35TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION Super Hero MARY MCLEOD BETHUNE

Mary McLeod Bethune

Mary McLeod Bethune was a beacon of hope to generations of Black youth and a tireless crusader for the African-American cause. She helped shape the formation of the Civil Rights Movement, was a friend and advisor to the Roosevelt administration, and facilitated the distribution of federal dollars into Black education and vocational training. Bethune founded scores of schools and organizations, most notably Bethune-Cookman College and the National Council of Negro Women. She was also one of the top social activists of the New Deal years.

Bethune was born in 1875, near Mayesville, South Carolina, the fifteenth of 17 children. Bethune attended Scotia Seminary in North Carolina and what became the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. By 1895, after failing to get a job as a missionary in Africa, she moved first to Georgia and then to Florida to teach.

Believing that education was the primary route to equality for Blacks, Bethune founded the Daytona Educational and Industrial Institute for young Black women with just five students and $1.50. By using her charisma and strong belief in the project to raise money, she molded the facility into what is now Bethune-Cookman College.

But the big, dark-skinned woman with the implacable will didn't stop there. In 1924, she became president of the National Association of Colored Women. Bethune had a brilliant vision of Black women taking an active role in public affairs at a national level. By 1935, she had established the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), an umbrella organization that grew to include 22 national groups with a strong lobbying presence in Washington. 

The next year, Bethune took the helm of the Division of Negro Affairs for the National Youth Administration (NYA), which was an agency geared to helping young people get jobs during the Great Depression and the war effort. Bethune worked to achieve equal benefits for Blacks and whites, lobbying for money for Black college students, and fighting to get African Americans decision-making positions in the NYA and in other social organizations. Her efforts finally made it possible for Blacks to get pilot training and defense department jobs. In many ways her career as an educator and civic leader and that of Booker T. Washington can be twinned. But whereas he often used private philanthropic monies to promote personal political ends, she strove to use her numerous contacts to broaden African-American access to resources and opportunities. 

In 1936, the pioneer formed the Federal Council of Negro Affairs, known as the Black Cabinet, which facilitated two precedent-setting national Black conferences. Poor health forced Bethune to cut back her activities in the 1940s, and she began writing newspaper columns for the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier. She died in 1955. In 1974, a statue was built in her honor in Washington, D.C.; it was the first in the capital to portray either a woman or an African American.

 From Great African Americans.  Copyright, Publications International, Ltd.