Mary McLeod Bethune: Dollar Fifty and a Dream
Near Daytona, Florida
On October third, nineteen oh four, a thirty-year-old woman named Mary McLeod Bethune sat down with five young girls and her own five-year-old son in a rented house in Daytona Beach and opened a school. She had one dollar and fifty cents. She had no books, no pencils, no desks. She had, by every account, an immovable will.
Bethune was the fifteenth of seventeen children born to formerly enslaved parents in South Carolina. She had fought for and won an education, trained as a teacher, and concluded that what Black children in the American South needed most was not charity but schooling. She chose Daytona Beach deliberately. The Florida East Coast Railway was driving Black workers south in large numbers, and their daughters had nowhere to go to school.
She created pencils from charred wood and made ink from elderberries. She stuffed corn sacks with Spanish moss for mattresses. Within two years, the school had two hundred fifty students and had outgrown its rented space. Bethune raised money by selling sweet potato pies to construction workers at a nearby development and by approaching wealthy winter visitors, including tire industrialist James Gamble of Procter and Gamble, who became a critical patron.
The school became a high school, then a junior college. In nineteen twenty-three it merged with the Cookman Institute of Jacksonville to become the Bethune-Cookman College, accredited in nineteen thirty-one. It is today a university, and it is the only historically Black college or university in the United States founded by a woman.
Bethune herself became something far larger than her school. She advised five American presidents: Coolidge, Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower. Roosevelt appointed her director of Negro affairs in the National Youth Administration, making her the first Black woman to head a federal agency. She created the National Council of Negro Women. She met with world leaders and testified before Congress.
She died in Daytona Beach in nineteen fifty-five and is buried on the campus she built from a dollar fifty and a box of charred wood.
