Mary McLeod Bethune Biography (1875–1955)
Mary McLeod Bethune was an educator and activist, serving as president of the National Association of Colored Women and founding the National Council of Negro Women.
Who Was Mary McLeod Bethune?
Mary McLeod Bethune was a child of formerly enslaved people. She graduated from the Scotia Seminary for Girls in 1893. Believing that education provided the key to racial advancement, Bethune founded the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute in 1904, which later became Bethune-Cookman College. She founded the National Council of Negro Women in 1935. Bethune died in 1955.
Early Life
Born Mary Jane McLeod on July 10, 1875, in Mayesville, South Carolina, Mary McLeod Bethune was a leading educator and civil rights activist. She grew up in poverty, as one of 17 children born to formerly enslaved people. Everyone in the family worked, and many toiled in the fields, picking cotton. Bethune became the one and only child in her family to go to school when a missionary opened a school nearby for African American children. Traveling miles each way, she walked to school each day and did her best to share her newfound knowledge with her family.
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 Dwight Moody's Institute for Home and Foreign Missions (also known as Moody Bible Institute) in Chicago. Bethune completed her studies there two years later. Returning to the South, she began her career as a teacher.
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