Education: Matriarch

Mary McLeod Bethune starts her working day with prayer. In her Washington, D.C. office she reads to her fellow workers from The Optimist’s Good Morning, a devotional hand-me-down from the late John D. Rockefeller. One of her favorite passages begins: “With this new day, O God, let some new strength be mine.” The staff of the National Council of Negro Women says a fervent amen. Though she was 71 last week, Mary Bethune still runs them ragged.

Last week warmhearted Mrs. Bethune, widely regarded as her race’s First Lady, paid a flying birthday visit to San Francisco, where Mayor Roger Lapham and California’s Attorney General Robert Kenny helped her celebrate. (She crowed happily: “These parties are getting more interracial every year—and for that reason I enjoy them more each year.”) In Washington, 12,000 fans at a special Negro ball game in Griffith Stadium sang Let Me Call You Sweetheart to the absent guest of honor. In 38 other U.S. cities, her admirers remembered the day.

You Do It. Mary Bethune knows how to make other people work. She likes to recall that her mother, an emancipated slave, bossed a family of 17 and pulled the purse-strings to boot. In West Africa, Mary’s ancestors come from a matriarchal tribe where the women led their men around by the nose. She looks over a job or problem, then commands: “This and this need to be done. You do it.” People seem to.

Born in a cabin in the cotton, Mary McLeod went to work early. As a child, she says, “I was a great little picker. I knew how to organize things.” When she got a chance to go to school, five miles away, she taught her family every night what she had learned.’She got a scholarship at Chicago’s Moody Bible Institute, but went back South, disappointed, when the missions would not send her to Africa.

Then Mary got married, and set up school in 1904 in Daytona Beach, Fla. “on $1.50 and faith.” Her first pupils were five little girls and her son. They used charcoal for pencils, mashed elderberries to make ink. The curriculum included manual training; her pupils repaired junk-pile furniture so they would have something to sit on.

Faith & Sweet Potatoes. In two years Mrs. Bethune’s school was teaching 250 girls. By selling sweet-potato pie and ice cream to the railroad construction gangs, she raised enough money to buy the oozing city dump (known as “Hell’s Hole”). Negro workmen, who took out part of their pay in tuition, built Faith Hall with secondhand bricks on 32 acres reclaimed from the dump.

Sweet-singing Mary Bethune and her girls entertained at swank Daytona hotels, passing a hat after each performance. One day a sewing-machine tycoon dropped in a $20 bill. He followed it up by visiting Mrs. Bethune’s school, and eventually left it $67,000 in his will. Mrs. Bethune sought out other angels. She rode a bicycle up to the secluded front door of Ivory Soap’s James Gamble, talked him into helping out the school.

Today Bethune-Cookman* is a four-year, co-ed college—with 450 students and an $800,000 campus. The emphasis is still on vocational training. Like Booker T. Washington, President Emeritus Bethune thinks Negro education’s first job is to teach job skills to Negroes. (Most of Bethune-Cookman’s 2,350 graduates are teachers.)

Freedom Isn’t Divisible. But Mrs. Bethune has a faith in political action that Booker T. would never have tolerated. Says she: “Without the Negroes’ exercise of the franchise, neither the white nor the black can be free.” Eloquent Mary Bethune has been stumping the country for years against the poll tax, for the anti-lynching bill and the FEPC. Sometimes her good friend Eleanor Roosevelt shares the platform.

While Franklin Roosevelt was President, Mary Bethune often visited the White House. Once, on her way up the front walk, a white Southerner stopped her and said: “Auntie, what are you doing here?” Mrs. Bethune, who has learned to “discipline my resentments,” just looked at him sweetly. Then she chirped: “Why, how do you do. Now which one of my sisters’ children are you?”

Sit Right Down. In the depression F.D.R. picked Mrs. Bethune to boss the Negro division of the National Youth Administration, the highest Government job a Negress has held. He relied on her also for extracurricular advice about Negro problems. (“He’d say: ‘Come right in, Mrs. Bethune, sit right down. Now tell me about your people.’ “) Occasionally she tried to boss the Boss—shaking her fingers under his nose to demand more funds for a pet project. When the President died, Mrs. Roosevelt sent one of his canes to Mary McLeod Bethune—a carved stick with Franklin Roosevelt’s initials on a silver band. Says Mrs. Bethune: “I swagger it sublimely. It gives me strength and courage and nothing to fear.”

*Mrs. Bethune’s school merged with the Methodist Cookman Institute (for Negro boys) in 1923.