Education, democracy and the remarkable life and work of Mary McCleod Bethune

DAN RICHARDS: From the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, this is Trending Globally. I'm Dan Richards. The Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol is a stately room just off the Great Rotunda, whose walls are lined with, you guessed it, statues. The statues are donated from each of the 50 states, honoring influential people from those states. And for most of the Hall's existence, there was not a single statue representing a Black American. But that changed in Twenty Twenty-Two.

Who, you might ask, became the first Black person to have their likeness represented in the Statuary Hall? Well, it was the educator, civil rights activist, and government official Mary McLeod Bethune. Bethune, who was born in Eighteen Seventy-Five and died in Nineteen Fifty-Five, might not be the first name you would have guessed. But as Noliwe Rooks, chair of Africana Studies at Brown University, explains in her new book, A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit, The Vision of Mary McLeod Bethune, Bethune's place in the Statuary Hall is well-deserved.

NOLIWE ROOKS: I can follow figures who come from very modest, very humble beginnings and climb to great heights, but they don't always insist that the least of these come through those doors with them. And for her, she insisted at every stage that people who were worse off than her, that they be bettered by her service. And that, for me, that's the inspiration.

DAN RICHARDS: Noliwe's book, which was recently nominated for an NAACP Image Award, is part biography, part personal memoir and part analysis of a period in American history that's often overlooked in the story of Black America's fight for civil rights. If you've never heard of Bethune, this book is for you. And even if you think you know the story of Mary McLeod Bethune, this book is also for you. It will probably show you a side of her that you have not seen before.

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Noliwe Rooks, thank you so much for coming back on the Trending Globally.

NOLIWE ROOKS: Thank you so much for having me.

DAN RICHARDS: So I wonder if we could just start a little bit with some of the biography of this figure that you write about-- Mary McLeod Bethune. So she was born in Eighteen Seventy-Five in South Carolina.

NOLIWE ROOKS: Yep.

DAN RICHARDS: And I wonder if you could just describe her sort of childhood and early life a little bit.

NOLIWE ROOKS: So she was the 15th of 17 children born to her parents, Sam and Patsy. Sam and Patsy were enslaved in Mayesville, South Carolina. So she's the first person to be born free.

DAN RICHARDS: In her family.

NOLIWE ROOKS: In her family. Her family are sharecroppers. By the time Bethune is 12, there's a missionary group that has started schooling Black children in the rural South. So people start coming around her community, knocking on doors, just saying, we're looking for children who we can school. Now, of course, education costs money at this point. So it's not public education as we know it. There were religious entities that were taking up donations and charities.

So it's-- so we would like one person. We can take one person from Mayesville. And everybody said, you want Mary. Mary is the one. If we can have one as a community, Mary is the one. In a biography, she tells the story of hearing this knock on the door. There's a woman there, a white woman there, who's a teacher, who's saying, we would like Mary to come to school. We'll pay for it. It will last this long. It was a two-mile walk there and back.

And of course, Mary's parents are like, but we're about survival here. Mary works. So a 12-year-old in this point in American history across race, childhood was not what we think of it as now. A 12-year-old was a worker.

DAN RICHARDS: Right.

NOLIWE ROOKS: And I think this is central to who Mary McLeod Bethune comes later. Her parents say, she can go. But every day she walks back in this house, what we're going to need is her to teach her brothers and sisters and her nieces and nephews what she learned that day. She doesn't get to be too tired. She doesn't get to have forgotten. Her job will be to impart what she learns to everybody else.

DAN RICHARDS: And her responsibility to teach wouldn't stop with her siblings.

NOLIWE ROOKS: She begins to go around to the larger community, and she begins to read letters that older people are getting from family members who have migrated away. Literacy rates being what they were, she would read the newspaper to community members so they had a sense of what was happening in the rest of the world. She turned education into a community resource. For me, that is such a key feature of who she was and really important understanding how it was that she came to touch the lives of so many Black children, Black people, Black community folks through education.

DAN RICHARDS: Inspired by her Methodist teachers, Bethune continued her education and dreamed of becoming a missionary.

NOLIWE ROOKS: First, she goes to Scotia College, which is a Methodist school. And then she goes to Chicago to Moody College of Bible, where she is being evangelical. What you learned in Chicago was to profess.

DAN RICHARDS: Bethune wanted to follow in the footsteps of the missionaries who trained her and spread the gospel around the world, to one part of the world in particular.

NOLIWE ROOKS: She wants to profess Christ to Black people in Africa. She graduates and she's at the top of her class.

DAN RICHARDS: But when Bethune declares--

NOLIWE ROOKS: I too would like my posting in Africa.

DAN RICHARDS: --she's told that--

NOLIWE ROOKS: Only white people can save Black people in Africa. We can't send Black people to Africa to save their souls. She's crushed. She's completely devastated. It never occurred to her that she would not be allowed. That wasn't her understanding of religion or the Methodist.

DAN RICHARDS: So instead of becoming a missionary--

NOLIWE ROOKS: She shook it off and said, well, then, I will just have to ply my trade amongst Black people in the South.

DAN RICHARDS: So Bethune ultimately starts her own school for Black girls in Daytona, Florida, in Nineteen Oh Four. But her career eventually expands far beyond teaching and even really beyond education policy. She becomes more of a civil rights leader. And we'll get to more of that story in a bit. But I wonder, do you think that experience of exclusion based on her race at that point in life contributed to her interest in working beyond education? Because really, her career takes a turn into a much broader scope.

NOLIWE ROOKS: Here's what I would say about education for Mary McLeod Bethune. For her, education was central as a way of building capacity for the protection of Black women and Black children. And she thought that that capacity had to do with politics, electoral politics, and she saw education as the kind of treasure chest that she was opening that allowed people to vote.

DAN RICHARDS: In Florida, like much of the South at that time, the link between education and political power for Black Americans was hardly theoretical.

NOLIWE ROOKS: There were literacy tests, in Florida in particular, but all across the former 13 slave-holding states in the United States. So because so few Black people could read, had been taught to read, formal education was so spotty that it was a huge impediment-- the reason it was on the books was it was a huge impediment to Black people being able to vote.

And so one of the first things that she did with her school was to start adult literacy classes for people in the community, and she specifically connected the idea of literacy to democracy. She specifically said, there is no way that you're going to be able to be a citizen. Voting is a key feature of citizenship and a key feature of democracy. And what they've done is decided if you can't read, you can't be a citizen. You can't practice democracy.

DAN RICHARDS: Bethune's career is filled with examples of her approaching roadblocks that Black Americans were facing and seeing opportunities. One other example.

NOLIWE ROOKS: One of her students gets appendicitis. And at the time, there were no hospitals in that area of Florida that would serve Black people. So they go to the white hospital and she's doubling over. She's in all kinds of pain. And the white nurses who there are like, well, obviously you can't come inside the building. So they set the child up, who's 14, on the back porch and basically performed surgery on her with no anesthesia because they're like, we're not giving anesthesia to Black people here in our white hospital.

Bethune comes the next day, finds her student on the back porch cut up in pain, and decides right then that she's going to found a hospital. She starts going to Black medical schools in the South and saying that she would like them to come and start a basically it's a clinic. Basically do your residency, basically learn how to be doctors.

DAN RICHARDS: Teaching hospital.

NOLIWE ROOKS: It's like a teaching hospital. It is the first one in Florida, but one of the first ones in the South. And so doctors, people from Meharry, people from Howard, Black medical schools worked out how to do their residency there. Her real goal it was that. But also, she wanted to train nurses. She wanted Black women to be able to have jobs as nurses, and there were no schools that were doing that. So she starts a nursing program at the school that she started and is seeing to the greater Black community in the area who for the first time has health care.

DAN RICHARDS: But it was about more than health care and about more than education.

NOLIWE ROOKS: What she teaches Black people in that area, and ultimately nationally, is about the power of a Black institution, what it means when you own the institution, what you can do with it, and how education is ultimately connected to many things outside of that pencil and paper.

DAN RICHARDS: That example, I think, points to her ambition and her work ethic, also her ability to social network. And there are examples throughout the book that touch on this. I wonder, at a time when it was so incredibly rare for a Black person, never mind a Black woman to reach the heights she did, what do you account for how she was so successful? Was it charisma? Was it work ethic? Was it like being in the right place at the right time?

NOLIWE ROOKS: Like how did she do it? So I'll tell you two things. One is a kind of woo-woo spiritual thing, and then another is much more practical. The first, she did an interview in the Nineteen Thirties talking about her childhood. And one of the things that she talks about is being born with a caul over her face. So this is something for rural Southerners. It's just the placenta. Some babies end up coming out with the placenta on their face.

This has become a marker of an ability to see. W. E. B. Du Bois was also born with a caul on his face, and he said it gifted him with second sight. That's the way that he talked about it. It allowed him to see between worlds, between races. So Bethune was born with a caul on her face, and she says that she always just knew she was special. There was something about her that she just seemed to know things that other people didn't know.

DAN RICHARDS: This self-confidence was also reinforced by her parents.

NOLIWE ROOKS: She had a conviction and a faith in herself that her parents completely formed and nurtured as someone special. She was a little Black girl who grew up in the South believing she was special. So that's one thing. The second thing, though, that accounts for who she became and how she became it was her meeting Eleanor Roosevelt.

DAN RICHARDS: By the mid-Nineteen Twenties, Bethune had become a nationally recognized figure in the worlds of education, women's rights, and civil rights. The school she had founded was growing dramatically and was on its way to becoming a college, with her as its first president. In Nineteen Twenty-Four, Bethune was elected president of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, which organized groups around the country to advocate for the rights of Black women. In Nineteen Twenty-Seven, Bethune was invited to a meeting of women's groups in DC held by a well-known philanthropist and political activist named Eleanor Roosevelt.

NOLIWE ROOKS: This is before her husband, FDR is elected governor of New York. So he's not-- it's pre-White House, even pre-governor's mansion.

DAN RICHARDS: So Bethune arrives at this event in Nineteen Twenty-Seven on the invitation of Eleanor Roosevelt.

NOLIWE ROOKS: And she's the only Black person in the room. And immediately, all of these women, the white women, are just completely scandalized because they're not used to socializing with Black women. DC is as segregated as any place else. They do not interact with Black women, and here you are at a society event. The white women are like, we can't stay. If she stays, we can't stay. We're not racist. We don't hate her, but this is just not how it's done.

And Eleanor Roosevelt says to her guests, she will be sitting right next to me on my right hand. If the rest of you need to leave, you feel free. But she and I will be right here.

DAN RICHARDS: It marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship. Bethune's career as an educator and activist continued to flourish, and as Eleanor Roosevelt's political influence rose, so did Bethune's. Bethune advised presidents Coolidge and Hoover on child welfare issues. And when FDR took office, Bethune became a key member of what became known as the Black cabinet, an informal group of advisors that helped to guide policy around issues facing Black Americans.

In Nineteen Thirty-Nine, on the eve of the US entering World War II, Bethune also played a role in bringing fighter pilot training programs to historically Black colleges, an initiative that would eventually produce America's first Black military pilots, known as the Tuskegee Airmen. Bethune's influence was so far-reaching, and often in a way that was somewhat behind the scenes, that it can be difficult to make sense of her career as a whole. But as Noliwe sees it, everything Bethune did shared a guiding philosophy.

NOLIWE ROOKS: Every room that she ended up in, every initiative that she worked on, every bill that she supported once she took up residence in the federal government was aimed at broadening who democracy was for and how you could access it. That and education and employment. Those were her North stars. And I think that, probably more than many things, is what inspires me about her.

And I can follow figures who climb to great heights, who come from very modest, very humble beginnings and climb high. But they don't always insist that the least of these come through those doors with them. And for her, she insisted at every stage that people who were worse off than her, more poorly educated, not as well employed, not able to access support, that they be bettered by her service. And that, for me, that's the inspiration.

DAN RICHARDS: You write how the process of writing and researching this book made you rethink what you thought you knew about this figure. And you wrote about how earlier in your life, maybe you had considered Bethune more of an accommodationist to white power, as you write, than an activist. But that is not quite how you feel anymore. And I wonder if you could just walk me through that change. What was the image you did have of her and how it changed?

NOLIWE ROOKS: What I had always heard is that she was just besties with powerful white people and she got very rich from that, but that it didn't really have a lot to do with any other Black people. It was one of these stories where you ascend, where you are brilliant. There are lots of stories of Black people, or any people, who manage in the worst kinds of circumstances to ascend to great heights. They're usually told as these bootstrap, you pick yourself up. You manage all by yourself to rise to these heights. And it's a real individualistic story.

I thought that that's who she was. I thought that, yeah, she had just done some things, but they were mostly important because they made her a great person. I did not understand the extent to which her whole focus was making the nation better, making things better for women, making things better for kids. So that's the big story, I think, that I knew I had gotten wrong.

DAN RICHARDS: This book isn't just about Bethune. It's also about you and your connection, both intellectually, but also literally your family's connection to this history. Your grandparents, after all, were both educators in Florida. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that history and your grandparents and how their story overlaps with this figure.

NOLIWE ROOKS: This is how I started to understand what I had gotten wrong about Southern Black people and political activism at that period of time, is I was looking for-- I have a book coming out in the spring that's about education. It's about my grandparents. And as I was telling the story of my grandparents, as I was finding their engagement pre-Brown v. Board with segregated education in this school in Clearwater, Florida, as I started to unpack that story, I found that Mrs. Bethune, who had been the president of the Black Teachers Association for a couple of years, and my grandfather, and some of their friends, who are now legendary civil rights figures, were all in Florida.

My grandmother and some of these other folks, Harry and Harriet Moore, among them, all went to Bethune-Cookman. They learned education. They learned what teaching was. But as I said earlier, for Bethune, education was never just education. It was you use this to do something else. So to use Black teachers and Black schools in the segregated South as a launching pad for Black politics more broadly, Black lobbying, they had phenomenal success over the course of four or five years where they were telling white politicians, we can swing this election your way, our 2,500 registered voters. But what will we get out of it?

And to find that my grandparents were so closely tied to Bethune's vision, but part of a much larger network of political movers and shakers that I just didn't know. I just-- they were just my grandparents. I just know they were just like the people who seemed a little out of touch, a little old who loved me to distraction and I love them, but I didn't think about them in that kind of way. And so to first come across Bethune looking for my grandparents, like I was really-- I was looking for them.

And to come across what she had done, who she was, and how even as she ascended to national and international heights. But what is central for her are those things that I first found looking for my grandparents, which is dignity, work, democracy, and citizenship.

DAN RICHARDS: As Noliwe mentioned, Bethune, over the course of her life, became quite wealthy. But as she sees it, Bethune's work as an entrepreneur and businessperson remained connected to Bethune's mission to empower Black people. One example of this.

NOLIWE ROOKS: So she founded a beach.

DAN RICHARDS: Yes, a beach. Bethune was actually involved in the founding of two beachside developments on the East coast of Florida.

NOLIWE ROOKS: She founded Bethune Beach. Soon after, she and some other business people were involved in founding a beach called American Beach.

DAN RICHARDS: While Bethune Beach struggled financially as a development, American Beach became a vibrant community for wealthy and middle class Black families. It was financed using the pension from one of the US's largest Black-owned insurance companies. These projects were not charities. They were real estate developments.

But as Noliwe described, their mission was bigger than pure profit motive. It was about using the wealth that existed in Black communities to create safe, joyful spaces for Black people when segregation was still an unchangeable fact of life. It was an idea that was summed up by American Beach's motto.

NOLIWE ROOKS: Relaxation without humiliation. Just the idea that there's some place that you can just be, that you own it and it is not just for the very, very wealthy.

DAN RICHARDS: A vision that had been compelling to Noliwe's own family. Her grandparents had bought a house on American Beach.

NOLIWE ROOKS: We went every summer to American Beach, again, without me knowing much about what it was. It was just, we're going to the beach. This idea of relaxation as necessary for Black people to feel human, fully human, was relatively new at the time. No one was talking about relocating. I mean, again, people were like, go work. We need money. Like, what are you going to be laying around on the beach?

But this was a you have to revitalize. You have to know joy. You have to have space where you can laugh. And it is just completely revolutionary to me that there were people who understood that in the midst of this nadir, this Jim Crow segregation that was founded on ideas of Black inferiority and white supremacy. We want Black children to laugh.

DAN RICHARDS: As Bethune got older, she started to take a more global interest in the fight for equality. In some ways, it was an outgrowth of an interest she'd had for a long time.

NOLIWE ROOKS: So Mrs. Bethune had always been interested in traveling. She grew up hearing that she had a grandmother from Senegal who was enslaved, who had been a Princess. You have people in Africa. That is your Homeland. It's part of why she wanted to go be a missionary. She felt connected to the continent because those stories had been passed down.

DAN RICHARDS: She started to write and speak more and more about the relationship between the fight for civil rights in the United States and the fight against colonialism that was growing in countries around the world.

NOLIWE ROOKS: In Nineteen Forty-One, '2, '3, you see her start saying, well, why would we just be confined to the US? These issues around employment and safety, there are women all over the world who actually need to become aware of what rights they have. And while she never took a foot off the pedal about Black women, Black children in the United States, she had a larger vision.

DAN RICHARDS: In Nineteen Forty-Five, she was appointed by President Truman to join the US delegation that would help create the United Nations charter. She was the only Black woman in the delegation. In the last years of her life, her vision indeed grew in size and scope. But according to Noliwe, her values never changed.

NOLIWE ROOKS: She had a North star that started for her very young, that had something to do with education, women, kids, dignity, citizenship, and democracy. And there's no stage of her life where you don't find her crafting an argument that's woven from those strands.

DAN RICHARDS: Bethune was really active in the first half of the 20th century. And I wonder, how do you think about her in the context of the Civil Rights Movement that came after her? You quote a historian in the book who describes her as something of a transitional figure in the story of American civil rights. Like, what did she share and make space for, for the next generation? And how was she different?

NOLIWE ROOKS: For Black civil rights study, there's this period from the Jim Crow period that a historian named Rayford Logan calls the nadir, the bottom the worst, the most difficult period for Black rights. I mean, the rights have been given. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution guarantee the end of slavery, citizenship rights, and that you could vote. So the rights were there, but it's a story of what do you do when they're there and withheld at every turn and you have no recourse, and all you have is your belief that there's something else.

Mrs. Bethune, she dies in '55, right before the Montgomery bus boycott. She dies on the eve of Brown v. Board being enacted. So these hallmarks have not quite come into view where you're seeing that kind of organized mass protest. But the fact, the belief that you could have organized mass protest comes from people like A. Philip Randolph.

DAN RICHARDS: A Black labor leader and contemporary of Bethune's.

NOLIWE ROOKS: He had an organization, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, that he turned into an economic and political force at the highest levels of government by starting with Black workers. Bethune is doing the same thing, I found out, along with my grandparents, starting with Black teachers, Black workers, a certain segment of Black people, and organizing them in defense of Black rights broadly and mobilizing Black people.

DAN RICHARDS: As Noliwe's book illustrates, Bethune's era has a lot to teach us about the broader history of the fight for civil rights in America.

NOLIWE ROOKS: There are no strategies that we see in the '50s that weren't actually perfected between the '20s and the '40s. We just leave that period out. We go from Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth to Martin Luther King in the easy history that we tell.

DAN RICHARDS: There are also lessons from Bethune and her era that can maybe help us make better sense of the present too.

NOLIWE ROOKS: For me and mine, I'm like, let's look at that period as a continuation because, if nothing else, I think it helps us understand how maybe for those of us in contemporary America need to see that period between the '50s and the '70s as a prehistory that can animate where we're going. It can help us to see the connections between the work that still needs to be done and answer the question about, if democracy is a journey or a destination, which is one of the questions, I think, for Black freedom struggles, Black freedom fighters that continually re-arises even if we don't state it like that. Is democracy for us a destination or is it a journey?

DAN RICHARDS: And the way you're describing it just there also makes me think, is there something we can learn in the present too from Bethune's life and her generation of how to persevere and think creatively at what can feel like a low point? And I think for a lot of people who work in social justice and anti-racism, we're in a moment right now that can feel a little bit like a low point. And do you think her work offers something for how to envision a path forward?

NOLIWE ROOKS: Bethune has reordered my world in terms of being visionary and pragmatic and understanding the basic elements that are required for survival in a moment like this. Because there's nothing about the moment that she lived in that is better than the moment that some of us believe we may be coming into. What she believed is that you had to have faith. You had to believe it.

Now that, I struggle with, sometimes. You have to believe something else is possible. She believed that you had to have folks who believed like you, who were heading in the same direction, who believed that freedom would look similar to them. You had to have them, and they had to be willing to follow you in those directions. And she believed that courage was required. Courage was absolutely necessary.

And my courage falters and my faith falters regularly. So I can tell you what she taught me we need. I have not learned from her how to have other people believe it in the same way that she made me believe it.

DAN RICHARDS: Well, I think this book is a wonderful step for helping other people to see and believe that type of future. So thank you so much for writing it and thank you so much for coming on to Trending Globally.

NOLIWE ROOKS: Thank you so much. Thank you for reading it.

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DAN RICHARDS: This episode of Trending Globally was produced by me, Dan Richards, and Zach Hirsch, with production assistance from Errol Danahy. Our theme music is by Henry Bloomfield. Additional music by the Blue Dot Sessions. If you like this show, please leave us a rating and review on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps other people to find us. And if you haven't subscribed to our show, please do that too.

If you want to learn more about the life and work of Mary McLeod Bethune, you can find Noliwe Rooks' book, A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit, The Vision of Mary McLeod Bethune, in bookstores everywhere. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode of Trending Globally.