Mary McLeod Bethune

The cabin she was born in stood on five acres her mother had bought from the woman who once owned her, and her father and brothers had built it. She was the fifteenth of 17 children. In a white family's house she picked up a book and a girl told her to put it down, she could not read. At 12 she watched a mob come close to hanging a Black man over a match. From October 1886 she walked five miles each way to Emma Jane Wilson's one-room mission school and came home to teach her brothers and sisters what she had heard. Scotia Seminary took her on scholarship, then Dwight Moody's institute in Chicago. She applied to be sent to Africa as a missionary. The Presbyterians said no.

In October 1904 she rented a Daytona house for 11 dollars a month and opened a school with six pupils, five girls and her son. Tuition was 50 cents. Desks were packing crates, ink elderberry juice, pencils burnt wood, and the lot backed onto the city dump. She sold sweet potato pies and ice cream to work crews until she could buy more dump land, then paid builders partly in tuition. Within two years, 250 girls enrolled. A 1920s merger made it Bethune-Cookman. From that base she built the National Council of Negro Women out of 28 organizations in 1935, took the National Youth Administration's Division of Negro Affairs in 1936, the first Black woman to head a federal division, co-founded the United Negro College Fund in 1944, and sat in the delegation that wrote the UN charter in 1945.

The school ran on white money and she never pretended otherwise. She put James Gamble of Procter and Gamble, the carmaker Ransom Olds and the sewing machine man Thomas White on her board of trustees, and Booker T. Washington coached her in 1912 on holding such men. John D. Rockefeller gave 62,000 dollars. She opened the campus to tourists on Sundays with no white section, which Florida law forbade. She registered Black voters and the Klan threatened her for it. When a white neighbor came at her students with a rifle she worked on him until he offered to defend her. Robert Weaver, who sat with her in Franklin Roosevelt's Black Cabinet, named the method: she could perform helplessness to get what she wanted, with a ruthlessness he called masculine. Her husband had walked out in 1907. They never divorced.

She died in Daytona Beach in May 1955 and is buried on the campus she built. Her Last Will and Testament left love, hope, a thirst for education, and racial dignity. On what would have been her 99th birthday in 1974 a bronze went up in Washington's Lincoln Park, the first monument in a District park to a Black American or a woman, and the Emancipation Memorial, facing the Capitol since 1876, was turned around to face her. In June 2020 protesters demanded that statue come down. The Boston copy did. The Washington one stayed, and she is still facing it. In July 2022 Florida sent her likeness in marble to Statuary Hall, replacing the Confederate general Edmund Kirby Smith.

Mary McLeod Bethune's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls company
  Six pupils, 50-cent tuition, crates for desks, on the edge of the Daytona dump 1904
• Daytona school library building
  Florida's first free library open to Black readers 1905
• National Council of Negro Women company
  Built out of 28 existing organizations 1935
• Federal Council of Negro Affairs company
  The group better known as Roosevelt's Black Cabinet 1936
• United Negro College Fund company
  Co-founded April 25 with Frederick Patterson and William Trent 1944
• Last Will and Testament article
  I leave you love, I leave you hope, I leave you racial dignity 1955

• October 1886 aged 11 Starts walking five miles each way to Trinity Mission School Emma Jane Wilson's one-room school, run by the Presbyterian Board of Missions for Freedmen.
• 1895 aged ~20 The Presbyterians reject her application to be a missionary in Africa She taught at Haines Institute in Augusta, Georgia, instead.
• October 1904 aged 29 Opens a school in a rented Daytona house for 11 dollars a month Six pupils, five girls and her son Albert.
• 1912 aged ~37 Booker T. Washington visits and advises her on courting white benefactors
• 1920 aged ~45 Opens Sunday meetings to tourists with no separate white section Florida law forbade interracial meetings. She ignored it.
• 1935 aged ~60 Founds the National Council of Negro Women Twenty-eight organizations under one roof. She also took the NAACP's Spingarn Medal that year.
• 1936 aged ~61 Takes the National Youth Administration's Division of Negro Affairs The first Black woman to head a division of a federal agency.
• 1945 aged ~70 Sits in the US delegation at the founding of the United Nations The only Black woman there, alongside W. E. B. Du Bois and Walter White for the NAACP.
• May 18, 1955 aged 79 Dies of a heart attack in Daytona Beach

• Eleanor Roosevelt 1884–1962
  First Lady and human rights advocate who chaired the UN committee that drafted the Universal Declaration. ally and defender
• Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945
  32nd President who led the nation through the Great Depression and most of World War II. appointed by
• Booker T. Washington 1856–1915
  Educator and founder of Tuskegee Institute who advocated for vocational training for African Americans. advised by
• W.E.B. Du Bois 1868–1963
  Sociologist, historian, and civil rights activist who was the first African American to earn a Harvard doctorate. fellow delegate at the UN founding
• Ida B. Wells 1862–1931
  Journalist and anti-lynching crusader whose investigative reporting exposed racial terror in the South. earlier in the same fight
• Ella Baker 1903–1986
  Grassroots organizer who helped found the SNCC and shaped the civil rights movement behind the scenes. successor movement