You’ve heard of Bethune-Cookman University, but odds are, you don’t know much about Mary McLeod Bethune.

Keep reading and that will change.

Mary McLeod Bethune’s legacy extends far beyond her name on an historically Black college. Born in 1875, both her parents had been enslaved, as had many of her 16 brothers and sisters; she was 15 of 17 children.

Although her mother continued to work for the man who had once enslaved her, her parents knew they wanted a better life for their children. They went without and saved everything they could, and soon they had a farm of their own in South Carolina. Her mother would do the wash for white women, and because of this, Mary McLeod had access to white children’s nurseries. 

(That last sentence evokes the opening sequence from The Princess and The Frog, but I’m not sure the filmmakers were paying homage to this part of history.)

It was on one such trip into a white child’s nursery that Mary saw a book and picked it up, only to have it snatched away by a white child who said that Mary couldn’t read.

As an adult, she would recall this moment as the one when she decided the only difference between her and a white person was education, and she laser-focused on that.

Her town, Mayesville, which even today isn’t large (it had slightly more than 700 residents in the 2010 census) had a one-room schoolhouse for Black children, and Mary walked five miles there and five miles home every day. When she returned home every day, she would teach her brothers and sisters what she had learned.

She graduated and attended college, and after college graduation, she did social work from her home with her husband in Savannah, but in 1899 they moved to Palatka (near Jacksonville), where she took on the task of running a missionary school and working with local prisoners. 

By the early 1900s, Mary had moved to Daytona and started the Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls. She used $1.50 of her own money and invested no small amount of her own labor into creating the school — she made benches and desks from other people’s trash.

The initial class had six students.

Parents and church members raised money for the school by selling fried fish, sweet potato pies, and ice cream to the men working at the dump adjacent to the school. 

But to further fund the school, Mary turned to the white community, asking white people of influence to sit on the school’s board of directors. One of these white people was James Gamble, of Proctor & Gamble. John D. Rockefeller donated $62,000. 

I often wonder if this was truly altruistic on the part of the white donors or if there was some amount of white guilt motivating this. I don’t know, and, frankly, I don’t think it matters.

Mary championed equality for Black women in other ways, too. She served as president of the Florida chapter of the National Association of Colored Women, ultimately becoming president of the national organization in 1924. Under her leadership, the NACW bought property in Washington, D.C., which made it the first Black organization with headquarters in our nation’s capital.

Her achievements go on, almost laundry list style, of all the things she did for Black women — and Black people overall.

She sat on President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Black Cabinet; she served as the first Black woman division head in the WPA.

But perhaps her largest contribution to Florida remains that school she started with six students: It merged with Cookman College for men, and today we know it as Bethune-Cookman College, one of our nation’s historically Black colleges and universities. 

In 2018, a statue of Mary McLeod Bethune replaced one of Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith in National Statuary Hall.

One last note: Until Mary McLeod Bethune served on President’s Roosevelt’s Black Cabinet, Black people had favored the Republican Party; it was her service, coupled with a shift in the party’s priorities, that led to many Black people turning to the Democratic Party.

More people deserve to know her history.

With so much tragic Black history in our state, it’s affirming to know there’s some truly remarkable history, too.