The life of Mary McLeod Bethune seems almost too surreal to be believable. How could the daughter of sharecroppers born as Reconstruction was ending become the confidant of presidents and first ladies? How could an independent woman start a school for Black girls in Florida in 1904 with $1.50 in her pocket? How could her statue be placed in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall in 2022 as one of Florida’s two statues, and the only statue there of a Black woman? Her story is one of perseverance and hope, of how a humanities heroine can offer life lessons to all Floridians.
Bethune was born in Maysville, South Carolina, in 1875; the fifteenth child of seventeen born to formerly enslaved parents. Encouraged by her parents to get an education, she attended a local Black school and caught the attention of the school principal, who worked to get her to attend church affiliated schools in North Carolina and Illinois. Upon completion in 1895, Bethune worked as an educator and Methodist missionary in the Carolinas and Georgia, marrying a fellow teacher in 1898.
Searching for new opportunities, they (like so many others) moved to Florida and settled in Palatka. With her marriage failing and not finding Palatka a suitable place, she moved to Daytona Beach in 1904. There, she established the Daytona Normal and Industrial School for Negro Girls that same year, with an enrollment of five young girls. Under her tough but nurturing leadership, the school prospered and merged in 1923 with the Cookman Institute, the first college in Florida for African-American males. By 1931, with its campus remaining in Daytona Beach, the name was officially changed to Bethune-Cookman College (today, as Bethune-Cookman University, it remains in Daytona with an enrollment of approximately 2800 students). Not simply an educator, Bethune worked with the city of Daytona Beach to improve the lives of its Black residents, establishing the city’s first Black hospital in 1911 and opening her school’s library to the public, making it the first free library accessible to Black Floridians.
If Bethune had only established and then led this institution of learning, it would have been a remarkable achievement during the Jim Crow era. But Bethune did so much more. She advocated for the right of women to vote, leading voter registration drives for both Black and white women. She exercised that right in the presidential election of 1920, when she went to the polls and faced down the Ku Klux Klan, intent on not allowing a Black woman to vote. In 1924, she was elected president of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs and 11 years later became the founding president of the National Council of Negro Women, an umbrella organization designed to empower and support Black women. As part of that effort, Bethune organized the National Archives for Black Women’s History, collecting archival materials and photographs and housing them in her house in Washington D.C. (where she lived from 1943 until her death in 1955).
By the late 1920s, Bethune became heavily involved with politics as a means of achieving racial equality. Along with James Weldon Johnson, she pushed for anti-lynching legislation on the federal level. Bethune was instrumental in the movement of Black voters from the Republican to the Democratic party with the initiation of the New Deal in 1933. She became a leading advisor of President Franklin Roosevelt, serving as the only female member of his unofficial Black cabinet, which advised him on issues pertaining to African-American problems. In 1936, FDR appointed her to a position with the National Youth Administration, a New Deal agency. Within two years, she was promoted to lead its Division of Negro Affairs, making her the highest-ranking Black woman in the federal government. Maybe as important as these official positions was her close personal friendship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Being seen so often in the public company of Eleanor Roosevelt, she became a visible symbol of the accomplishments of Black women.
In 1949, Rollins College awarded Bethune an honorary Doctor of Humanities degree, marking the first time a white college in the South bestowed that honor to a Black person. It was only fitting that Rollins would do this, since Bethune had addressed the white student body there in 1931 and held them spellbound. With the awarding of that humanities degree, it is very appropriate that Mary McLeod Bethune is granted another humanities award, this time by Florida Humanities, for her service to the people, and especially the youth, of the state of Florida.
