What Did Mary Mcleod Bethune Continually Strive for

DAYTONA BEACH — On the July day Mary Jane McLeod came into the world in a small log cabin on a South Carolina rice and cotton farm, she already had obstacles scattered across the path she was about to travel.

It was 1875, she was female, and she was Black. Slavery and the Civil War had just ended 10 years earlier. Her parents were former slaves, and she was their 15th child.

She was toiling in the cotton fields by the time she was five years old, but a year later her parents agreed to give up the extra set of helping hands so she could go to the one-room school a few miles away. She became the first person in her family to learn to read and write.

It was a small opportunity, but she parlayed her rural South education into a career that led to her founding and running a college, and becoming an advisor to U.S. presidents, including Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The woman who would become known as Mary McLeod Bethune after she got married in 1898 was the only African American woman to help the U.S. delegation that created the United Nations charter. She also created the National Council of Negro Women, directed the Office of Minority Affairs in the National Youth Administration, and became a general in the Women's Army for the National Defense.

"If you'd let her get her toe in the door, it wouldn't be long until her foot and her whole body was inside," said 87-year-old Harold Lucas, whose father was an accountant and teacher at Bethune's school for children that evolved into Bethune-Cookman University. "She was a very persistent person, and a very convincing person. She showed her sincerity and fought for what she believed in."

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Her disadvantaged start in life only seemed to make her more determined and toughen her for the challenges she ran up against throughout her 79 years. When the Ku Klux Klan marched to her school in Daytona Beach and threatened to burn it down, she retorted that she would just build another one.

"She did not want to create waves, but she wasn't afraid to go swimming," said Lucas, who Bethune took under her wing after his mother was stricken with tuberculosis in 1939 and died in 1942. "Mrs. Bethune had a facade about her that let you know she was strictly business."

When Bethune hit a dead end, she made a U-turn and found a detour that would at least get her close to where she wanted to end up.

Black people weren't allowed on Daytona's beaches until the late 1960s, so Bethune secured a small stretch of the oceanfront south of New Smyrna Beach.

In 1911, after one of her students was put in a life-threatening situation because no hospitals in Daytona Beach would treat Black people, Bethune opened a hospital for Blacks on what is now part of the B-CU campus.

When she wanted to start a school for girls in Daytona Beach in 1904, she rented a small house for $11 per month. She made benches and desks from discarded crates, pencils from burned wood and ink from elderberry juice.

The Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls site bordered Daytona Beach's trash dump, so Bethune raised money selling sweet potato pies, ice cream and fried fish to crews at the dump.

The landfill was ominously nicknamed Hell's Hole, but it came to be considered sacred ground after it was sealed and Bethune built a school on top of it.

"She had incredible faith, and she was very persevering," said Nancy Long, who has written books on Bethune and was an English professor at B-CU from 1995-2015. "She would never give up. She was totally driven."

Bethune once caught herself wagging her finger at President Roosevelt during a conversation between the two of them, Long said.

In an era when Daytona Beach and the rest of the country were strictly segregated, Bethune managed to befriend white people — many of them wealthy and powerful — and convince them to help her.

She courted wealthy white organizations, such as the ladies' Palmetto Club. She convinced influential white men who had winter homes in the Daytona Beach area, including James Gamble of Procter & Gamble and Thomas H. White of White Sewing Machines, to contribute to her school and sit on the board of trustees.

She even managed to get a $62,000 donation for her school, big money in the early 1900s, from ultra wealthy oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, who had a home just north of Daytona Beach on the eastern bank of the Halifax River.

Long said it "was almost like a miracle" how Bethune, whose original dream was to be a missionary in Africa, was always able to get what she needed for the school. One Christmas, she needed dishes for her students' holiday dinner, so the family that lived in the grand Lilian Place Victorian home on the beachside sent over an old china set.

"Anytime they needed something, she would say, 'I'll pray. I have faith.' And the next day it would show up," Long said.

"She had the ability to get you to buy into her dream," said Leonard Lempel, a retired history professor who taught at B-CU from 1980-1996 and Daytona State College from 1996-2015. "She must have been one of the greatest sales people in history. She was very confident and clear about what she wanted to accomplish. She asserted herself in circles in a way that was unheard of."

Lempel is putting together a film on Bethune's life, and he's been reading through minutes of the Daytona City Council from 1904 and 1905 to find Bethune's comments to the elected officials of more than 100 years ago. In 1904, she asked for sidewalks and Black policemen in the Black neighborhoods, and the next year, she got both, Lempel said.

City-funded Black police officers "didn't exist anywhere else in the South" at that time, Lempel said. She also got the city to improve the sewer system in a Black neighborhood, and helped Blacks to be able to walk into Peabody Auditorium through the same door as white people in the years when they still couldn't sit together.

Cynthia Slater, head of the local branch of the NAACP and a B-CU graduate, said Daytona Beach would not be what it is today without Bethune.

"She reached out to white Daytona to let them know how important African Americans were to this city," Slater said.

"She was very practical and able to compromise," Lempel said. "She was criticized for not asking for more, but she knew the limits of how far to push. If she challenged segregation she would have been lynched. She worked within the system."

Lempel said Bethune endeared herself to the community by sending her student singers to events, and doing other non-threatening things.

Her school was in the only Daytona Beach neighborhood where Blacks could live, shop, get an education and worship. But she gently broke that racial barrier by opening her school every Sunday to anyone who wanted to listen to an interesting speaker or talented singers.

Hundreds of people would show up each Sunday to her community gatherings. There was no white section or Black section in the room where everyone gathered. It was an oasis of integration.

Her leadership skills rose to a new level in 1928, when a hurricane hit Florida and she organized the Red Cross response, Long said. Two years later, Bethune was invited to Washington, D.C., to speak about youth and her talk wowed listeners.

Through her work in Washington, D.C., Bethune became a friend of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. The two women, who were introduced through a mutual friend, regularly had lunch together in the White House. Eleanor Roosevelt even stayed in Bethune's home in Daytona Beach, a shocking thing in the days of segregation.

At a time well before computers and televisions could be used to communicate with people nationwide, Bethune had articles published in National Notes, the Pittsburgh Courier, Aframerican Women's Journal and Chicago Defender. She sometimes reached an audience of millions by speaking on NBC radio broadcasts.

Through his research for his film on Bethune, Lempel came across a recording of her speaking in a 1939 New York City radio broadcast. She had a high-pitched voice, but she was very articulate, substantive and commanding when she spoke.

"She just had this force of personality," Lempel said. "When she said do something, you did it. She spoke with such authority."

He said it wouldn't be a reach to consider Bethune "the mother of the civil rights movement."

"She set the stage in the 1930s. She sparked it," Lempel said. "I think Mary McLeod Bethune was one of the key figures in launching the modern civil rights movement through her activism, her political skills and her ability to convince the Roosevelt administration to do things. The civil rights movement really began in the Great Depression with the New Deal."

Roosevelt used the New Deal to give Blacks middle management jobs and a voice, Lempel said. Roosevelt also created what came to be known as the Black Cabinet, and Bethune was a leader of that cabinet.

The Black Cabinet was made up of an unofficial group of advisors who met in Bethune's Washington, D.C., home and strategized. Combined with her official positions in the nation's capital, Bethune held some sway.

"It was a big deal then for Blacks to have any influence," Lempel said.

He said Bethune groomed herself to become a leader by starting various organizations for women and Blacks.

He said two gifts she left behind were self-respect for Blacks, and a place for Blacks to get a college degree, which together allowed a Black middle class to form in Daytona Beach. Bethune also trained women to vote when they gained that right for the first time in 1920, Lempel said.

She improved racial tolerance in Daytona Beach during an era when there was very little throughout the South, said Mayor Derrick Henry.

"Mary McLeod Bethune has an unrivaled place in our history," Henry said. "She is on Daytona Beach's Mount Rushmore."

There is no large rock formation anywhere with Bethune's face on it to celebrate the trailblazer, who died in 1955. But if all goes as planned, there will soon be a bronze sculpture of her in Daytona Beach's Riverfront Park, and a marble sculpture in National Statuary Hall inside the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C.

A group of local leaders has shepherded the years-long effort to get the two sculptures created and placed. They've had a goal to raise $550,000, and still need to collect the last $150,000.

"It's wonderful to contribute to something that's symbolic of what anyone can achieve in their lifetime," said Nancy Lohman, chair of the local nonprofit Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune Statuary Fund. "She left a legacy of how important education is, and the need to embrace one another."

The local group is hoping that within the next month or two it will get the final approval from the Architect of the U.S. Capitol, a federal department that oversees that building. If that OK comes, the artist can get to work on the marble statue that would be placed in Statuary Hall.

Master sculptor Nilda Comas has already created a small version of the sculpture and done other preparatory work, but she'll need about six months to complete the 11-foot-tall work of art in her studio in Italy. Shipping will take another four to six weeks, so the unveiling is probably at least nine months away.

"The statue will be the first African American, male or female, to reside in Statuary Hall in the state collection and the only statue of a person in a cap and gown, representing Mary McLeod Bethune's commitment to education," Lohman said.

Henry said people "can't get enough of Bethune's story" because it "resonates with who we are and who we aspire to be."

"She was Daytona Beach's model of possibility," he said.

Lohman said the United States, and the whole world, need "role models and people to aspire to."

"Our country needs Mary McLeod Bethune and her words of wisdom now as much as ever," Lohman said. "In her last will and testament, a beautiful doctrine that is so relevant still today, she included these sentiments: I leave you love, hope, faith, racial dignity, a thirst for education, courage, peace and the desire to live harmoniously with others."

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Source: https://www.news-journalonline.com/story/news/history/2020/08/14/mary-mcleod-bethunes-racial-equality-work-still-helping-daytona-beach/3319135001/

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