Queer Places:
640 Dr Mary McLeod Bethune Blvd, Daytona Beach, FL 32114
Mary McLeod Bethune Council House National Historic Site, 1318 Vermont Ave NW, Washington, DC 20005
Bethune-Cookman College Campus Grounds
Daytona Beach, Volusia County, Florida, USA
Mary
Jane McLeod Bethune (born Mary Jane McLeod; July 10, 1875 – May 18, 1955[1])
was an American educator, stateswoman, philanthropist, humanitarian, womanist,[2] and civil
rights activist. A woman of considerable political influence, Bethune
served on presidential commissions under Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and
Franklin D. Roosevelt; she was a personal friend of
Eleanor Roosevelt, and she
met with President Roosevelt regularly throughout his presidency to discuss
the needs of African Americans.
Bethune founded the National Council for Negro Women in 1935, established
the organization's flagship journal Aframerican Women's Journal,[3][4] and
resided as president or leader for myriad African American women's
organizations including the National Association for Colored Women and the
National Youth Administration's Negro Division.[5] She
also was appointed as a national adviser to president Franklin
D. Roosevelt, whom she worked with to create the Federal Council on Negro
Affairs, also known as the Black
Cabinet.[6] She
is well known for starting a private school for African-American students
in Daytona
Beach, Florida; it later continued to develop as Bethune-Cookman
University. Bethune was the sole African American woman officially a part
of the US delegation that created the United Nations charter,[7] and
she held a leadership position for the Women's
Army Auxiliary Corps.[8] For
her lifetime of activism, she was deemed "acknowledged First Lady of Negro
America" by Ebony magazine in July 1949[9] and
was known by the Black Press as the "Female Booker T. Washington".[10] She
was known as "The First Lady of The Struggle" because of her commitment to
gain better lives for African Americans.[11]
Born in Mayesville,
South Carolina, to parents who had been slaves, she started working in
fields with her family at age five. She took an early interest in becoming
educated; with the help of benefactors, Bethune attended college hoping to
become a missionary in
Africa. She started a school for African-American girls in Daytona
Beach, Florida. It later merged with a private institute for
African-American boys and was known as the Bethune-Cookman School. Bethune
maintained high standards and promoted the school with tourists and donors, to
demonstrate what educated African Americans could do. She was president of the
college from 1923 to 1942, and 1946 to 1947. She was one of the few women in
the world to serve as a college president at that time.
by Carl Van Vechten
McLeod married Albertus Bethune in 1898, they moved to Savannah,
Georgia, where she did social work up until the Bethunes made the move to
Florida. They had a son, named Albert. Coyden Harold Uggams, a visiting
Presbyterian minister, persuaded the couple to relocate to Palatka,
Florida, to run a mission school.[23] The
Bethunes moved in 1899; Mary ran the mission school and began an outreach to
prisoners. Albertus left the family in 1907; he never got a divorce but
relocated to South Carolina. He died in 1918 from tuberculosis.[24]
In 1931, Mary McLeod Bethune helped to arrange a reading tour for
Carl Van
Vechten’s good friend, the poet Langston Hughes. The tour would take Hughes to
many black colleges and universities throughout the south. In a letter to Van
Vechten describing Bethune’s appearance at one such reading, Hughes wrote,
“Mrs. Bethune is marvelous as mistress of ceremonies—a sort of black Texas
Guinan joyfully clothed in African dignity, presenting myself, with a full
orchestra and a hundred student voices singing Negro music as a setting for my
poems.” Bethune was, perhaps, uniquely qualified to introduce Hughes to
audiences for she had inspired his work “The Negro Mother.” Once, when Hughes
closed a reading with this poem, Bethune was so moved that she jumped up from
her chair and ran to the stage to embrace him. Mary McLeod Bethune was a
commanding and important promoter of civil rights for African Americans, and
the effects of her advocacy, especially in the area of education, cannot be
overstated. “She is a power down here,” Langston Hughes wrote to Carl Van
Vechten of her influence among the southerners he met on his reading tour;
that she was also “a power” among her friends is evident in Hughes’s next
sentence: “She sends her greetings to you; and commands that you visit her.”
Bethune was also active in women's clubs, which were strong civic
organizations supporting welfare and other needs, and became a national
leader. Bethune wrote prolifically, publishing in National Notes from
1924–1928, Pittsburgh Courier from 1937–1938, Aframerican Women’s Journal from
1940–1949, and Chicago Defender from 1948–1955, among others.[12] After
working on the presidential campaign for Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, she
was invited as a member of his "Black Cabinet." She advised him on concerns of
African Americans and helped share Roosevelt's message and achievements with
blacks, who had historically been Republican voters since the Civil War. At
the time, blacks had been largely disenfranchised
in the South since the turn of the century, so she was speaking to black
voters across the North. Upon her death, columnist Louis
E. Martin said, "She gave out faith and hope as if they were pills and she
some sort of doctor."[13]
Honors include designation of her home in Daytona Beach as a National
Historic Landmark,[14] her house
in Washington, D.C. as a National
Historic Site,[15] and
the installation of a memorial
sculpture of her in Lincoln
Park in Washington,
D.C.[16] The
Legislature of Florida designated her in 2018 as the subject of one of
Florida's two statues in the National
Statuary Hall Collection.[17]
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