On
July 10, 1875, two years before the end of Reconstruction, Mary Jane McLeod was
born to two former slaves, Samuel and Patsy Macintosh McLeod, near Maysville,
South Carolina. She was the fifteenth of seventeen children; most of her
brothers and sisters were born in slavery. Once her family was reassembled from
various plantations after slavery, her parents acquired five acres of land and
built a family home known as the "Homestead". Her mother continued to work for
her former owner, and her father cultivated cotton on their land. Young Mary
Jane, as was the custom in the cotton regions of South Carolina, was in the
fields along with the adults. The time spent working in the cotton fields in Maysville helped shape Mary McLeod's keen work ethic and values regarding the importance of the use of the hands in labour and success. But Mary McLeod knew that God intended more for her than working in the cotton fields. She had a burning desire to learn how to read and write and was not happy until she was allowed to attend Maysville's one room schoolhouse. McLeod became the prize student of the teacher, Emma Jane Wilson, who recognized her outstanding skills. Miss Wilson recommended McLeod for a scholarship to attend Scotia Seminary near Concord, North Carolina. Upon graduation from Scotia in 1894, McLeod was awarded a scholarship to Dwight Moody's Institute for Home and Foreign Missions in Chicago. This rising young scholar had dreamed of going to Africa to minister to the spiritual and educational needs of her ancestors. However, this future "foremost woman of her race in the United States" was informed that there were "no openings for Negro Missionaries in Africa".
Mary McLeod was not one to have gone that far to be discouraged from her "missionary spirit-the spirit of doing things for others". Following a year at Moody's Institute she returned to Maysville to become Miss Wilson's assistant at the Presbyterian Mission School. Restless and unrequited in her ambition, she requested and received from the Presbyterian Board of Education an appointment at the Haines Institute in Augusta, Georgia. Here she honed her programmatic educational philosophy from the dynamic Lucey Craft Laney. It was at the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute that McLeod gained experience in a predominately female setting with primary, grammar, elementary normal and industrial courses. Laney also helped create a city hospital. The lessons McLeod learned from her one year's experience at Haines served her well when she established her own school.
Sometime between 1897 and 1898, McLeod was transferred by the Presbyterian Board to Kendell Institute at Sumpter, South Carolina. Here she continued to teach and render social services. But most importantly, she met Albertus Bethune, a former schoolteacher turned haberdasher. They were married in early May 1898; on February 3, 1899, she gave birth to Albertus McLeod Bethune Jr., in Savannah, Georgia. Their relationship vacillated between his desire to make money and her dream of continuing her mission work. Moreover, she now had an added responsibility-raising a son. This and mission work won out over settling down to homemaker.
While living in Savannah, Mrs. Bethune met Reverend C.J. Uggans, a Presbyterian pastor from Palatka, Florida. He offered her the opportunity to start a school in that city. At Palatka, she started a community school and worked in the jails two and three times a week, and in the sawmills and among the young people in clubs. Bethune stayed in Palatka five years, until she was encouraged to go to Daytona by Reverend S.P. Pratt who informed her that the area was fertile ground for her missionary spirit.
Having received an education at Maysville Presbyterian Mission School, Scotia Institute, and Moody's Bible Institute, having gained teaching experience at her primary school with her mentor Emma Wilson, and having arrived in Daytona Beach in 1904 and established the Daytona Literary and Industrial School for Training Negro Girls, Bethune laboured the next twenty years, dividing her time and energy between making the school a success and building for herself a national reputation.
Mary McLeod Bethune became a public leader in the second decade of the twentieth century. She led a drive to register black voters in Daytona Beach which earned her a visit from the local Ku Klux Klan. Moreover during this period, Bethune was elected president of the State Federation of Coloured Women's Clubs. During four years in office, she organized scattered clubs of black women throughout the Southeast to combat school segregation and the lack of health facilities among black children. In 1924, Bethune became the eighth president of the prestigious National Association of Coloured Women's clubs (NACW). Among her accomplishments, during her first four years as president, was the acquisition of a national headquarters in the nation's capital.
Even greater recognition was bestowed upon her as a leader in education. In 1928, she attended the Child Welfare Conference called by President Calvin Coolidge. During Herbert Hoover's administration, she was again summoned to Washington to attend the National Commission for Child Welfare. According to biographer Rackham Holt, she was "the expert on educational boards, able to supply the facts on the Negro institutions" that received federal aid. Bethune likewise served on the Hoover Commission on Home Building and Home Ownership. In 1933 she was appointed to the Planning Committee established by the Federal Office of Education of Negroes in the spring of 1934. In addition, she was able to carry on her duties as president of her Daytona Beach school, and to organize the National Council of Negro Women in New York City. Bethune's increasing Involvement in national conferences on education, child welfare, and home ownership, as well as her reputation as a moving spirit in the black women's club movement, brought her into contact with a widening circle of influential people which eventually included the Roosevelt's. Subsequently her recognition as a "leader" in the "black world", and her affiliation with the architects of the New Deal reform program, led to her service as an advisor on minority affairs in the Roosevelt administration.
Bethune's appointment as advisor on minority affairs in the National Youth Administration (NYA) is an interesting story. Undoubtedly, as a result of her activities in the women's movement in the 1920s and 1930s, she attracted the attention of Eleanor Roosevelt, who invited her to a luncheon at her New York home for representative leaders of the National Council of Women of the United States. It was at this social gathering that Bethune met Sara Delano (Mrs. James) Roosevelt, mother of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. According to Bethune, the friendship that grew from this initial meeting, "became one of the most treasured relationships of my life." Subsequently, she developed a "close" friendship with the Roosevelt women probably led to her government appointments.
A series of events in the early 1930s led to a large meeting of black leaders later in the decade in Washington, D.C., to chart the social, political, and economic destiny of millions of black Americans. The events were the election of President Roosevelt, the appointment of Mary McLeod Bethune as director of minority affairs in the NYA, and the advent of the Great Depression. In 1937 and again in 1939, with the approval of Aubrey Williams, NYA executive director, Bethune issued calls for national conferences on the problem of black Americans. She established the conferences' theme when she wrote to the president that, "until now, opportunity (had) not been offered for Negroes themselves to suggest a comprehensive program for the full integration into the benefits and the responsibilities of American democracy." Delegates from around the nation sent recommendations to Roosevelt and to Congress, which they considered fundamental to resolving the problems facing "the Negro" and its youth. Many of these problems were compounded by the Depression and racism.
The two National Conferences were perhaps, the pinnacle of Bethune's public career. When the NYA was abolished in 1943, she returned to Daytona Beach to devote herself to her beloved community, family, and school.
Known for her reputation as an educator, public figure in government, and black women's club activist, Bethune was also a Business woman. While much of her energy was devoted to keeping the College solvent, she also provided a better living condition for her parents and an education for her son and grandson. Two axioms of Bethune's philosophy, "not for myself, but for others," and "I feel that as I give I get," were confessed to Charles S. Johnson. But she was not one to rely upon chance for her economic security. She held a one-fourth interest in the Welricha Motel at the Bethune Volusia Beach, Inc., a resort purchased in 1943 to provide recreational facilities for black Daytonans, was located on a two-and-one-half-mile stretch of oceanfront property jointly owned by Bethune, George W. Engram Sr., and Joseph Nathaniel Crooms and his wife, Wealthy.
Bethune also held capital stock in the Afro-American Life Insurance Company of Jacksonville and the Central Life Insurance Company of Tampa. Her association with the latter company dates back to 1923 when thirteen men, led by Tampa realtor and mortician Garfield D. Rodgers, offered Bethune the opportunity to join them in the insurance business. She held capital stock in the Pittsburgh Courier too.
In addition to these ventures, Bethune invested in real estate mainly in the neighbourhood of the College. The revenue from these investments enabled her to have a comfortable life for herself and her son and grandson. Also, Bethune used extra earnings from selling insurance to pay off the mortgage on the "Homestead" in Maysville, and bought a modern home for her parents.