Mary McLeod Bethune

Mary McLeod Bethune was born, on July 10, 1875, in Mayesville, South Carolina. She was the fifteenth out of seventeen children, but the most successful. Her parents were slaves and they considered education to be very important. She entered the local Presbyterian Mission School for Negroes. With the help of scholarships, part-time jobs, and familial sacrifice she was able to attend, from 1888 to 1894, Scotia Seminary (now Barber-Scotia College) in Concord, North Carolina. Aspiring to work as a missionary in Africa, she studied at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, graduating in 1895. The Presbyterian Mission Board, however, turned down her application for a missionary post. She returned to the south where she secured a series of teaching positions in Georgia and South Carolina. She married Albertus Bethune and bore a son in 1899. Afterwards, Albertus Bethune died.

Bethune settled in Daytona, Florida, where she founded, in October 1904, the Daytona Literary and Industrial School for Training Negro Girls. In 1923, however, she agreed to merge with Cookman Institute, a Methodist school for Negro boys, forming the Bethune-Cookman College.

Bethune s pioneering work in black education earned national acclaim. In many respects she was as difficult a fund-raiser as Booker T. Washington. Like him she adhered to an educational philosophy that stressed teacher preparation, industrial training and domestic arts, good manners, and Christian virtue. She soon attracted the attention of white political leaders, serving as adviser on black education and racial affairs in the Coolidge administration. From 1936 to 1945, under the New Deal's National Youth Administration, Bethune served as director of the Division of Negro Affairs. She well understood the need for blacks to marshal political power and acquire advanced education as strategies in the ongoing struggle for equal rights.

In 1935 she founded and served as president, until 1949, of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) the largest and most spread federation of black women's organizations. The NCNW proposed to collect, interpret, and disseminate information concerning the activities of black women. The leaders also desired "to develop competent and courageous leadership among Negro women and effect their integration and that of all Negro people into the ... life of their communities." To work toward these ends, NCNW leaders founded the Aframerican Woman's Journal. It was dedicated to achieving "the outlawing of the Poll Tax, the development of a Public Health Program, an Anti-lynching Bill, the end of discrimination in the Armed Forces, Defense Plants, Government Housing Plants, and finally that Negro History can be taught in the Public Schools of the country.

Mary McLeod Bethune died on, May 18,1955, in Daytona Beach, Florida. She is a pivotal figure in twentieth-century black women's history. Her life and work formed a major link connecting the social reform efforts of post-Reconstruction black women to the political protest activities of the generation emerging after World War II.