Mary Jane McLeod Bethune

• Mary Jane McLeod Bethune
• Born: July 10, 1875
• Died: May 18, 1955

Civil and women’s rights activist and educator, was born in Mayesville, South Carolina, the fifteenth of seventeen children of former slaves, Samuel McLeod and Patsy (McIntosh) McLeod. In early life McLeod lived in poverty, picking cotton with the rest of her family. She attended the Presbyterian Mission School in South Carolina and did so well that in 1888 she received a scholarship to attend Scotia Seminary in North Carolina. She was graduated in 1893 and attended the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, where she prepared for a career as a missionary. A Presbyterian and deeply religious, McLeod aspired to teach the gospel in Africa; however, the Presbyterian Mission Board would not assign black missionaries to Africa.

From 1895 until 1903 McLeod taught school. She served at Haines Institute in Georgia from 1895 until 1896, when she returned to South Carolina to teach at Kindell Institute. There she met Albertus Bethune, a teacher and salesman. They were married in 1898 and had one son, Albert McLeod, born in 1899. That same year the family moved to Palatka, Florida, and Bethune taught at the Palatka Mission School until 1903. Bethune’s intense devotion to her teaching career caused problems in her marriage, and she and her husband soon separated. Albertus Bethune died in 1918.

In 1904 Bethune moved to Daytona Beach, Florida, where she founded the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute for black girls, for whom there was then no public education. With help from the black community and with money from wealthy whites, the school grew under Bethune’s dynamic leadership. Its early stress on religious and vocational training was broadened in the 1920s to include college-preparatory and teacher-training courses. Always she urged her students, who came to number some 300, to strive for “self-control, self-respect, self-reliance and Race Pride.” In 1929 the school was formally merged with the Cookman Institute to become Bethune-Cookman College, a coeducational institution; the high school division was later dropped. Bethune was the college’s head until 1942, raising money for it mostly from white sources; on occasion she gave vocal concerts and told the story of her life. She worked hard to exemplify black womanhood at its best and most independent.

Bethune is most widely known for her work in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Her influence at the White House was strengthened by a long association with Eleanor Roosevelt, the president’s wife, which gave Bethune access to important ears. In 1935 Roosevelt appointed her to the National Advisory Committee of the National Youth Administration (NYA). From 1936 to 1944 she directed the Division of Negro Affairs within the NYA. NYA programs were instituted to help America’s youth find employment, and Bethune was responsible for ensuring that the special needs of black youth received attention. Under her directorship, the Division of Negro Affairs expanded to the regional level; black regional directors were appointed to administer NYA programs at local levels of government. Bethune’s success in obtaining equal expenditures and appropriations for black programs was limited, although she was able to get funds for black colleges through the creation of a school-aid program.

As one of the highest-placed blacks in the Roosevelt administration, and the only black woman, Bethune commanded substantial influence. In 1936 she organized and directed the Federal Council on Negro Affairs. The “Black Cabinet,” as it is often termed, consisted of black government officials who promoted New Deal programs among blacks. Black Cabinet members proposed greater funding for job training and financial assistance to needy blacks, worked to expand opportunities for blacks in government jobs, and pushed for a policy of nondiscrimination and desegregation in the federal government. Bethune and other cabinet members played an instrumental role in obtaining Roosevelt’s 1941 executive order that banned racial discrimination in government jobs and defense industries.

Bethune’s greatest and most significant achievement was her organization and leadership of black women. With a feminist perspective, she combined the qualities of the activist with those of the educator, and mobilized thousands of black women to work for civil and women’s rights. She served as president of the Florida Federation of Colored Women, the state branch of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), which had been founded in 1896. In 1920 she founded and presided over the Southeastern Federation of Colored Women. In the early 1920s she worked closely with NACW presidents Margaret Murray Washington and Mary B. Talbert to preserve and restore the home of abolitionist Frederick Douglass in Washington, D.C. Bethune served as president of the NACW from 1924 until 1928. In 1927 she attended a meeting of the National Council of Women of the United States; she was the only black woman in attendance. At this meeting she met and greatly impressed Eleanor Roosevelt.

Bethune corresponded with many NACW members in the early 1930s, urging that black women’s organizations unite to work together. Several meetings were held to discuss plans for the formation of a national organization of organizations. In 1935, in New York City, Bethune joined with the representatives of twenty-nine national black women’s organizations to form the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), which she served as president from 1935 until 1949.

Under Bethune’s leadership NCNW programs addressed women’s issues, education, employment, health, housing, and international relations. Although most members were of the middle class, NCNW programs and publications devoted attention to the problems of black working-class women. Council members fought sexual and racial inequalities in various ways. They worked for the integration of black women in the Women’s Army Corps during World War II and held “wartime employment clinics” to address the needs of black women in the defense industries. The NCNW also held a war bond drive to raise money to finance a Liberty ship that was named for the Underground Railroad abolitionist Harriet Tubman.

Bethune possessed an extraordinary historical and cultural consciousness. She served as president of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History from 1936 to 1951. In 1938 she organized a Museum-Archives Department in the NCNW. Through her leadership, thousands of black women were educated to acknowledge and appreciate their important historical roles.

Bethune’s commanding presence, exceptional oratorical ability, and devotion to women’s and civil rights enabled her to lead a movement to improve the quality of social and economic life for black Americans. In 1935 she received the Spingarn Medal from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for her outstanding contributions toward the advancement of her race. In 1949 she returned to Daytona Beach, where she remained active until her death at seventy-nine from a heart attack.

Adamant in her efforts to improve the material and political circumstances of black Americans, Bethune was not afraid to take vigorous public action, as in picketing Washington businesses that denied jobs to blacks in the 1930s or in protesting miscarriages of criminal justice. At the same time she was diplomatic but firm with white groups, many of which contributed to her causes. And for both blacks and whites she came to be thought of as among the most influential people of her time. She personified black aspirations to equality and the important role women could play in attaining it.

The records of the National Council of Negro Women in the National Archives for Black Women’s History in Washington, D.C, document Bethune’s presidency of the NCNW. Her work with the Division of Negro Affairs is documented in the records of the National Youth Administration, Record Group 119, at the National Archives in Washington. The Mary Church Terrell Papers and the Nannie Burroughs’ Papers at the Library of Congress contain significant amounts of Bethune correspondence from the 1920s that document her work with the NACW. The Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt Papers at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York, provide information on her relationship with the Roosevelts. Bethune correspondence is also available at the Amistad Research Center at Dillard University in New Orleans. Manuscript sources documenting Bethune’s work at Bethune-Cookman College and with the NACW are still unavailable for research.

During the 1930s Bethune wrote a weekly column for The Pittsburgh Courier; in the 1940s and 1950s she also wrote articles for The Chicago Defender. In November 1938, she published “I’ll Never Turn Back No More,” in Opportunity, An essay, “Certain Unalienable Rights,” was published in R. Logan, ed., What the Negro Wants (1944). “My Secret Talks with FDR,” appeared in Ebony, April 1949. In January 1950 she published “The Negro in Retrospect and Prospect,” in Journal of Negro History. “My Last Will and Testament” was published in Ebony, August 1955. Three admiring biographies, none comprehensive, have been published: C. O. Peare, Mary McLeod Bethune (1951); E. G. Sterne, Mary McLeod Bethune (1957); and R. Holt, Mary McLeod Bethune: A Biography (1964). For further information, see the annotated bibliography by D. C. Leffall and J. L. Sims, “Mary McLeod Bethune—The Educator,” Journal of Negro Education, Summer 1976. See also Current Biography, January 1942; The Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 5 (1977); and Notable American Women: The Modern Period (1980).