MARY McLEOD BETHUNE
July 10, 1875, Mayesville, Sc Died May 18, 1955, Daytona Beach, Fl
Husband: Albertus Bethune
Bethune opened the first black hospital in Daytona, Florida. It started with two beds and, within a few years, held twenty. Both white and black physicians worked at the hospital, along with Bethune’s student nurses. This hospital went on to save many black lives within the twenty years that it operated
Organizations Bethune Founded: Bethune-Cookman University, National Council of Negro Women, and
co-founded the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) on April 25, 1944, with William J. Trent and Frederick D. Patterson. The UNCF is a program that gives many different scholarships, mentorships, and job opportunities to African American and other minority students attending any of the 37 historically black colleges and universities.
Education Summary: Scotia College from 1888 to 1893 Moody Bible Institute
was an American educator, philanthropist, humanitarian, womanist, and civil rights activist. Bethune founded the National Council of Negro Women in 1935, established the organization’s flagship journal Aframerican Women’s Journal, and presided as president or leader for a myriad of African American women’s organizations including the National Association for Colored Women and the National Youth Administration’s Negro Division.
She also was appointed as a national advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom she worked with to create the Federal Council on Colored Affairs, also known as the Black Cabinet. She is well-known for starting a private school for African-American students in Daytona Beach, Florida. It later continued to develop at Bethune-Cookman University. She was the sole African American woman officially a part of the US delegation that created the United Nations charter, and she held a leadership position for the American Women’s Voluntary Services founded by Alice Throckmorton McLean. For her lifetime of activism, she was deemed “acknowledged First Lady of Negro America” by Ebony magazine in July 1949 and was known by the Black Press as the “Female Booker T. Washington”. She was known as “The First Lady of The Struggle” because of her commitment to promoting better lives for African Americans.
She died on May 18, 1955, in Daytona Beach, Fl
Mary Jane McLeod was born in 1875 in a small log cabin near Mayesville, South Carolina, on a rice and cotton farm in Sumter County. She was the fifteenth of seventeen children born to Sam and Patsy McLeod, both former slaves. Most of her siblings had been born into slavery. Her mother worked for her former owner, and her father farmed cotton near a large house they called “The Homestead”.
Her parents wanted to be independent, so they sacrificed to buy a farm for the family. As a child, Mary used to accompany her mother to deliver “white people’s” wash. Allowed to go into the white children’s nursery, she became fascinated with their toys. One day she picked up a book, and as she opened it, a white child took it away from her, saying that she did not know how to read. Mary decided then that the only difference between white and colored people was the ability to read and write. She was inspired to learn.
McLeod attended Mayesville’s one-room black schoolhouse, Trinity Mission School, which was run by the Presbyterian Board of Missions of Freedmen. Going to and from the school, she walked five miles each day. She was the only child in her family to attend school, so she taught her family what she had learned each day. Her teacher, Emma Jane Wilson, became a significant mentor in her life.
McLeod had attended Scotia Seminary (now Barber–Scotia College). She helped McLeod attend the same school on a scholarship, which she did from 1888 to 1893. The following year, she attended Dwight L. Moody’s Institute for Home and Foreign Missions in Chicago (now the Moody Bible Institute), hoping to become a missionary in Africa. Told that black missionaries were not needed, she planned to teach, as education was a prime goal among African Americans.
McLeod married Albertus Bethune in 1898. They moved to Savannah, Georgia, where she did social work until the Bethunes moved to Florida. They had a son named Albert McLeod Bethune, Sr. Coyden Harold Uggams, a visiting Presbyterian minister, persuaded the couple to relocate to Palatka, Florida, to run a mission school. The Bethunes moved in 1899; Mary ran the mission school and began an outreach to prisoners. Albertus left the family in 1907; he never got a divorce but relocated to South Carolina. He died in 1918 from tuberculosis.
In the early 1900s, Daytona Beach, Florida, lacked a hospital that would help people of color. Bethune had the idea to start a hospital after an incident involving one of her students. She was called to the bedside of a young female student who fell ill with appendicitis. It was clear that the student needed immediate medical attention. Nevertheless, there was no local hospital to take her to that would treat black people. Bethune demanded that the white physician at the local hospital help the girl. When Bethune went to visit her student, she was asked to enter through the back door. At the hospital, she found that her student had been neglected, ill-cared for, and segregated in an outdoor hospital. She found a cabin near the school, and through sponsors helping her raise money, she purchased it for five thousand dollars. In 1911, Bethune opened the first black hospital in Daytona, Florida. It started with two beds and, within a few years, held twenty. Both white and black physicians worked at the hospital, along with Bethune’s student nurses. This hospital went on to save many black lives within the twenty years that it operated.
During that time, both black and white people in the community relied on help from the McLeod Hospital. After an explosion at a nearby construction site, the hospital took in injured black workers. The hospital and its nurses were also praised for their efforts during the 1918 influenza outbreak. During this outbreak, the hospital was full and had to overflow into the school’s auditorium. In 1931, Daytona’s public hospital, Halifax, agreed to open a separate hospital for people of color. Black people would not fully integrate into the public hospital’s main location until the 1960s.
After the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which enacted women’s suffrage, Bethune continued her efforts to help Black people gain access to the polls. She solicited donations to help Black voters pay poll taxes, provided tutoring for voter registration literacy tests at Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute, and planned a mass voter registration drive.
In 1896, the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) was formed to promote the needs of black women. Bethune served as the Florida chapter president of the NACW from 1917 to 1925. She worked to register black voters, which was resisted by white society and had been made almost impossible by various obstacles in Florida law and practices controlled by white administrators. She was threatened by members of the resurgent Ku Klux Klan in those years. Bethune also served as the president of the Southeastern Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs from 1920 to 1925, which worked to improve opportunities for black women.
She was elected as national president of the NACW in 1924. While the organization struggled to raise funds for regular operations, Bethune envisioned acquiring a headquarters and hiring a professional executive secretary; she implemented this when NACW bought a property at Vermont Avenue in Washington, D.C. She led it to be the first black-controlled organization with headquarters in the capital.
Gaining a national reputation, in 1928, Bethune was invited to attend the Child Welfare Conference called by Republican President Calvin Coolidge. In 1930 President Herbert Hoover appointed her to the White House Conference on Child Health
The Southeastern Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs (eventually renamed the Southeastern Association of Colored Women’s Clubs) elected Bethune as president after its first conference in 1920 at the Tuskegee Institute They intended to reach out to Southern women (specifically white women) for support and unity in gaining rights for black women. The women met in Memphis, Tennessee, to discuss interracial problems.
In many respects, all of the women agreed about what needed to be changed until they came to the topic of suffrage. The white women at the conference tried to strike down a resolution on black suffrage. The SACWC responded by issuing a pamphlet entitled Southern Negro Women and Race Co-Operation; it delineated their demands regarding conditions in domestic service, child welfare, conditions of travel, education, lynching, the public press, and voting rights.
The group went on to help register black women to vote after they were granted suffrage resulting from the passage of the constitutional amendment. However, in both Florida and other Southern states, black men and women experienced disenfranchisement by discriminatory application of literacy and comprehension tests and requirements to pay poll taxes, lengthy residency requirements, and governmental insistence upon keeping and displaying relevant records.
In 1931 the Methodist Church supported merging the Daytona Normal and Industrial School and the Cookman College for Men into Bethune-Cookman College, established first as a junior college. Bethune became a member of the church, but it was segregated in the South. Essentially two organizations operated in the Methodist denomination. Bethune was prominent in the primarily black Florida Conference. While she worked to integrate the mostly white Methodist Episcopal Church, she protested its initial plans for integration because they proposed separate jurisdictions based on race.
Bethune worked to educate both whites and blacks about the accomplishments and needs of black people, writing in 1938, If our people are to fight their way up out of bondage we must arm them with the sword and the shield and buckler of pride—belief in themselves and their possibilities, based upon a sure knowledge of the achievements of the past
A year later, she wrote, Not only the Negro child but children of all races should read and know of the achievements, accomplishments, and deeds of the Negro. World peace and brotherhood are based on a common understanding of the contributions and cultures of all races and creeds.
On Sundays, she opened her school to tourists in Daytona Beach, showing off her students’ accomplishments, hosting national speakers on black issues, and taking donations. She ensured that these Community Meetings were integrated. A black teenager in Daytona at the time later recalled: “Many tourists attended, sitting wherever there were empty seats. There was no special section for white people.”
When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional, Bethune defended the decision by writing in the Chicago Defender that year:
Bethune organized the first officer candidate schools for black women. She lobbied federal officials, including Roosevelt, on behalf of African-American women who wanted to join the military.
She co-founded the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) on April 25, 1944, with William J. Trent and Frederick D. Patterson. The UNCF is a program that gives many different scholarships, mentorships, and job opportunities to African American and other minority students attending any of the 37 historically black colleges and universities. Trent had joined Patterson and Bethune in raising money for UNCF. The organization started in 1944 and by 1964, Trent had raised over $50 million.
On May 18, 1955, Bethune died of a heart attack. Her death was followed by editorial tributes in African-American newspapers across the United States. The Oklahoma City Black Dispatch stated she was “Exhibit No. 1 for all who have faith in America and the democratic process.” The Atlanta Daily World said her life was “One of the most dramatic careers ever enacted at any time upon the stage of human activity.” Moreover, the Pittsburgh Courier wrote, “In any race or nation she would have been an outstanding personality and made a noteworthy contribution because her chief attribute was her indomitable soul.”
The mainstream press praised her as well. Christian Century suggested, “The story of her life should be taught to every school child for generations to come.” The New York Times noted she was “one of the most potent factors in the growth of interracial goodwill in America.” The Washington Post said: “So great were her dynamism and force that it was almost impossible to resist her … Not only her own people but all America has been enriched and ennobled by her courageous, ebullient spirit.” Her hometown newspaper, the Daytona Beach Evening News printed, “To some, she seemed unreal, something that could not be. … What right had she to greatness? … The lesson of Mrs. Bethune’s life is that genius knows no racial barriers.”McLeod Bethune is buried in Daytona Beach, Florida.
legacy
In 1930, journalist Ida Tarbell included Bethune as number 10 on her list of America’s greatest women.
Bethune was awarded the Spingarn Medal in 1935 by the NAACP.
In the 1940s, Bethune used her influence and friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt to secure luxury travel buses for Eddie Durham’s All-Star Girls Orchestra, an African-American, all-women’s swing band.
Bethune was the only black woman present at the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945, representing the NAACP with W. E. B. Du Bois and Walter White. In 1949, she became the first woman to receive the National Order of Honour and Merit, Haiti’s highest award.
She served as the U.S. emissary to the induction of President William V.S. Tubman of Liberia in 1949. She also has had essays written about her.
She also served as an adviser to five of the presidents of the United States. Calvin Coolidge and Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed her to several government positions, which included: Special Advisor in Minority Affairs, director of the Division of Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration, and chair of the Federal Council of Negro Affairs. Among her honors, she was an assistant director of the Women’s Army Corps. She was also an honorary member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority.
In 1973, Bethune was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. On July 10, 1974, the anniversary of her 99th birthday, the Mary McLeod Bethune Memorial, by artist Robert Berks, was erected in her honor in Lincoln Park (Washington, D.C.). It was the first monument honoring an African American or a woman to be installed in a public park in the District of Columbia.
At least 18,000 people attended the unveiling ceremony, although one estimate claims that approximately 250,000 people attended, including Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American woman elected to Congress.[69] The funds for the monument were raised by the National Council of Negro Women. The inscription on the pedestal reads “Let her works praise her” (a biblical reference to Proverbs 31:31), while the side is engraved with a passage from her “Last Will and Testament”:
“I leave you to love. I leave you to hope. I leave you the challenge of developing confidence in one another. I leave you with a thirst for education. I leave you a respect for the use of power. I leave your 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.”
In 1985, the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp in Bethune’s honor. In 1989 Ebony magazine listed her as one of the “50 Most Important Figures in Black American History”. In 1999, Ebony included her as one of the “100 Most Fascinating Black Women of the 20th Century”. In 1991, the International Astronomical Union named a crater on the planet Venus in her honor.
In 1994, the National Park Service acquired Bethune’s last residence, the NACW Council House at 1318 Vermont Avenue. The former headquarters was designated as the Mary McLeod Bethune Council House National Historic Site.
Schools have been named in her honor in Los Angeles, Chicago, San Diego, Dallas, Phoenix, Palm Beach, Florida, Moreno Valley, California, Minneapolis, Ft. Lauderdale, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Folkston and College Park, Georgia, New Orleans, Rochester, New York, Cleveland, South Boston, Virginia, Jacksonville, Florida, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Bethune on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.
In 2004, Bethune-Cookman University celebrated its hundredth anniversary of its founding as a primary school. The former 2nd Avenue on one side of the university was renamed Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard. The university’s website says, “The vision of the founder remains in full view over one-hundred years later. The institution prevails in order that others might improve their heads, hearts, and hands.”[76] The university’s vice president recalled her legacy: “During Mrs. Bethune’s time, this was the only place in the city of Daytona Beach where Whites and Blacks could sit in the same room and enjoy what she called ‘gems from students’—their recitations and songs. This is a person who was able to bring Black people and White together.”
An historical marker in Mayesville, Sumter County, South Carolina, commemorates her birthplace.[78]
The Legislature of Florida in 2018 designated her as the subject of one of Florida’s two statues in the National Statuary Hall Collection, replacing Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith.
The Mary McLeod Bethune Scholarship Program, for Floridian students wishing to attend historically black colleges and universities within the state, is named in her honor.
A statue of Bethune in Jersey City, New Jersey, was dedicated in 2021 in a namesake park across the street from the Mary McLeod Bethune Life Center.
A statue of Mary McLeod Bethune was unveiled on July 13, 2022, in the United States Capitol, making her the first black American represented in the National Statuary Hall Collection.
Schools named in her Honor
California
Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune Middle School, Los Angeles, California
Mary McLeod Bethune Elementary School Moreno Valley, California
Florida
Bethune Academy, formally known as Bethune Elementary – Haines City, Florida
Bethune-Cookman University, Daytona Beach, Florida
Mary M. Bethune Elementary School, Hollywood, Florida
Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune Elementary School, Riviera Beach, Florida
Georgia
Mary McLeod Bethune Middle School, Decatur, Georgia
Louisiana
Mary McLeod Bethune Elementary School, New Orleans, Louisiana Mary M. Bethune High School, Norco, Louisiana (closed when schools integrated)
Michigan
Mary McLeod Bethune Elementary-Middle School, Detroit, Michigan
Minnesota
Mary McLeod Bethune Community School, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Missouri
Mary Bethune School for Black Children, Weston, Missouri
Mississippi
Mary Bethune Alternative School, Hattiesburg, Mississippi
New York
Mary McLeod Bethune School No. 45, Rochester, New York
Ohio
Mary McLeod Bethune K–8, Cleveland, Ohio
Pennsylvania
Mary McLeod Bethune School, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
South Carolina
Bethune Bowman Middle High School, Rowesville, South Carolina
Texas
Bethune Academy (now merged with Anderson Academy), Houston, Texas[86]
Mary McLeod Bethune Elementary School, Dallas, Texas
Virginia
Mary M. Bethune High School, Halifax, Virginia (converted into an office complex for the local government following integration)