Mary McLeod Bethune

Early life

Mary McLeod was born on July 10, 1875, near Mayesville, South Carolina, the fifteenth of seventeen children of Samuel and Patsy McLeod. Her parents and several of her older siblings had been enslaved. She worked in the cotton fields as a child and was the only one of the McLeod children to receive a formal education.

She graduated from Scotia Seminary in North Carolina in 1894 and went on to Dwight Moody's Institute for Home and Foreign Missions in Chicago. When no church would sponsor her as a missionary, she turned to teaching. She married fellow teacher Albertus Bethune in 1898, and their son Albert was born the following year. The couple later separated.

Building a school

On October 3, 1904, Bethune opened the Daytona Literary and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls in Daytona Beach, Florida, starting, by the university's account, with $1.50 and five girls, plus her own son. The school grew steadily. Between 1923 and 1925 it merged with the Cookman Institute of Jacksonville, founded in 1872, to form Daytona-Cookman Collegiate Institute. It was renamed Bethune-Cookman College in 1931 and became Bethune-Cookman University in 2007.

National leadership

Bethune became one of the most prominent Black women in public life. After women won the vote in 1920 she led voter registration drives despite threats of violence. In 1924 she was elected president of the National Association of Colored Women. In 1935 she became founding president of the National Council of Negro Women, which held its first meeting at the 137th Street YMCA in New York City.

Her friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt, which began in 1927, opened doors in Washington. In 1936 she became director of Negro Affairs at the National Youth Administration, a post she held until 1944 and, according to the National Women's History Museum, the highest government position then held by an African American woman. She also became the de facto leader of Franklin Roosevelt's informal "Black Cabinet." The National Park Service notes that this group of Black advisers had no direct role in making policy.

Bethune served as a vice president of the NAACP from 1940, sat on the advisory board that created the Women's Army Corps in 1942, and pushed for it to be racially integrated. She helped found the United Negro College Fund. In 1945 President Harry Truman appointed her to the founding conference of the United Nations.

Legacy

Bethune died of a heart attack at her home on May 20, 1955. A memorial statue was unveiled in Washington, D.C., in 1974, and her Washington residence is now a National Historic Site. On July 13, 2022, she became the first African American represented by a state statue in the National Statuary Hall Collection at the U.S. Capitol.