[By Kiley Mallard]

Mary McLeod Bethune: A Lifetime of leadership, A Legacy of Learning

I have always marveled at her and thought it was wonderful that she could go through so many hardships and emerge so free of bitterness. - Eleanor Roosevelt referring to Mary McLeod Bethune in Ebony magazine, February 1953

Born Mary Jane McLeod on July 10, 1875 in Mayesville, South Carolina, Mary McLeod Bethune was the 15th of 17 children. Her parents and most of her siblings were born slaves. After the Civil War, her parents purchased five acres and planted cotton. Bethune worked the fields with her brothers and sisters once the family was reassembled from several plantations.

In a 1946 interview with Charles S. Johnson, Bethune recalled an early interaction with a little white girl: "I picked up one of the books . . . and one of the girls said to me, 'you can't read that - put that down. I will show you some pictures over here,' and when she said to me, 'You can't read that-put that down,' it just did something to my pride and to my heart that made me feel that someday I would read just as she was reading."

Bethune's parents enrolled her in Trinity Presbyterian Mission School, where she completed the equivalent of a sixth or seventh grade education. In 1888, she received a scholarship from Scotia Seminary near Concord, North Carolina. After graduation in 1894, she won a second scholarship to Dwight Moody's Institute for Home and Foreign Missions in Chicago.

Learning there were no openings for Negro missionaries in Africa, Bethune concluded that Africans in America needed education just as much as those in Africa. She told Johnson, "There was such a need for somebody to go and do something. Instinctively, I felt that leadership was needed, someone to inspire and build a program to tell the people something else aside from this very scanty life we were called up on to live."

After teaching in Georgia and South Carolina, she married Albertus Bethune in 1898. The couple had one son, Albert McLeod Bethune, the 90th grandchild on Mary's side. The Bethune family moved to Palatka, Florida in 1899, where she worked at the Palatka Mission School until 1903.

In 1904, with $1.50 (the equivalent of $30.00 today) and five students, Bethune opened the Daytona Educational and Industrial School for Negro Girls in Daytona Beach. At the time, the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson supported the practice of racial segregation and the doctrine of "separate but equal" accommodations for blacks. "I had no furniture. I begged dry good boxes and made benches and stools; begged a basin and other things I needed," she recalled .

Bethune's school became coeducational in 1923 when it merged with the Cookman Institute and in 1931 became a junior college, renamed Bethune-Cookman College. In 1941, the college received Florida Department of Education approval to offer four-year baccalaureate programs. Bethune remained president of the college for over 40 years. A hands-on administrator, she reportedly could call every student by their first and last names and would frequently be seen strolling through campus.

Bethune-Cookman College celebrated its centennial in 2004. The school now encompasses 70 acres of land with 36 buildings. Nearly 3,000 students were enrolled and 274 Bachelor degrees awarded in 2003-2004. As part of the centennial celebrations in January 2005, Bethune's grandson Albert, Jr. was in attendance for the unveiling of a 12-foot bronze statue of Bethune on campus.

Bethune's on-campus house, "The Retreat", was constructed in 1915 and purchased for her by long time friends and benefactors Thomas H. White, a sewing machine magnate, and James M. Gamble, founder of Proctor and Gamble. Today, it serves as headquarters for the Mary McLeod Bethune Foundation, and welcomes visitors for public tours. The site was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1974. Upon her death in 1955, Bethune was laid to rest in a simple gravesite on the property of her Daytona Beach home.