Mary McLeod Bethune: “What Does American Democracy Mean to Me?”

About the Author

Mary Jane McLeod was born near Mayesville, South Carolina, on July 10, 1875. She was the fifteenth of seventeen children born to Samuel and Patsy McLeod, both former slaves; most of her siblings had been born into slavery. Her mother worked for her former owner, while her father worked on a nearby cotton plantation. From an early age, Mary exhibited a desire to learn to read and go to school. One of her earliest formative experiences was an encounter with a white girl who commanded her, “Put down that book. You can’t read.” Determined to prove the girl wrong, she enrolled at the one-room Trinity Mission School, run by the Presbyterian Church, when it opened. At the urging of her teacher, she enrolled at Scotia Seminary (now Barber-Scotia College) in Concord, North Carolina, in 1888. After completing her degree in 1894, McLeod moved to Chicago to attend Dwight Moody’s Institute for Home and Foreign Missions (now Moody Bible College). Her earliest goal was to become a missionary in Africa, but after being told that there was no call for black missionaries there, she decided to embark on a teaching career, which included stints at the school she had attended as a child; at the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute in Augusta, Georgia; and at the Kindell Institute in Sumter, South Carolina. In 1898 she married Albertus Bethune, who left her in 1907 and died in 1918.

In 1899 Bethune was persuaded to relocate to Florida to run a mission school. During this time she supplemented her income by selling life insurance. But in 1904 she launched efforts to establish her own school for girls. She rented a house (for ten dollars a month), gathered discarded and donated materials, built desks out of old packing crates, and formed the Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls in Daytona Beach, initially with six students and cash on hand of one dollar and fifty cents. She continued to scrounge for donations, securing a substantial grant from the industrialist John D. Rockefeller, and she persuaded prominent white men in the bustling economic climate of Daytona Beach to sit on the school’s board of directors. The school had over a hundred students by 1910 and more than three hundred by 1920. In 1923 the school, now called the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute for Negro Girls, completed the process of merging with the Cookman Institute for Men of Jacksonville to become the Daytona-Cookman Collegiate Institute. In 1929 the coeducational institution was renamed Bethune-Cookman College. Bethune served as president of the college until 1942. As of the twenty-first century, the school, which achieved university status in 2007, has some four thousand students on a seventy-acre campus and an operating budget of $50 million.

Bethune’s career continued to evolve after the establishment of Bethune-Cookman College. From 1917 to 1925 she served as the Florida chapter president of the National Association of Colored Women, using her position to register black voters. She also served as the president of the Southeastern Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs from 1920 to 1925. With these positions on her résumé, she was named national president of the National Association of Colored Women in 1924. Then, in 1935, Bethune founded the National Council of Negro Women in New York City. The council brought together twenty-eight organizations to form a united voice that would work to improve the quality of life for women and their communities. In 1936 Bethune earned a position in the National Youth Administration, a New Deal agency in Franklin Roosevelt’s administration whose goal was to increase educational and occupational opportunities for young people. Two years later, in 1938, she was appointed director of the administration’s Division of Negro Affairs, making her the first black woman to head a federal agency. Also that year, Bethune’s National Council of Negro Women played host to the White House Conference on Negro Women and Children. The goal of the conference was to highlight the democratic roles of black women, which would later include providing opportunities for black women as officers in the Women’s Army Corps during World War II.

Bethune was a close friend to President Franklin Roosevelt and, particularly, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. This friendship gave her access to the White House, and she used that access to help form the Federal Council on Negro Affairs, commonly known as the Black Cabinet. This was an informal group made up primarily of a number of prominent African Americans who worked in various federal government agencies. The Black Cabinet’s role was to function in an advisory capacity, keeping the administration informed about the concerns of black Americans while at the same time demonstrating to African American voters that the Roosevelt administration heard those concerns. Late in her life Bethune wrote weekly editorial columns for black newspapers such as the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier.

Bethune was known almost as much for her personal manner as for her achievements. On the Black Cabinet she was referred to affectionately as “Ma Bethune.” A matronly figure even in her thirties, she took to walking with a cane not because she needed it but because, she said, it gave her “swank.” She was a teetotaler—one who does not consume alcohol—and often approached drunken men in the street to chastise them. Her peers said that she was able to assume a kind of feminine helplessness that concealed a ruthlessness about getting what she wanted. She also possessed an uncanny knack for bringing blacks and whites together. One noteworthy example was her investment in a stretch of private beach in Daytona Beach, where blacks—barred from other beaches—mingled with whites.

Bethune was the recipient of numerous honors, including the Spingarn Medal, an award given by the NAACP for outstanding achievement. She was the only black woman present at the founding of the United Nations in 1948, co-representing the NAACP. After her death on May 18, 1955, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1973. Numerous schools throughout the United States are named in her honor.