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Today, February 12th, 2024, we honor Mary McLeod Bethune, who was "[o]ne of the 20th century’s most powerful and celebrated advocates for civil rights and suffrage" (Bennet, C. 2019).
Mary Jane Mcleod was born on a cotton far near Mayesville, South Carolina. She "was the fifteenth of seventeen children of former slaves, Samuel and Patsy McIntosh McLeod. Driven by an early personal belief in the power of education, Bethune secured scholarships to Scotia Seminary in North Carolina and Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, where she was the only African-American student. Among her many pioneering educational strides, Bethune fulfilled a dream to open a school for African American girls in Florida in 1904."
"Bethune turned her sights toward women’s suffrage in the early 1900s, when there was little role for African-American women, especially in the South. In 1912, she joined the Equal Suffrage League, an offshoot of the National Association of Colored Women. In an era when even African-American men couldn’t vote because of Jim Crow laws, Bethune watched as white-dominated voting rights and suffrage organizations marched and protested nationwide.
Following the 1920 passage of the 19th amendment, Bethune rode a bicycle door-to-door raising money to pay the 'poll tax,' a tax imposed by white lawmakers to suppress black voting. Because a literacy test was also required, she conducted night classes to teach reading. When 80 members of the Ku Klux Klan threatened to burn her school, Bethune held an all-night school-front vigil with a groundskeeper and some of her students. The Klan backed down, and Bethune led a procession of 100 African Americans to the polls to vote for the first time in the Daytona mayoral election.
The story of her defiance of the KKK spread, and Bethune became a popular speaker for the rights of African Americans. Inspired by W.E.B. DuBois, she opened her school’s library to the public, providing the first free source of reading material for African Americans in Florida." (What Is A Vote Worth, 2019b)
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