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

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

At under six hundred words, Bethune’s remarks were appropriately brief for a radio audience. She begins by saying that for the nation’s twelve million blacks, democracy remained a goal, not something that had been fully achieved. (The total population then was just under 132 million.) She cites her Christian faith, which told her that African Americans were “rising out of the darkness of slavery into the light of freedom.” She points out that progress has been made; dramatically more African Americans were literate, and significant numbers owned and operated their own farms. She notes that blacks had moved from being “chattels”—that is, property—to full contributors to American culture. In the second paragraph she cites some prominent African American artists and intellectuals, including Paul Laurence Dunbar, perhaps the first black American poet to achieve national recognition; Booker T. Washington, the founder of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama; the singer Marian Anderson, who, with the backing of Eleanor Roosevelt, gave an open-air concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on Easter Sunday that year (having been refused access to Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution); and George Washington Carver, a scientist and educator who was a model of the kind of frugality and humanitarianism that Bethune preached as an educator.

In the third paragraph, Bethune points to some of the inequalities that remained. She notes, for example, that in the South black youth lacked the same educational opportunities afforded to white youth. An examination of spending patterns of that era shows that per-student budgets for black schools were actually worse than Bethune indicates: as little as one-twentieth of those for white schools. She also points out that blacks were often barred from labor unions and forced to accept the most poorly paid menial work. Additionally, blacks continued to be denied civil rights, including the right to vote. They too often lived in squalid housing, and they continued to fear the lynch mob.

In paragraph 4, Bethune acknowledges that the black community had sometimes been slow to assume the burdens of civic responsibility, but she notes, too, that it had done so because it had been denied full equality. Perhaps making reference to the growing threat of war, she asserts that “we have always been loyal when the ideals of American democracy have been attacked.” As an example she cites Crispus Attucks, a man of African and Native American descent who was slain in the Boston Massacre. And, in a reference to World War I, she comments that blacks had shed blood on the battlefields of France. Part of the fight, however, had been for civil liberties, particularly the right to vote. She alludes to the Declaration of Independence when she states, “We have fought to preserve one nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” According to Bethune, America had imperfections, yet African Americans always fought for what they knew the nation could become. She stresses this point in the final paragraph, where she looks forward to a time when blacks and whites could work shoulder to shoulder for “a new birth of freedom” in the hope “that government of the people, for the people and by the people shall not perish from the earth”—words of Abraham Lincoln from the Gettysburg Address of 1863.