"I leave you love. I leave you hope. I leave you the challenge of developing confidence in one another. I leave you respect for the use of power. I leave you faith. I leave you racial dignity."
Mary McLeod Bethune was an American educator, civil rights activist, stateswoman, humanitarian, and philanthropist. Born on July 10, 1875, in Mayesville, South Carolina, to former slaves, she grew up in poverty. She became the only one of 17 children in her family to go to school when a missionary opened a school nearby for African American children. Bethune later received a scholarship to the Scotia Seminary (now Barber-Scotia College), a school for girls in Concord, North Carolina. After graduating from the seminary in 1893, she went to the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago and completed her studies there in 1895.
Believing that education provided the key to advancement for persons of African descent, Bethune founded the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute in 1904 with only $1.50. Reflecting on her early efforts, she said, "I considered cash money as the smallest part of my resources. I had faith in a loving God, faith in myself, and a desire to serve." When the school subsequently merged with the Cookman Institute for Men, the combined institution became known as the Bethune-Cookman College, now Bethune-Cookman University. At the time, it was one of the few places where African American students could pursue a college degree.
Among other accomplishments, Bethune served as president of the National Association of Colored Women in 1924, and in 1935 became one of the founders of the National Council of Negro Women. She was also involved in government service, lending her expertise to several presidents. President Calvin Coolidge invited her to participate in a conference on child welfare. For President Herbert Hoover, she served on Commission on Home Building and Home Ownership and was appointed to a committee on child health. Bethune was friends with Eleanor Roosevelt and became the highest-ranking African American woman in government, and the first African American head of a federal agency, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt named her director of Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration in 1936.
Bethune retired from her work at Bethune-Cookman in 1942. Eventually returning to Florida in her retirement, she died on May 18, 1955, in Daytona, Florida. She is the the first African American to be represented with a state statue in the National Statuary Hall Collection at the U.S. Capitol.
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