Mar 25, 2023 - Dr. Crystal deGregory
What does a buck fifty get you? Well, when combined with a lifetime of persistent faith, and seemingly endless hard work, the very institution from which
I write.
Let me back up. With only $1.50 in seed funding - a reality hardly imaginable now and meager even then -Mary Jane McLeod Bethune secured a four-bedroom house for rent, and in it, on Oct. 3, 1904, the Daytona Literary and Industrial School for Training Negro Girls was born.
Dr. Bethune understood education for Black people to be a part of her divine calling. Her location and timing, then, were just right as the coming of Henry M. Flagler's railroads led to Black migration and increased local demand for African American educational opportunities.
"I love you young people so deeply - so warmly. I have worked with you so earnestly - so unselfishly. I have depended upon you for help and guidance in such a motherly way that you have endeared yourselves around me," a 75-year old Dr. Bethune wrote in a March 1950 letter to her friend, journalist Alfred
Edgar Smith.
Dr. Bethune is as prominent a figure in Black women's 20th-century history as there ever was, and as such, we honor and recognize her work to make our lives possible. Beyond her many educational and entrepreneurial achievements here
in Daytona Beach, she served as president of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs in 1926 and went on to found the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) in 1935. The following year, she helped organize President Franklin Roosevelt's Federal Council on Negro Affairs. As the only woman member of the influential "Black Cabinet," Dr. Bethune leveraged her friendship
with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to lobby for integrating the Civilian Pilot Training
Program which eventually led to the authorization of the "Red Tail Angels" of Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) in Alabama in 1939.
Until 1943, she directed the National Youth Administration's (NYA) Office of Negro Affairs, championing its employment of thousands of young African Americans. In
1944, Dr. Bethune co-founded the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) to financially support the nation's private Black colleges.
And yet, with all these achievements and so many more, Dr. Bethune, in the winter of her life, lamented the threat of her being forgotten by the many people whose lives were made better because of her.
"I think of you, and sometimes wonder whether too many of you are forgetting to think of me," wrote Dr. Bethune to Smith.
It is beyond regrettable that Dr. Bethune felt even a wisp of sorrow at the possibility, much more, the reality, that far too many had neglected to love her,
to honor her and to show up and out for her as she yet lived.
After all, there aren't many instances where a woman, born in 1875 into the suffocating poverty of sharecropping within just a decade of emancipation, can lay claim to being, not only a university founder and president, but also a philanthropist, social, civic and civil rights activist, womanist, political lobbyist and advisor to multiple U.S. presidents.
To acknowledge that she did all of this without the privilege of whiteness, the benefit of maleness, or the protection of her estranged husband, with dark,
coffee-colored skin and in a body that grew large as she labored is a testament to her humanity and her commitment that belongs now to us.
And while I would admit that the hard-fought campaign to have her likeness permanently invested in the United States Capitol's National Statuary Hall last July is undeniably laudable, it does not nearly meet the great debt owed to her by generations of Americans, including this one.
It is in her example that we find our mandate to serve any of the many causes she did: civil rights, voting rights, women's rights, the rights of access to clean, safe communities, quality health care, and an education of the head, hand, and heart - especially at her beloved Bethune-Cookman University. And it is not shallow mores, but her example that all of us would do good to follow.
Even though recalling the sad poem,
"I am bleeding, but I am not dead! I'll lay me down and
bleed awhile,
And, then, I'll rise and fight again."
Dr. Bethune found, again and again, the will to keep fighting. In Black and women's history months, we must always recognize this work anew, just
as we must carry it with us throughout the year.
"That is just what I am doing... The fight is not yet over."
This article was originally published in the Orlando Sentinel.
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