Profiles in Character #21: Mary McLeod Bethune’s Thirst for Learning

A statue of Mary McLeod Bethune sits near the U.S. Capitol in Lincoln Park.  She is handing a copy of her legacy to two young black children and the inscription on its base includes words from her “Last Will and Testament,” including “I leave a thirst for education.”  This first monument on public land in the nation’s capital to an African American and a woman faces the Freedman’s Memorial honoring Abraham Lincoln.  A slave whose chains are broken kneels beside the martyred president.  The juxtaposition of these memorials is fitting. Mary McLeod Bethune became the embodiment of the hope of emancipation and the full realization of human capacity, a cause to which she dedicated her life.

Her parents were born enslaved, but in 1875 she was born free.  She shared a small cabin near Mayesville, South Carolina with them and 16 siblings.  Legal emancipation, however, meant only eking out a sharecropper’s existence. Her father grew cotton and her mother washed for local white women.  In time they owned a small plot of land, but poverty for Mary still meant working in the fields and carrying baskets of others’ clean clothes. 

At 11, still illiterate she hungered to learn. As she picked up a book in the nursery of a white woman her mother served, the woman’s child grabbed it away, telling Mary she didn’t know how to read anyway.  Concluding that the ability to read is what separated white and black children, she became the only member of her family who went to school, walking three miles to a one-room mission schoolhouse for black children.  Her teacher helped her get a scholarship to Scotia Seminary in North Carolina.  It was the first time she encountered a brick building and learned to use a fork.  At 20, her benefactor paid her way to (what is now) Chicago’s Moody Bible Institute where she was the sole black student.  At graduation, however, her goal of becoming a missionary to help her race was thwarted when she was told they would not send a black missionary to Africa.

Undaunted, she returned to Mayesville and taught briefly at the school she had left, but a school of her own flourished in her mind.  It would be a school for black girls, focused on what she would later call “vocational braining – not only the technique of actual work, but intelligent comprehension of duties as a citizen and the ability to partake of the higher spiritual life of this world.”

After stints in other schools and marriage, she decided to pursue her dream in the growing town of Daytona, Florida. With just $1.50, she packed up her young son (her husband declined to join her) and set off.  With just five students, she opened her school in an unoccupied house on the edge of “colored town.” After morning classes, she baked and sold sweet potato pies, raising money for rent and supplies while she searched for benefactors essential to realize the fullness of her dreams.  “I begged strangers for a lamp . . . I hunted the dump heap and the trash piles behind hotels . . . Everything was scoured and mended” she would recall, to build her school.  Her motto “Enter to learn; depart to serve” and her faith in God sustained her.

Within a year, her school had more than 30 students and the curriculum included science, business and foreign languages. By 1911, prosperous donors had taken notice and Faith Hall, a four-story frame classroom and dormitory was built.  That same year she opened the first black hospital in Daytona, which grew from 2 to 20 beds in a few years.  By 1931, her renown led to merger with an all-boys institution to create Bethune-Cookman College (today, a university). 

Mary McLeod Bethune would always call Daytona and her school home, but her work grew to encompass campaigns for voting rights, the empowerment of women and the destruction of segregation.  She founded the National Council of Negro Women in 1935, become a confidant first of Eleanor Roosevelt and then the president, who appointed her Director of the Division of Negro Affairs in the National Youth Administration.  In 1945 she founded the United Negro College Fund and in that same year was the only black woman at the founding of the United Nations. 

Dr. Robert Weaver, who served with her in FDR’s “Black Cabinet,” said “She had the most marvelous gift if effecting feminine helplessness in order to attain her aims with masculine ruthlessness.”  Born just a decade after slavery, rising from poverty to international acclaim, she had demonstrated by her determination, courage and hard work what the fruits of freedom offered.

On July 13, Mary McLeod-Bethune’s statue will take its place in Statuary Hall of the U.S. Capitol as one of the two allowed the State of Florida, which in 2018 chose her to replace an existing statue of a Confederate general.  At the base of the statue are her words, describing her hope as well as her journey: “Invest in the human soul.  Who knows, it may be a diamond in the rough.”

Photo Credit: flickr.com