Excerpts from:
Bethune-Cookman College 1904-1994: The Answered Prayer To A Dream
Sheila Y. Flemming, Ph.D.
 On July 10, 1875, two years before the end of Reconstruction, Mary Jane McLeod was born to two former slaves, Samuel and Patsy Macintosh McLeod, near Maysville, South Carolina. She was the fifteenth of seventeen children; most of her brothers and sisters were born in slavery. Once her family was reassembled from various plantations after slavery, her parents acquired five acres of land and built a family home known as the "Homestead". Her mother continued to work for her former owner, and her father cultivated cotton on their land. Young Mary Jane, as was the custom in the cotton regions of South Carolina, was in the fields along with the adults.
The time spent working in the cotton fields in Maysville helped shape Mary McLeod's keen work ethic and values regarding the importance of the use of the hands in labor and success. But Mary McLeod knew that God intended more for her than working in the cotton fields. She had a burning desire to learn how to read and write and was not happy until she was allowed to attend Maysville's one room schoolhouse. McLeod became the prize student of the teacher, Emma Jane Wilson, who recognized her outstanding skills. Miss Wilson recommended McLeod for a scholarship to attend Scotia Seminary near Concord, North Carolina. Upon graduation from Scotia in 1894, McLeod was awarded a scholarship to Dwight Moody's Institute for Home and Foreign Missions in Chicago. This rising young scholar had dreamed of going to Africa to minister to the spiritual and educational needs of her ancestors. However, this future "foremost woman of her race in the United States" was informed that there were "no openings for Negro Missionaries in Africa".
Mary McLeod was not one to have gone that far to be discouraged from her "missionary spirit-the spirit of doing things
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for others". Following a year at Moody's Institute she returned to Maysville to become Miss Wilson's assistant at the Presbyterian Mission School. Restless and unrequited in her ambition, she requested and received from the Presbyterian Board of Education an appointment at the Haines Institute in Augusta, Georgia. Here she honed her programmatic educational philosophy from the dynamic Lucey Craft Laney. It was at the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute that McLeod gained experience in a predominately female setting with primary, grammar, elementary normal and industrial courses. Laney also helped create a city hospital. The lessons McLeod learned from her one year's experience at Haines served her well when she established her own school.
Sometime between 1897 and 1898, McLeod was transferred by the Presbyterian Board to Kendell Institute at Sumpter, South Carolina. Here she continued to teach and render social services. But most importantly, she met Albertus Bethune, a former schoolteacher turned haberdasher. They were married in early May 1898; on February 3, 1899, she gave birth to Albertus McLeod Bethune Jr., in Savannah, Georgia. Their relationship vacillated between his desire to make money and her dream of continuing her mission work. Moreover, she now had an added responsibility-raising a son. This and mission work won out over settling down to homemaker.
While living in Savannah, Mrs. Bethune met Reverend C.J. Uggans, a Presbyterian pastor from Palatka, Florida. He offered her the opportunity to start a school in that city. At Palatka, she started a community school and worked in the jails two and three times a week, and in the sawmills and among the young people in clubs. Bethune stayed in Palatka five years, until she was encouraged to go to Daytona by Reverend S.P. Pratt who informed her that the area was fertile ground for her missionary spirit.
Having received an education at Maysville Presbyterian Mission School, Scotia Institute, and Moody's Bible Institute, having gained teaching experience at her primary school with her mentor Emma Wilson, and having arrived in Daytona Beach in 1904 and established the Daytona Literary and Industrial School for Training Negro Girls, Bethune labored the next twenty years, dividing her time and energy between making the school a success and building for herself a national reputation.
Mary McLeod Bethune became a public leader in the second decade of the twentieth century. She led a drive to register black voters in Daytona Beach which earned her a visit from the local Ku Klux Klan. Moreover during this period, Bethune was elected president of the State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs. During four years in office, she organized scattered clubs of black women throughout the Southeast to combat school segregation and the lack of health facilities among black children. In 1924, Bethune became the eighth president of the prestigious National Association of Colored Women's clubs (NACW). Among her accomplishments, during her first four years as president, was the acquisition of a national headquarters in the nation's capital.
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