- ANTONE PIERUCCI
- Posted On
This Week in History: Honoring the work of Mary McLeod Bethune
If I were to ask you to list the three most important African American women of the 19th and 20th century, you likely wouldn’t come up with Mary McLeod Bethune.
She’s one of those historical figures that, although flashing brightly in her own lifetime, the imprint of her passing quickly faded away.
Bethune was part of that first generation of free African Americans. Born in 1875 in Mayesville, South Carolina, she was the 15th of 17 children; both of her parents had been born slaves.
She studied at the local Presbyterian church schools and grew up wanting to become a missionary. With this goal in mind, she applied to the Presbyterian Board in 1895 but found that they took no negroes.
Although this roadblock deterred her from her initial dreams, it awakened in her a fresh determination to alleviate the detriments of discriminatory educational practices. How, after all, were black boys and girls supposed to get ahead in life if they were barred from the basic avenues taken by other children?
Nine years later Bethune founded the Daytona Educational and Industrial Institute for Colored Girls.
For the entire life of the Institute, Bethune successfully garnered financial support from wealthy white patrons. The most famous of these were Thomas H. White of the White Sewing Machine Company and James Gamble of Proctor and Gamble, who both left significant trust funds to expand the school. By 1922, the Institute had grown to 300 girls and 25 staff members.
During the 1920 elections, Bethune and her all-women staff braved the threats from the local Ku Klux Klan to cast their votes. In 1923, Bethune’s school merged with the Cookman Institute for Boys and became a coeducational school. In 1943, the Bethune-Cookman Institute became a four-year liberal arts college.
The impact of Mary McLeod Bethune’s work went well beyond this single school. Starting in the 1890s, Bethune became deeply involved in the Progressive women’s clubs movements and in 1920, became the head of the Southeastern Association of Colored Women.
As chair of the association for five years, Bethune participated in the Southeastern Interracial Committee, which became the Colored Contingent at the Women’s General Committee of the Atlanta-based Commission on Interracial Cooperation.
During this same period, she served as the president of the National Association of Colored Women, or NACW. Throughout the 1920s, she sought to transform this loose collection of service organizations into a united organization at the regional, state and national level.
In 1928, she secured a national headquarters for the NACW in Washington, D.C. Her efforts to create a strong, national advocacy group that could tackle issues of racial equality were wasted on the NACW, however, whose more conservative members continued to focus only on local issues.
After a power struggle within the organization, Bethune left the NACW and at the end of 1935, she created the National Council of Negro Women and served as its president until 1949.
Perhaps Bethune’s most significant impact on national affairs came by way of her political connections to the Roosevelts. She had met Eleanor Roosevelt through clubwomen’s groups working on social tolerance, community uplift and other educational programs.
After FDR’s election in 1932, Bethune used her connections to organize the Federal Council on Negro Affairs, known unofficially as the Black Cabinet. During this period of political support, she helped sponsor national conferences on labor in 1937, 1938 and 1939.
She reached new heights of political influence when President Roosevelt appointed her the Director of Negro Affairs for the National Youth Administration on June 24, 1939. This appointment made Mary McLeod Bethune the first black woman to hold a major federal office.
Throughout the Roosevelt Presidency, Bethune had unprecedented access to the White House. The First Lady routinely referred to her as “her closest friend in her age group” and she wasn’t afraid to show it. When the President and First Lady attended the 1938 Southern Conference on Human Welfare held in Birmingham, Alabama, Mrs. Roosevelt requested a seat next to Mary, despite the state segregation laws.
Mary McLeod Bethune would go down as one of the most effective activists in the fight for racial equality – certainly the most effective in the first half of the 20th century.
Unfortunately, she would not live to see the tumultuous, yet vindicating decade of the 1960s. Bethune began to suffer health problems in the 1950s and died of a heart attack in 1955.
Although she might not have the name recognition of Harriet Tubman, Mary McLeod Bethune is the black woman most commemorated through historic preservation, with a total of four state and/or nationally-registered sites preserved in honor of her work, including buildings on the campus of the still-operating Bethune-Cookman University.
Antone Pierucci is curator of history at the Riverside County Park and Open Space District and a freelance writer whose work has been featured in such magazines as Archaeology and Wild West as well as regional California newspapers.