02/13/2022
*BLACK HISTORY MOMENT*
July 10, 1875 - May 18, 1955)
Mary McLeod Bethune used the power of education, political activism, and civil service to achieve racial and gender equality throughout the United States and the world. The first person in her family born free and the first person in her family afforded a formal education, Bethune emerged from abject poverty and oppression of the Reconstruction South to achieve greatness.
Born Mary Jane McLeod on July 10, 1875 in Mayesville, South Carolina, she had the unusual opportunity to attend school and receive an education not common among African Americans following the Civil War. Most of her schooling prepared her for missionary work abroad, though she would never serve. Instead, she taught at schools in Georgia and South Carolina. In Sumter, South Carolina, she met her husband, Albertus Bethune, and within a year gave birth to their son, Albert. The family moved to Palatka, Florida, approximately 50 miles south of Jacksonville. There, she established a missionary school. Bethune moved again to Daytona Beach and established another school—the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute for Negro Girls—on October 3, 1904 that she grew from five girls (plus her son) to a high school. In 1923, this school merged with the all-male Cookman Institute of Jacksonville, Florida, and in 1931, the school became accredited by the Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools of the Southern States, with its name officially changed to Bethune-Cookman College, at which time Bethune became the first African American woman to serve as a college president.