served as president of the college until she retired in 1942.
Milestones
You might assume the school provided more than enough work for Mary, but her influence was not limited to Florida. In fact, today she is best known for her work on the national level with the National Council of Negro Women, an organization Mary founded in 1935 to represent a number of groups working on critical issues for African American women. She also served as a special advisor on minority affairs to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and as director of the Division of Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration (NYA).
When Aubrey Williams, director of the NYA, first approached Mary to inform her that President Roosevelt had created a special position for her as administrator of the Division of Negro Affairs, Mary balked. Feeling overwhelmed and underqualified for a job of such magnitude, she refused to accept the offer until Williams insisted she was the only woman President Roosevelt wanted for the position. “Do you realize that this is the first time in the history of America that an administrative government office has been created for one of the Negro race?” he asked.3 Such a grand statement surely unnerved Mary further, but she accepted the challenge.
In 1936, as part of her effort to focus attention on racial inequality, she organized the Federal Council on Negro Affairs, which became known as the Black Cabinet. Comprised of African Americans who had been appointed to various government agencies, the group first met in August 1936 at Mary’s Washington, DC, apartment. They focused on how African Americans could be better represented in the administration and how they could best benefit from New Deal programs. “The responsibility rests on us,” Mary told the group. “We can get better results by thinking together and planning together. . . . Let us band together and work together as one big brotherhood and give momentum to the great ball that is starting to roll for Negroes.”4
It’s easy to look at Mary’s myriad accomplishments and forget the immense burden she shouldered as an African American woman who broke innumerable barriers. At times, Mary’s work at the national level was lonely and discouraging. At one point, after she overheard a disparaging comment from a white woman in attendance at one of the First Lady’s afternoon teas, Mary wrote in a journal, “I looked about me longingly for other dark faces. In all that great group I felt a sense of being quite alone.” A few sentences later, though, she acknowledged the importance of her role:
Then I thought how vitally important it was that I be here, to help these others get used to seeing us in high places. And so, while I sip tea in the brilliance of the White House, my heart reaches out to the delta land and the bottom land. I know so well why I must be here, must go to tea at the White house. To remind them always that we belong here, we are part of this America.5
Despite facing constant humiliation, Mary did not succumb to bitterness or hatred. “Love, not hate, has been the foundation of my fullness,” she wrote in her spiritual autobiography. “When hate has been projected toward me, I have known that the persons who extended it lacked spiritual understanding. . . . Faith and love have been the most glorious and victorious defense in this ‘warfare’ of life, and it has been my privilege to use them.”6
Two years before her death, Mary sat at her desk in her Florida home and penned her last will and testament. As she noted, her worldly possessions were few, but the principles she had derived from her life’s work were, in her words, the legacy she passed on to her people:
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 uses 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 finally a responsibility to our young people.7
“If I have a legacy to leave my people,” she stated in her last will and testament, “it is my philosophy of living and serving.”8 Mary McLeod Bethune lived that philosophy each day of her eighty years, and she left each one of us her legacy of living and serving to follow as well.