BETHUNE, MARY MCLEOD

Born to former slaves on a rice and cotton farm near Mayesville, South Carolina, Mary Jane McLeod (July 10, 1875–May 18, 1955) was the fifteenth of seventeen children. Instilled with the belief that God did not discriminate and that she could "achieve whatever was worth achieving," she progressed through various Christian schools and, choosing to be a missionary, enrolled in Dwight Moody's Institute for Home and Foreign Missions, graduating in 1895.

When her application for a missionary post was rejected, McLeod returned to the South to teach. In Sumter, South Carolina, in 1898, she met and married Albertus Bethune, and bore a son, Albert, in 1899. Five years later, with "a dollar and a half, and faith in God," she started the Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls in Florida. Stressing vocational education, the school grew gradually, and in 1923 Bethune agreed to merge her 315 students and twenty-five faculty and staff members with Cookman Institute, a Methodist school for African-American boys, creating the Bethune-Cookman College.

Bethune gained national acclaim as an educator, and served on presidential commissions for Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. She also served two terms as president of the National Association of Colored Women (1924–1928), and, in 1935, founded and became president of the National Council of Negro Women—a broad coalition of organizations that she headed until 1949. Dedicated to developing female black leaders and to the integration of African Americans in all walks of life, the National Council of Negro Women campaigned against lynching and the poll tax, pushed for the inclusion of African-American history in public school curriculums, and protested racial discrimination in the armed forces and defense industry during World War II. Bethune made a special effort to get African-American officers into the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps.

A personal friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, who supported her reform agenda, Bethune was appointed to the National Advisory Committee of the newly formed National Youth Administration (NYA) in 1935. The following year she became administrative assistant in charge of Negro affairs of the NYA, and in 1939 the director of the NYA's Division of Negro Affairs. As such, she was the first African-American woman to head a federal agency. Her goal was to gain African Americans equal participation, and equal pay, in NYA programs. Only partially successful, Bethune did get the NYA to eventually enroll black youths in numbers approximating their proportion of the national population, but not in proportion to their need for assistance.

At the same time, Bethune helped organize the Federal Council on Negro Affairs, an informal group of African-American federal officials popularly known as the Black Cabinet. It sought to secure increased benefits for African Americans from the federal government, as well as to increase the number of blacks serving in New Deal agencies. While she publicly acknowledged the benefits that the New Deal brought to blacks, Bethune often met privately with President Franklin Roosevelt to criticize the administration for not doing enough to aid African Americans.

After World War II, President Harry Truman appointed Bethune as a consultant to the U.S. delegation to the United Nations, and as his personal representative at the presidential inauguration of William Tubman in Liberia in 1952. Bethune died of a heart attack at her home in Daytona Beach, Florida, in 1955. The recipient of many awards and tributes, including a dozen honorary degrees and the Spingarn Medal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Bethune became the first woman and the first African American to be honored with a statue in a public park in Washington, D.C.

BETHUNE, MARY MCLEOD

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