Chronicles of black courage: Mary McLeod Bethune started college with "$1.50 and faith" - educator

Ebony, Feb, 2002 by Lerone Jr. Bennett

COURAGE comes in different packages and speaks different languages.

There is a courage called defiance, and there is a courage called perseverance.

There is a courage that shouts and a courage that whispers.

And although courage is generally identified with tumults and trumpets, it speaks loudest perhaps in small acts performed far from the applauding crowd--in the face of doubt, ridicule and disparagement--by a great spirit who refuses to give in or give up.

Such was the spirit of the young Mary McLeod Bethune, who was saved for immortality by the courage of the cotton field and the garbage dump. We know her best at the zenith of her career, when she advised presidents and shaped the vision of a whole generation of Black youths. But there can be no understanding of her character as it has passed into history without some understanding of the indomitable tenacity of spirit of the young woman who dreamed herself out of the cotton field and created a great institution on a noxious dumping ground called "Hell's Hole."

In the course of a long and exemplary career, the great educator became a living legend and was listed among the 50 greatest women produced in America. But she maintained until the end that the road to the heights leads through a thicket of ordinary, even menial, tasks. "There is no menial work," she said once, "only menial spirits." The words she repeated on a thousand platforms became famous:

"Cease to be a drudge, seek to be an artist."

She was an artist, even in the cotton field. The daughter of former slaves and the sister of former slaves, born on July 10, 1875, near Mayesville, S.C., she was sent to the field at an early age and could pick 250 pounds of cotton by the time she was 9. But nothing--neither cotton nor drudger nor Jim Crow-dampened the spirit of young Mary Jane, who transcended her environment by refusing to be limited by the limits of her environment. Always everywhere, even in the cotton field, she dreamed dreams. She dreamed of books and light and a world where Black virtue and beauty would not be crushed by bales of whiteness.

"I knew then," she said later, "as I stood in the cotton field helping with the farm work that I was called to a task which I could not name or explain."

She knew it, but the Jim Crow laws of South Carolina did not know it. Unbelievable as it may seem in this age, when it is fashionable to decry the quality of Black schools, there were no schools for Blacks in Mayesville. Young Mary Jane was 11 when the Presbyterians opened a one-room mission school. She walked five miles a day to this school and completed the limited curriculum. She then returned to the cotton field, for there were no public high schools for Blacks in her area.

A lesser spirit would have been crushed by this setback, but in her ease, as in so many other eases in Black history, defeat was a prelude, perhaps a necessary prelude, to victory. A White woman denoted a scholarship for a Black student "Who will make good." The local teacher remembered the light in the eyes of Mary McLeod, who went on to Scotia Seminary in North Carolina and Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. It was her intention then to go on to Africa as a missionary, but the eagerly awaited invitation never came, probably because of her race. Undaunted, the young woman returned to the South. She said later that she had wanted to go to Africa but that the Africa God called her to was named Florida.

In the years that followed, Mary McLeod taught school, married Albertus Bethune and gave birth to a son, Albert McLeod Bethune. Never for a moment, however, did she give up the great dream of her life--a school for Black girls. I'd been dreaming," she said, "all my life, down yonder in the cotton fields, in the classroom, singing in the Chicago slums, dreaming, dreaming, of big buildings and little children--my own institution. But where to put it?"

An answer came in 1904 when friends told her that there was a fertile missionary field in Daytona Beach, Florida, which was the focal point of a railroad construction project. Without a moment's hesitation, she caught a train for Daytona Beach and started her life's work. With capital of $1.50, raised by selling sandwiches and cakes to railroad construction workers, she rented a cottage and enrolled a handful of students. On October 4, 1904, the Daytona Literary and Industrial School for Training Negro Girls opened with five students.

Looking back later, Mrs. Bethune said:

"We burned logs and used the charred splinters as pencils. For ink, we mashed up elderberries. Strangers gave us a broom, a lamp, some cretonne to drape around the ugly packing case which served as my first desk. Day after day, I went to the city dump and visited trash piles behind hotels, looking for discarded linen and kitchenware, cracked dishes and shattered chairs. I became adept at begging for bits of old lumber, bricks and even cement. Salvaging, reconstructing, and making bricks without straw were all part of our training."