Mary McLeod Bethune: Building a Better World

by Mary McLeod Bethune, Elaine M. Smith (Editor)

This volume explores the multi-faceted career of Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955) in her roles as stateswoman, politician, educational leader, and social visionary. It offers a unique combination of original documentary sources and analysis of Bethune's life and work. The more than 70 documents, spanning 53 years of Bethune's public life, include letters, memoranda, position papers, newspaper columns, interviews, and speeches. Essays by the editors relate these documents to the phases of Bethune's career.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

336 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1999

About the author

Mary Jane McLeod Bethune (born Mary Jane McLeod) was an American educator, stateswoman, philanthropist, humanitarian, womanist, and civil rights activist. Bethune founded the National Council for Negro Women in 1935, established the organization's flagship journal Aframerican Women's Journal, and resided as president or leader for myriad African American women's organizations including the National Association for Colored Women and the National Youth Administration's Negro Division. She also was appointed as a national adviser to president Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom she worked with to create the Federal Council on Negro Affairs, also known as the Black Cabinet. She is well known for starting a private school for African-American students in Daytona Beach, Florida; it later continued to develop as Bethune-Cookman University. Bethune was the sole African American woman officially a part of the US delegation that created the United Nations charter, and she held a leadership position for the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps. For her lifetime of activism, she was deemed "acknowledged First Lady of Negro America" by Ebony magazine in July 1949 and was known by the Black Press as the "Female Booker T. Washington".[ She was known as "The First Lady of The Struggle" because of her commitment to gain better lives for African Americans.

Reviews

[Royal Jewel · Rating 5 out of 5]

She was an amazing woman!

[Jeremy Lucas · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the pantheon of Black American History, the most resonant names—Malcom, Martin, Frederick, Marcus, Booker—seem to get recirculated, over and over, to the detriment of equally if not more powerful voices from the same period, with one of the least remembered figures being Mary McLeod Bethune. This book is not a riveting narrative, nor should it be, as a matter of archives and records and documents, but Bethune’s life, her vast accomplishments, and her valuable insights are catalogued here in a work that illuminates her brilliance. The only reason I can find for the nation lacking much knowledge of Bethune’s existence, today, is that she was living and speaking and leading proudly during a time when women were not regarded well for doing so. In the aftermath of her death in 1955, I gather that a rippling misogyny allowed her once-prominent, once-undeniable existence to become a barely recognizable footnote in our male-obsessed past. But it’s a shame we don’t see her in the same light, the same vein, the same authoritative platform as we put the most public men of her generation.