Keepers of the dream: as Bethune-Cookman College celebrates 100 years, school officials, alumni say mission has not changed

Black Issues in Higher Education, Nov 18, 2004 by Kendra Hamilton

From this humble beginning, Mary McLeod Bethune rose to become a legend in education, the peer of giants like Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois of Fisk University and Lincoln University's Dr. Horace Mann Bond; in the realm of social action, a "clubwoman" par excellence and tireless worker for child welfare and racial uplift; in politics, a valued advisor to U.S. presidents.

And the school she founded, the modestly named Daytona Literary and Industrial School for Training Negro Girls, became her legacy. Bethune-Cookman today has an enrollment of nearly 3,000, an annual budget of more than $50 million and an endowment of $26 million and rising.

For these reasons and many others, "Mrs. Bethune" was the one plus ultra of Black womanhood for young Black women who came of age in the 1950s and early 1960s. With that shock of snow white hair above her impeccable dress suits, she was a fascinating mixture: a wife and mother, a "race woman," a highly successful career woman. She managed to embody all the Victorian virtues so admired by our mothers while also embracing thoroughly modern values in education, in her career choices and in her tireless political activism.

Dr. Sheila Flemming, dean of the school of social sciences at Bethune-Cookman College, thinks it's a shame that more people don't know about "Mrs. Bethune."

"There have been so many changes in our communications system and our technology," she says. "Most people recall Martin Luther King because he came during the age of television. And in terms of our young people and their understanding of Black culture, they tend to take lead from the popular media. So Dr. King they've learned about--Malcolm X and Rosa Parks, they've learned about them."

Bethune, who died nearly a half-century ago, might have to wait for a movie treatment or a miniseries before her legend can capture the imagination of a broad segment of the youth population. But her story has nothing if it doesn't have cinematic sweep.

According to Flemming's official history of the school, The Answered Prayer to a Dream: Bethune-Cookman College, 1904-1994, Mary Jane McLeod was born July 10, 1875, in Maysville, S.C., just two years before the end of Reconstruction. The 15th of 17 children, Bethune's parents and most of her siblings were born into slavery. Indeed, the family had to be reassembled from various plantations after the slave regime fell. Her parents then purchased a five-acre farm they called the "Homestead" and set about growing cotton, with young Mary Jane working in the fields alongside her brothers and sisters.

Bethune's parents saw something special in the little girl, however, and were determined that she accept an offer from a Quaker woman to attend school. She received a scholarship from Scotia Seminary near Concord, N.C.,--now known as Barber-Scotia College. After graduating in 1894, she was awarded a second scholarship to an institution for the training of missionaries, Dwight Moody's Institute for Home and Foreign Missions in Chicago. The dream of going to Africa was thwarted, however, when she was informed after a year at the school that there were "no openings for Negro missionaries in Africa."