Black History Makers: Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune

Get the Point!

Born to formerly enslaved parents in 1875, Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune spent her formative years picking cotton on a sharecropper farm in South Carolina before graduating from Scotia Seminary (later Barber-Scotia College, a North Carolina based HBCU).

Dr. Mary M. Bethune

After marrying Albertus Bethune and moving to Palatka, Florida, Dr. Bethune sold insurance until 1904, when she established the Daytona Literary and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls "with $1.50, faith in God and five little girls: Lena, Lucille, and Ruth Warren, Anna Geiger and Celest Jackson."

In 1923, the school merged with the Cookman Institute of Jacksonville, Florida, which had been founded in 1872. The new co-ed college, affiliated with the United Methodist Church, was renamed the Daytona-Cookman Institute in 1931 and after receiving full accreditation, changed its name to Bethune-Cookman College later that year.

Dr. Bethune (front right) with a number of Black women leaders in Chicago circa 1937…

Over the next two decades until her death in 1955, Bethune became arguably the most influential Black leader in America as she founded the National Council for Negro Women in 1935 and subsequently served as a highly influential adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor throughout the former's 12 years in office.

Dr. Bethune also led the charge to commission Black women into the U.S. Army in the years prior to World War II and in 1935, she won the Spingarn Medal—the highest honor granted by the NAACP. In 1945, Bethune earned the distinction of becoming the only woman of color tapped by then President Harry Truman to attend the founding conference of what would become the United Nations.

Photos of yours truly addressing the Bethune Cookman University student body in historic Heyn Chapel circa 2018…

Dr. Bethune's greatest legacy, however, remains in the college that she helped found, one whose motto, "Enter to Learn, Depart to Serve," has guided thousands of her graduates who have achieved greatly in their fields of professional endeavor including Civil Rights leaders A. Phillip Randolph, Harry and Harriet Moore, Basketball Hall of Fame Coach John Chaney, NFL Hall of Fame lineman Larry Little, and legendary college football coach Cy Mclairen.

Lest we forget...