Mary McLeod Bethune a trailblazer for civil rights, education and racial harmony
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – Patsy and Samuel McLeod knew the cruelty and harsh realities for Black people in the Civil War-era South.
When the former slaves' 15th child was born in 1875, they undoubtedly hoped their baby girl Mary would live a purely free life, have the chances they never did to get an education and one day be a wife and mother.
From the 19th-century view on their small South Carolina rice and cotton farm, never could they have imagined what was ahead for the person the world would come to know as Mary McLeod Bethune after she married in 1898.
She started a fledgling school for girls that evolved into Bethune-Cookman University. Her quest for civil rights and women's rights to vote took her to Washington, D.C., where she became the only African American woman to help the U.S. delegation that created the United Nations charter.
She created the National Council of Negro Women, directed the Office of Minority Affairs in the National Youth Administration, and became a general in the Women's Army for the National Defense.
She became an adviser to four U.S. presidents, including Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Leonard Lempel, a retired history professor who taught at Bethune-Cookman University from 1980 to 1996, said it wouldn't be a reach to consider Bethune "the mother of the civil rights movement."
"She set the stage in the 1930s. She sparked it," said Lempel, who also taught history at Daytona State College in Florida from 1996 to 2015. "I think Mary McLeod Bethune was one of the key figures in launching the modern civil rights movement through her activism, her political skills and her ability to convince the Roosevelt administration to do things. The civil rights movement really began in the Great Depression with the New Deal."
Bethune gets a seat at the table
Roosevelt used the New Deal to give Black people middle-management jobs and a voice, Lempel said. Roosevelt also created what came to be known as the Black Cabinet, and Bethune was a leader of that body.
The Black Cabinet was made up of an unofficial group of advisers who met in Bethune's home in Washington. Combined with her official positions in the nation's capital, Bethune held some sway.
"It was a big deal then for Blacks to have any influence," Lempel said.
He said Bethune groomed herself to become a leader by starting various organizations for women and Black people.
Bethune originally wanted to be a missionary in Africa, but she was turned down because she was Black. She eventually let go of her dream of being a missionary abroad, but she wound up becoming a missionary of sorts for Daytona Beach and eventually for Black people nationwide.
In 1904 she decided to start a school for girls in Daytona Beach. She rented a small house for $11 a month in the only part of town where Black people could live, run businesses, worship and go to school.
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She made benches and desks from discarded crates, pencils from burned wood and ink from elderberry juice. The Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls site bordered Daytona Beach's trash dump, so Bethune raised money selling sweet potato pies, ice cream and fried fish to crews at the dump.
She went on to do much more for Daytona Beach, including opening a hospital for Black people, securing oceanfront land so Blacks could go to the beach, and persuading city leaders to build sidewalks and create a city-funded Black police force for the Black neighborhood.
She also stood up to the Ku Klux Klan when they marched onto her campus, bravely coming outside and refusing to budge when they approached.
Lempel said two gifts Bethune left behind were self-respect for Black people, and a place for them to get a college degree, which together allowed a Black middle class to form in Daytona Beach. Bethune also trained women to vote when they gained that right for the first time in 1920, he said.
"She was very practical and able to compromise," Lempel said. "She was criticized for not asking for more, but she knew the limits of how far to push. If she challenged segregation, she would have been lynched. She worked within the system."
'Way ahead of her time'
Abel Bartley, a professor of African American history at Clemson University, said Bethune was one of the rare female Black civil rights activists of the 20th century.
"She embodied the hopes and the wishes Blacks had for that period," said Bartley, a native of Jacksonville. "She knew how to articulate that in ways that did not offend the white South."
He said she was "way ahead of her time" and had an incredible level of courage. She pushed the limits of what a Black woman of her generation could accomplish and was successful perhaps because people underestimated her and didn't push back, Bartley said.
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She also understood the minds of elite white people, he said. Over and over, she was able to persuade wealthy white people to help in her efforts.
One of Bethune's biggest legacies, Bartley said, is the tens of thousands of students who attended the schools she started for young girls, high-schoolers and college students. Those pupils have gone on to become ministers, attorneys, nurses, teachers, government officials and law enforcement officers.
Lasting legacies
"Mary McLeod Bethune is my shero," said Sheila Flemming-Hunter, an adjunct history professor at Clark Atlanta University who wrote a book on Bethune-Cookman College. "She was a Renaissance woman."
Bethune did everything from selling life insurance to Black people in the 1930s and 1940s to establishing a hospital in Daytona Beach's historically Black Midtown neighborhood that operated until the late 1950s.
She said Bethune left educational, economic, political, religious and spiritual legacies. The force of all that is still being felt today in the institutions Bethune founded and worked with, said Flemming-Hunter, an early 1970s graduate of Bethune-Cookman College, which is now a university.
The National Council of Negro Women, for example, still exists and encourages Black women's political participation, she said.
Bethune-Cookman University has become a major employer in Daytona Beach, creating an economic impact on the city for decades, said Flemming-Hunter, who has been a professor and held high-level administrative positions at Bethune-Cookman University, the University of Texas, the University of Maryland and Clark Atlanta University.
'Can't get enough of Bethune's story'
Bethune improved racial tolerance in Daytona Beach during an era when there was very little throughout the South, said Mayor Derrick Henry.
"Mary McLeod Bethune has an unrivaled place in our history," Henry said. "She is on Daytona Beach's Mount Rushmore."
There is no large rock formation anywhere with Bethune's face on it to celebrate the trailblazer, who died in 1955. But there are two new statues of Bethune created in an artists' studio in Italy.
If all goes as hoped, a bronze sculpture of Bethune will be permanently placed in Daytona Beach's Riverfront Park in May or June, and a marble sculpture honoring Bethune will move into National Statuary Hall inside the U.S. Capitol in Washington in May.
After the statues were completed last year, the marble statue was shipped to Daytona Beach, where more than 10,000 people were able to see it during a temporary display inside the News-Journal Center.
A group of Daytona Beach leaders shepherded the years-long effort to get the two sculptures created and placed. The marble statue will be the first in Statuary Hall's state collection to honor an African American, male or female.
Henry said people "can't get enough of Bethune's story" because it "resonates with who we are and who we aspire to be."