Bethune, Mary McLeod

Impact on the world

Opened a school for African American girls in Daytona Beach, Florida in 1904 with five students, $1.50 in borrowed rent money, and furniture scavenged from trash piles and crate boxes, building it over decades into what became Bethune-Cookman University; in 1936 she became the first Black woman to lead a federal agency when President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed her to head the National Youth Administration's Division of Negro Affairs, and she went on to found the National Council of Negro Women and serve as the only African American woman on the official U.S. delegation that drafted the United Nations Charter.

Life & background

Born in Mayesville, South Carolina, the fifteenth of seventeen children and the first born free to formerly enslaved parents, Bethune could pick 250 pounds of cotton a day by age nine before a scholarship took her to Scotia Seminary and then Chicago's Moody Bible Institute, where she hoped to become a missionary in Africa, only to be told no missionary positions existed there for Black Americans; she resolved instead that her own country needed her work just as much. After teaching alongside trailblazing educator Lucy Craft Laney in Augusta, Georgia, and marrying fellow teacher Albertus Bethune, she opened the Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls in 1904, scavenging desks from crates and ink from elderberry juice while declaring that she considered money the smallest part of her available resources compared to faith and a desire to serve; the school grew to 250 students within two years and merged in 1923 with the all-male Cookman Institute to become Bethune-Cookman College. She served as the school's president until 1942, cultivating donors ranging from Black churches to white industrialists including a Procter & Gamble executive, while simultaneously building a parallel career as a civil rights and women's rights organizer, founding the National Council of Negro Women in 1935 and becoming, the following year, the first Black woman to head a division of a federal agency under President Roosevelt's National Youth Administration, where she organized the informal 'Black Cabinet' of African American federal officials advising the president on civil rights. She remained a close friend and advisor to Eleanor Roosevelt, was the only African American woman on the official delegation that helped draft the United Nations Charter, and her 1955 memorial in Washington's Lincoln Park became the first monument honoring either an African American or a woman ever installed in a public park in the District of Columbia.

Sources

1. National Women's History Museum; NMAAHC; Social Welfare History Project; EBSCO Research Starters; Learning to Give