Bethune, Mary McLeod

Mary McLeod Bethune. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; neg. no. LC USW3 13,518 Mary McLeod Bethune. Corbis-Bettmann

(born July 10, 1875, Mayesville, S.C., U.S.—died May 18, 1955, Daytona Beach, Fla.) American educator who was active nationally in African American affairs and was a special adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt on the problems of minority groups.

Mary McLeod was the daughter of former slaves. She graduated from Scotia Seminary (now Barber-Scotia College) in Concord, North Carolina, in 1893 and from the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago in 1895. She married Albertus L. Bethune in 1898, and until 1903 she taught in a succession of small Southern schools.

In 1904 Bethune moved to the east coast of Florida, where a large African American population had grown up at the time of the construction of the Florida East Coast Railway, and in Daytona Beach, in October, she opened a school of her own, the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute for Negro Girls. Having virtually no tangible assets with which to start, she worked tirelessly to build a schoolhouse, solicit help and contributions, and enlist the goodwill of both the African American and white communities. In 1923 the school was merged with the Cookman Institute for Men, then in Jacksonville, Florida, to form what was known from 1929 as Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach. Bethune remained president of the college until 1942 and again from 1946 to 1947. Under her administration the college won full accreditation and grew to an enrollment of more than 1,000.

Bethune's efforts on behalf of education and of improved racial relations brought her to national prominence, and in 1936 she was appointed administrative assistant for Negro affairs (a title changed in 1939 to director of the division of Negro affairs) of the National Youth Administration by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a post she held until 1944. In 1935 she founded the National Council of Negro Women, of which she remained president until 1949, and she was vice president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People from 1940 to 1955. She was an adviser on minority affairs to Roosevelt and assisted the secretary of war in selecting officer candidates for the U.S. Women's Army Corps (WAC).