Mary McLeod Bethune essays

Mary McLeod Bethune essays One day when Mary Jane was playing with the white children of her mothers first slave mistress, she saw a book and picked it up. When she it picked it up the little girl said, You cant read that. Put that down. The kids struck Mary Jane and stuck with her and she promised herself she would learn to read one day. (African Biographies, 16) For more than three decades (1920-1955) Mary McLeod Bethune was known as the "most influential black woman in the United States." For all blacks, but especially for black women, she emphasized the need for education and for the opportunity to break free from oppressive social and political boundaries. She urged blacks to unite in one political movement and believed that the government could be used to improve the black race. She once summarized her beliefs as "self-control, self-respect, self-reliance, and race pride." Born near Mayesville, South Carolina, Mary McLeod was the fifteenth of the seventeen children of Sam and Patsy McLeod, slaves freed after the Civil War. Beginning her education at a black mission school near Mayesville, McLeod quickly learned all its teachers could offer her, and in 1888 she won a scholarship to attend Scotia Seminary, a Presbyterian school for black girls in Concord, New Hampshire. At that school, which emphasized religion and industrial education and had both whites and blacks on its faculty, she enrolled in the normal and scientific course, which prepared her to teach. After graduating in July 1894, she received a scholarship to the Bible Institute for Home and Foreign Missions in Chicago, where she spent a year preparing for missionary work in Africa. When she learned there were no missionary openings for blacks in Africa, McLeod went to teach at the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute in Augusta, Georgia. There she met the dynamic founder and principal of the school, Lucy Laney, whose service to others made her an im...