Occupation: educator, racial justice activist, New Deal government official
Known for: improving educational opportunities for African Americans; president, National Association of Colored Women; founder, National Council of Negro Women. Her statue in Washington, DC, was the first statue depicting any woman or African American in any park in the nation's capital. Her home is a National Historic Landmark.
Mary McLeod Bethune was born in Mayesville, South Carolina, the 15th of 17th children. Her parents, Samuel and Patsy McLeod, and her oldest brothers and sisters, were slaves before emancipation when the Union won the Civil War. In her early years, she picked cotton and attended a Methodist mission school.
In 1888, Mary McLeod Bethune received a scholarship to Scotia Seminary in North Carolina. After graduating in 1893, she enrolled at what is now Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, intending to become a missionary to Africa. She discovered, however, that African Americans were not selected for such assignments.
Instead, Mary McLeod Bethune became a teacher in several Presbyterian schools in Georgia and South Carolina.
She married Albertus Bethune in 1898, andtheir son was born in 1899. The marriage lasted about eight years; Albertus left the family but they remained married until his death in 1918.
Moving to Florida, and realizing that the workers being brought in for railway construction needed schools for their families, Mary McLeod Bethune opened the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute in 1904, with only a few students. She raised funds, ran the school, taught the students, and the school grew.
Mary McLeod Bethune focused the school on educating girls, who had few other opportunities for education. At first, the school focused on elementary classes, and later secondary courses. While first stressing industrial training and religious instruction, gradually the school moved to more academic subjects.
The school was supported in part by whites, including northerners with summer homes in the area, and such industrialists as James M. Gamble of Proctor and Gamble -- who served as president of the school's board of trustees from 1912 until his death -- and Thomas H. White of the White Sewing Machine Company.
In 1911, after the school added nursing classes, Bethune also opened a hospital, because students could not be admitted to the local, whites-only, hospital. (The hospital closed in 1931.)
In the 1920s, Bethune arranged for the school's affiliation with the Methodist Episcopal Church, and in 1923, merged it with the Cookman Institute for men in Jacksonville to become Bethune-Cookman College. The school began to focus on post-secondary courses, especially teacher training. The school, which had begun with a handful of students, grew to a peak of 1,000 students and won full accreditation -- 1939 as a junior college and 1941 as a four-year college.
Mary McLeod Bethune served as President of the school from 1904 until 1942, with a brief return in 1946-47. But she was also involved in other organizations, extending her interest in opportunities for young African Americans.
During World War I, Bethune helped pressure the American Red Cross to integrate, and she was active in anti-lynching campaigns.
In 1924, Mary McLeod Bethune was elected president of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). During her term, the organization bought a Washington, DC, building as a national headquarters, and brought the organization into affiliation with the larger and more powerful, though white-run, National Council of Women.
Mary McLeod Bethune was active in the Methodist Episcopal Church. She was a delegate from 1928 to 1944 to the general conference held each four years. She opposed the merger of the northern and southern conferences, because the southern conference segregated black members.
In 1935, Mary McLeod Bethune brought together black women from many different organizations, founding the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), and served as its president from 1935 to 1949. That same year, she was awarded the Springarn Medal from the NAACP, and she served as vice-president of the NAACP from 1940 to 1955.
From 1936 to 1951, Mary McLeod Bethune served as president of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, the black history organization founded by Carter G. Woodson.
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Mary McLeod Bethune Council House National Historic Site
Photograph of Mary McLeod Bethune