Mary mcleod bethune biography third grade
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Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune
Bethune-Cookman University’s founder, Mary McLeod Bethune, is one of America’s most inspirational daughters. Educator. National civil rights pioneer and activist. Champion of African American women’s rights and advancement. Advisor to Presidents of the United States. The first in her family not to be born into slavery, she became one of the most influential women of her generation.
Dr. Bethune famously started the Daytona Literary and Industrial Training Institute for Negro Girls on October 3, 1904 with $1.50, vision, an entrepreneurial mindset, resilience and faith in God. She created “pencils” from charred wood, ink from elderberries, and mattresses from moss-stuffed corn sacks. Her first students were five little girls and her five-year-old son, Albert Jr. In less than two years, the school grew to 250 students. Recognizing the health disparities and lack of medical treatment available to African Americans in Daytona Beach, she also founded the Mary McLeod Hospital and Training School for Nurses, which at the time was the only school of its kind that served African American women on the east coast.
Daytona Normal would continue to increase in popularity, and merged with the Cookman Institute of Jacksonville, Florida i
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Mary McLeod Bethune Facts
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The daughter of formerly enslaved parents, Mary Jane McLeod Bethune became one of the most important Black educators, civil and women’s rights leaders and government officials of the twentieth century. The college she founded set educational standards for today’s Black colleges, and her role as an advisor to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave African Americans an advocate in government.
Born on July 10, 1875 near Maysville, South Carolina, Bethune was one of the last of Samuel and Patsy McLeod’s seventeen children. After the Civil War, her mother worked for her former owner until she could buy the land on which the family grew cotton. By age nine, Bethune could pick 250 pounds of cotton a day.
Bethune benefited from efforts to educate African Americans after the war, graduating in 1894 from the Scotia Seminary, a boarding school in North Carolina. Bethune next attended Dwight Moody’s Institute for Home and Foreign Missions in Chicago, Illinois. But with no church willing to sponsor her as a missionary, Bethune became an educator. While teaching in South Carolina, she married fellow teacher Albertus Bethune, with whom she had a son in 1899.
The Bethunes moved to Palatka, Florida, where Mary worked at the Presbyterian Church and also sold insurance. In 1904, her marr