Mary Jane McLeod was born in 1875 in Mayesville, South Carolina, the fifteenth of seventeen children, to parents who had been enslaved. She was the first of her family born free. She grew up picking cotton, and the story she told for the rest of her life was of a day in a white family’s house when she picked up a book and a child took it out of her hands and told her she could not read. She decided that afternoon that she would learn.
She did, at a mission school five miles’ walk away, then at Scotia Seminary, then at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. She wanted to be a missionary in Africa and was refused on the grounds that the church did not send Black missionaries. She went to Florida instead and, in 1904, opened a school in Daytona Beach with five students, a rented cottage, and a dollar and a half.
The School
The Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls was built on nothing. Bethune raised money by selling sweet potato pies to construction workers, singing with her students at hotels for donations, and cultivating a set of wealthy white winter residents — James Gamble of Procter & Gamble, Thomas White of White Sewing Machines — with a persistence that became legendary.
The site she bought for the permanent campus was a municipal rubbish dump. By 1923 the school had grown enough to merge with the Cookman Institute; Bethune-Cookman College survives today as a university. She served as its president until 1942, one of very few women of any race running an American college in that period.
“Invest in the human soul. Who knows, it might be a diamond in the rough.”— Mary McLeod Bethune
The Black Cabinet
Bethune came to Washington in 1936 as Director of the Division of Negro Affairs at the National Youth Administration — the first Black woman to head a federal agency. The appointment was substantive rather than ceremonial: she controlled a real budget and directed roughly twenty-one million dollars toward Black students over the life of the programme.
She also convened and led what became known as the Federal Council on Negro Affairs, the informal group of Black federal appointees that the press called the Black Cabinet. It had no statutory existence. It met at her house on Sunday evenings. Its function was to coordinate what was otherwise a scattering of individual appointees into something that could apply consistent pressure on how New Deal money was distributed.
Relief on Segregated Terms
The New Deal was administered locally. That meant Southern relief officials set Southern wage scales, agricultural and domestic workers — two-thirds of Black workers — were written out of Social Security, and federally financed housing was built segregated. Bethune’s work was not to add a Black programme alongside the New Deal but to force the existing programmes to distribute on equal terms. She won partial victories on NYA funding and lost more often than she won.
Her access mattered because it was personal. Eleanor Roosevelt was a genuine friend and ally, and Bethune used that relationship without apology to reach the President directly. She was one of the few people in Washington who could walk into the White House and say plainly that the administration’s programmes were being administered in a way that excluded Black Americans, and be listened to.
“If I have a legacy to leave my people, it is my philosophy of living and serving. We have a powerful potential in our youth, and we must have the courage to change old ideas and practices.”— Mary McLeod Bethune, “My Last Will and Testament,” 1955
The National Council of Negro Women
Bethune founded the National Council of Negro Women in 1935 as an umbrella organisation, on the reasoning that Black women’s organisations were numerous, effective, and individually too small to be heard in Washington. Consolidated, they could not be ignored. The NCNW became the vehicle through which she lobbied on anti-lynching legislation, on discrimination in the defence industries, and on the exclusion of Black women from the wartime services.
In 1945 she attended the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco as a consultant to the American delegation — the only Black woman there in that capacity.
Bethune in the Film
Bethune is the film’s corrective. Every other figure in it is arguing about how much the federal government should do; she is asking who the government is doing it for, and getting an answer she refuses to accept.
Her key scene is a Sunday evening at her house with the Black Cabinet — a dozen people in a sitting room going through relief figures county by county and finding the same pattern everywhere. It is the only scene in the film where the audience is shown the New Deal from the position of the people it was leaving out.