Tall and well dressed, Bethune was an architect of the early civil rights movement. She was a Black woman with power, with access to the White House, when few Black people were allowed in.
She was often greeted on her White House visits by her friend, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who would embrace Bethune warmly at the White House gate. The two women would walk arm in arm down the circular drive, into the White House, past the hostile stares of White Southerners, many of whom made up the White House staff. Inside, Bethune would talk privately with the president about “the problems of my people.”
“I discussed with him the problems of my people in many an off-the-record private talk held in the President’s study in the White House,” Bethune wrote in an article titled “My Secret Talks With FDR,” which was published in 1949 in Ebony magazine. “I often expressed to him my impatience with the slowness of the democratic process.”
She recalled visiting Roosevelt one evening in 1943. “I was feeling particularly distressed that day over reports I had received on flagrant bias shown against Negroes seeking to enter the National Youth Administration in certain parts of the South,” Bethune wrote. “I called him direct that afternoon, and must have sounded awfully agitated.”
Roosevelt invited her for dinner that evening. Bethune was escorted by an attendant to the president’s private elevator, she wrote in Ebony.
The president was waiting for her upstairs in his private study. Bethune found Roosevelt sitting in a chair near the door, holding “his famous cigarette holder,” she recalled. He waved to welcome Bethune, whose parents had been enslaved. She had become a famed educator, the founder of a college and one of the most politically influential figures in history.
“What can I do for you?” Bethune recalled Roosevelt asking.
She told the president about the persistent racism in the country and the lack of training facilities for “Negroes in certain Southern states and the refusal of state governments to allocate funds” for the National Youth Administration to help Black youth.
“I was visibly disturbed and made the President aware of how I felt,” Bethune wrote. “I caught his arm and clung to him. ‘The Negro people need all of the strength that you can give, Mr. President, in opening up opportunities for them.’ ”
Roosevelt, she recalled, “looked at me seriously for a few seconds, and then said, ‘Mrs. Bethune. I shall not fail you.’”
A statue in the Capitol
A statue of Bethune, representing the state of Florida, will soon be installed in the National Statuary Hall collection at the U.S. Capitol Building.
Bethune will be the first Black American to represent any state in the collection, according to a statement by Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.). Each state has two statues in the hall, and Bethune’s will replace one of a Confederate general that had represented Florida there since 1922 before being removed in September. (A statue of Rosa Parks in the hall was commissioned by Congress and does not represent a particular state.)
Bethune’s statue was carved from a large piece of marble quarried in the Italian Alps. “The statue is more than a commemoration,” said Jill Watts, a professor of history at California State University-San Marcos and author of “The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt.”
Watts, who spoke at a U.S. Capitol Historical Society panel discussion in January, said Bethune’s statue represents her activism and is “an extension of her political presence that she established in this ‘Black Cabinet’ period.” Watts said that Bethune was “critical to the Black Cabinet,” a self-organized advisory group to FDR.
According to the sculptor, the Bethune statue is carved from the finest marble in the world. Inscribed on its pedestal are Bethune’s name and a quote for which she is famous: “Invest in the human soul. Who knows, it may be a diamond in the rough.”
The training school would merge with Cookman Institute of Jacksonville, Fla., in 1923, to become the Daytona-Cookman Collegiate Institute, which in 1931 was renamed Bethune-Cookman College. In 2007, it became Bethune-Cookman University after adding a graduate program.
“Dr. Bethune was a visionary, an entrepreneur, a business executive, a friend and adviser to five US Presidents, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt, President Calvin Coolidge, President Herbert Hoover, and President Harry S. Truman,” Bethune-Cookman University says on its website. “She was close friends with Eleanor Roosevelt, who actually had her own guest room in Dr. Bethune’s home.”
The statue shows Bethune holding a black rose. “Dr. Bethune was captivated by the beauty of a rose with a particular dark hue,” the Bethune Statuary Project explains on its website. She would often refer to her students as her “Black roses.”
The statue also depicts Bethune holding a walking stick, which, according to the Statuary Project, symbolizes a gift from President Roosevelt.
A life of firsts
Mary Jane McLeod was born on July 10, 1875, near Mayesville, S.C., according to the National Park Service, which operates the Mary McLeod Bethune Council House, a national historic site in Washington.
Her father, Samuel McLeod, and her mother, Patsy McIntosh McLeod, were born enslaved. As a child, Mary attended the Presbyterian Mission School in Mayesville, according to her résumé. She graduated in 1893 from Scotia Seminary in Concord, N.C. In 1898, she married Albertus Bethune, and they had one son. Mary wanted to be a missionary, but the mission told her it was no longer sending Black Americans to Africa.
In 1895, she began teaching at the Haines Institute in Augusta, Ga. She taught at schools in South Carolina and Florida before founding the Daytona Normal and Industrial School and serving as president of Bethune-Cookman College from 1904 to 1942.
“At the time, it was one of the very few institutions below the Mason-Dixon Line where African Americans could receive something higher than a high school diploma,” the National Park Service says on its website.
According to the Women’s History Museum, Bethune became the highest-ranking Black woman in government when Roosevelt appointed her in 1936 as director of Negro affairs for the National Youth Administration.
A year later, Bethune organized a conference on “The Problems of the Negro and Negro Youth,” according to the Women’s History Museum. In 1940, she became vice president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Persons. She helped create the Women’s Army Corps and ensured it was racially integrated, according to the museum, and in 1945, she was the only woman of color at the founding conference of the United Nations.
Bethune, who was also an entrepreneur, co-owned a beach resort in Daytona, Fla., and co-founded a life insurance company. She also founded the Mary McLeod Hospital and Training School for Nurses in Daytona Beach, which, according to Bethune-Cookman University, was “the only school of its kind that served African American women on the east coast.”
Bethune and Carter G. Woodson were friends, and Bethune became the first female president of Woodson’s organization, the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History.
In 1927, Bethune met Eleanor Roosevelt when Roosevelt invited her to a meeting of the National Council of Women of the United States, according to the Mary McLeod Bethune Council House National Historic Site. Roosevelt was embarrassed when White women attending the meeting refused to sit next to Bethune, the only Black woman invited.
But then Sara Delano Roosevelt, Franklin’s mother, whom Bethune would later describe as “that grand old lady,” took her by the arm and put her in the “seat of honor” to the right of Eleanor Roosevelt.
“I can remember, too, how the faces of the Negro servants lit up with pride when they saw me seated at the center of that imposing gathering,” Bethune wrote later. “From that moment my heart went out to [Sara] Roosevelt. I visited her at her home many times subsequently, and our friendship became one of the most treasured relationships of my life.”
Through that relationship, she became friends with Eleanor Roosevelt. Their friendship “soon ripened into a close and understanding mutual feeling.” According to Bethune-Cookman University, Bethune advised Eleanor Roosevelt to use her influence to integrate the Civilian Pilot Training Program and bring it to historically Black schools, leading to the graduation of some of the country’s first Black pilots.
During their evening meeting in 1943 at the White House, Bethune and Roosevelt spoke for 40 minutes, “touching on such subjects as anti-Negro discrimination, and the progress our forces were making in the war abroad,” Bethune wrote.
Roosevelt promised Bethune that he would implement programs to help train Black people. “Your people and all minorities shall have their chance,” Bethune recalled Roosevelt saying.
As she left the room, Bethune wrote, Roosevelt shook her hand.
“Mr. President,” Bethune recalled telling him, “the common people feel they have someone in the While House who cares.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/03/01/mary-mcleod-bethune-roosevelt-statue/
2022-03-05 13:59:00Z
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