Women Builders
Mary McLeod Bethune
Mary McLeod Bethune (1875–1955) was one of seventeen
children born to slave parents in Mayesville, South Carolina. Although it was very hard for her to part from her family, Bethune left home at the age of eleven to attend school at the Scotia Seminary, where she developed an interest in missionary work. She continued her education at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago and after two years applied to be a missionary in Africa. However, no positions for African-American missionaries were available, so Bethune accepted a job teaching at the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute in Augusta, Georgia. After years of teaching, she decided to open her own school and moved to Daytona Beach, Florida, to pursue this dream. In 1904 she established the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute,
dedicated to high academic instruction and teacher training. Bethune's institute
merged with the nearby Cookman Institute in 1923, becoming Bethune-Cookman
College.
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