A Thirst for Education
Right
from the start, Mary Jane McLeod knew the meaning of hard
work and sweat.
She was born the fifteenth child to former slaves, near Mayesville, South Carolina, in 1875. It wasn’t long before she joined her family in the fields. She spent hours—her back bent in the hot sun—planting, weeding, and picking cotton. By age nine, Mary could pick 250 pounds of cotton a day. Her father considered her his champion picker.
Mary was strong, but she had other talents as well. She was known for her singing voice and, more importantly, for her sharp mind, deep thoughts, and thirst for education.
“My mother said when I was born I was different from the rest. For one thing, I was the most homely child. The ordinary things the children did, I wouldn’t. My sisters wanted to get married early. I had no inclinations that way. . . . My ideas were different. My mother was proud of it. My father felt the same way. . . . I was always striving to set up something that was going in the opposite direction from the mass of things. . . .”
Mary was destined to go on from the cotton fields. Years later, she recalled, “I knew then, as I stood in the cotton field helping with the farm work, that I was called to a task which I could not name or explain.”
She was eleven when the first Black mission school opened in Mayesville. Mary walked five miles each way to attend. She learned all she could there. But by age fifteen she was back on the farm, since there were no Black high schools for her to attend.
Mary would not be defeated. Her appetite for learning never diminished. She prayed for a chance to continue her education. News of the Mayesville mission school had spread, and soon a scholarship was donated to a promising student “who would make good.” Mary was chosen. She went off to Scotia Seminary in North Carolina and then on to Moody Bible Institute in Chicago.
During this time, Mary felt a call to be a missionary in Africa. But after finishing Chicago’s Moody Bible Institute, she was told that Black missionaries were not being sent to Africa from the United States.
In these early years, Mary taught wherever she was most needed. She married Albertus Bethune, a former schoolteacher, and had a son.
In the early 1900s, Mary was in charge of a school in Palatka, Florida. All along she kept dreaming of starting her own school for Black girls. In 1904, at the urging of a young Baptist minister, Mary moved to Daytona Beach in eastern Florida near the center of a railroad construction project.
With $1.50 she rented a cottage and started her school, the Daytona Literary and Industrial School for Training Negro Girls. Five girls and Mary’s son, Albert, enrolled.
The elementary school grew by faith and hard work. Each day Mary and her students searched the city dump and trash piles behind hotels, picking up cracked dishes, broken chairs, lumber, and other discarded items that could be cleaned and repaired for use in their school.
“We burned logs and used the charred splinters as pencils,” she said. “For ink we mashed up elderberries.”
Enrollment increased. Classes began to overrun the cottage. Mary Bethune searched for property of her own. The only available spot was the city dump. The price, $250. The owner agreed to accept $5 down with the balance to be paid later.
“He
never knew it, Mary later recalled, “but at the time
I didn’t even have the first $5.” With the help
of students and supporters, she got the money by selling
ice cream and sweet-potato pies to nearby construction workers.
The dump was cleared, and the fund-raising continued.
Mary and her students sang at fashionable hotels. She gave speeches and campaigned for support. All along, her deep faith and prayer gave her hope that the amount of financial gifts would grow.
And they did. Gradually, as the contributions increased, school enrollment thrived. From the humble cottage elementary school and the city dump, the institute grew into a secondary school and later merged with Cookman Institute, the first Florida school for the education of Black boys. Today Mary Bethune’s dream has become the modern campus of Bethune-Cookman College.
As her school prospered, Mary Bethune’s influence reached far beyond Florida. In 1935, she organized the National Council of Negro Women to fight against segregation and discrimination. The following year the President himself, Franklin D. Roosevelt, appointed her director of the Negro Affairs Division of the National Youth Administration.
Mary Bethune was a teacher, organizer, administrator, and clever politician, who saw education as a way of getting on in the world, escaping poverty, and gaining self-respect. Until her death in 1955, she campaigned tirelessly for social justice.
