Mary McLeod Bethune
"One day when Mary Jane was playing with the white children of her mother's first slave mistress, she saw a book and picked it up. When she it picked it up the little girl said, 'You can't read that. Put that down.' The kids struck Mary Jane and stuck with her and she promised herself she would learn to read one day." (African Biographies, 16) For more than three decades (1920-1955) Mary McLeod Bethune was known as the "most influential black woman in the United States." For all blacks, but especially for black women, she emphasized the need for education and for the opportunity to break free from oppressive social and political boundaries. She urged blacks to unite in one political movement and believed that the government could be used to improve the black race. She once summarized her beliefs as "self-control, self-respect, self-reliance, and race pride." Born near Mayesville, South Carolina, Mary McLeod was the fifteenth of the seventeen children of Sam and Patsy McLeod, slaves freed after the Civil War. Beginning her education at a black mission school near Mayesville, McLeod quickly learned all its teachers could offer her, and in 1888 she won a scholarship to attend Scotia Seminary, a Presbyterian school for black girls
In 1929 it was officially renamed Bethune-Cookman College, and three years later it earned regional accreditation as a junior college. She praised President Roosevelt's 1941 executive order desegregating defense industries and the government, and she promoted the war effort among African Americans. She also opposed the Klan in local elections. representative at the inauguration of the new Liberian president. Roosevelt's 1941 executive order demanding equal treatment for blacks in hiring for those factories. Two and a half years later she became director of the Division of Negro Affairs, responsible for ensuring that a fair share of the agency budget went to programs for blacks. Army, pressing for African American participation in the corps. In 1904 Bethune went to Daytona Beach, Florida, where she established the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute, a girls' school modeled on Scotia Seminary. In 1942 she persuaded the agency to employ regional Negro Affairs representatives and guided the creation of school-aid programs and funding for black colleges and graduate students. During World War I she was instrumental in integrating the Red Cross. Because of Bethune's administrative abilities, the school grew rapidly. When she learned there were no missionary openings for blacks in Africa, McLeod went to teach at the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute in Augusta, Georgia. In demand as a speaker, she continued to promote African American education before various groups around the country. By 1939 Bethune had become director of Negro affairs for the NYA. Bethune served as president of Bethune-Cookman until December 1942.
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Acceptance Essays
