A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit: The Vision of Mary McLeod Bethune (Significations) - Hardcover

Buch 1 von 4: Significations

Rooks, Noliwe

 
9780593492420: A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit: The Vision of Mary McLeod Bethune (Significations)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593492420 ISBN 13: 9780593492420
Verlag: Penguin Press, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

An intimate and searching account of the life and legacy of one of America’s towering educators, a woman who dared to center the progress of Black women and girls in the larger struggle for political and social liberation

When Mary McLeod Bethune died, tributes in newspapers around the country said the same thing: she should be on the Mount Rushmore of Black American achievement. Indeed, Bethune is the only Black American whose statue stands in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol, and yet for most, she remains a marble figure from the dim past. Now, seventy years later, Noliwe Rooks turns Bethune from stone to flesh, showing her to have been a visionary leader with lessons to still teach us as we continue on our journey toward a freer and more just nation.

Any serious effort to understand how the Black civil rights generation found role models, vision, and inspiration during their midcentury struggle for political power must place Bethune at its heart. Her success was unlikely: the fifteenth of seventeen children and the first born into freedom, Bethune survived brutal poverty and caste subordination to become the first in her family to learn how to read and to attend college. She gave that same gift to others when in 1904, at age twenty-nine, Bethune welcomed her first class of five girls to the Daytona, Florida, school she had founded and which would become the university that bears her name to this day. Bethune saw education as an essential dimension of the larger struggle for freedom, vitally connected to the vote and to economic self-sufficiency, and she enlisted Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and many other powerful leaders in her cause.

Rooks grew up in Florida, in Bethune’s shadow: her grandmother trained to be a teacher at Bethune-Cookman University, and her family vacationed at the all-Black beach that Bethune helped found in one of her many community empowerment projects. The story of how Bethune succeeded in a state with some of the highest lynching rates in the country is, in Rooks’s hands, a moving and astonishing example of the power of a mind and a vision that had few equals. Now, when the stakes of the long struggle for full Black equality in this country are particularly evident—and centered on the state of Florida—it is a gift to have this brilliant and lyrical reckoning with Bethune’s journey from one of our own great educators and scholars of that same struggle.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Noliwe Rooks is the chair of and a professor in Africana Studies at Brown University. Her work explores how race and gender both impact and are impacted by popular culture, social history, and political life in the United States. The author of four books and numerous articles, essays, and op-eds, Rooks has received research funding from the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, among other organizations. She lectures frequently at colleges and universities around the country and is a regular contributor to popular outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Time, and NPR.

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1

"MY NAME IS
MRS. BETHUNE"

In November 1938, Bull Connor, the commissioner of Public Safety in Birmingham, Alabama, and an ardent segregationist, threatened to arrest Eleanor Roosevelt for sitting with Black people in public. What set Bull Connor, the first lady, and twelve hundred bystanders on a collision course was the inaugural meeting of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, a group formed to discuss how Alabama and the rest of the South could reduce poverty, improve the equitable enforcement of civil and constitutional rights, make credit and banking more widely available across racial lines, improve public education, reform the sharecropping/farm tenancy system, and embrace democracy by repealing the poll tax. For many who thought things in the South were fine as they were, with Black people disenfranchised, undereducated, and overtaxed, these goals were controversial and led to charges in the local press that the conference was a front for socialists and communist sympathizers. But more than fear about the group's political agenda, the cries of "race mixing" garnered the lion's share of public and media attention. Newspaper articles reported that members of the city's Ku Klux Klan had found a woman who represented white women Democrats and was coming forward to warn everyone that the gathering was a ruse to allow Black men and white women to engage in sex with one another.

Sociologist and Fisk University president Charles Johnson reported that the attendees were a "curiously mixed body which included labor leaders and economists, farmers and sharecroppers, industrialists and social executives, government officials and civic leaders, ministers and politicians, students and interested individuals." There was one thing they had in common: they all knew that on the morning of the second day of the conference, Eleanor Roosevelt would be joining the proceedings. However, few were prepared for the sight that greeted them that morning: the entire Birmingham police department out in force at the conference center with the exterior of the auditorium encircled by police cars, wagons, and motorcycles. And inside, policemen stood or leaned against every wall. Bull Connor grabbed a bullhorn and announced that anyone who failed to "segregate apart" would face immediate arrest. The attendees obeyed, sorting themselves with Black people on one side of the auditorium and white people on the other. That is where things stood when Eleanor Roosevelt arrived with Mary McLeod Bethune by her side. Ignoring the police officers who tried to steer her to the white section, the first lady joined Bethune on the "Black" side of the room. A moment after they settled themselves, one of the policemen tapped Roosevelt on the shoulder and told her to move or face arrest. Instead of acquiescing, she produced a folding chair, placed it in the aisle between the white and Black sections, and declared she would not move again, saying, "I refuse to be segregated."

If you ever research Bethune's life, if you go looking for her in archives and oral histories, you will find that this recounting of Bethune and Eleanor Roosevelt arriving at the conference that day is an oft-told tale. I had seen the story about Eleanor Roosevelt defying Bull Connor, risking arrest, and challenging Birmingham's racial segregation laws so often that I had started to skim the words when some aspect of the event was mentioned. I found articles about the altercation in both the Black and the white press. I saw it in archives and in transcripts of audio recordings of speeches, and cited in biographical sources. Accounts always mention Eleanor Roosevelt, the first lady of the United States, and only passingly mention Mary McLeod Bethune, whom Black people at the time referred to as the "first lady of the struggle" or the "first lady of Black America." Sometimes, Bethune is not mentioned at all. Roosevelt is always the focus, and Bethune's presence is something akin to smoke rising to signal a recently extinguished fire. She is present, seen, undeniably there, but understood as the result or aftermath of something more notable having taken place. That's why I was so surprised when I came across an interview with the conference's organizer, Virginia Durr, who shared what had happened the evening before the police and the first lady arrived. Mrs. Bethune provoked an incident that set the conference attendees abuzz simply by rising and saying her name. Durr described the impact, on the first evening of the conference, of attendees being able to sit where they pleased. "It was thrilling; it was really marvelous. The new day had come; the whole South was coming together to make a new day, and it was just thrilling." She recalled,

The only thing I remember that happened particularly Sunday night was that Mrs. Louise Charlton, who had been one of the organizers . . . called on Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune, and she called her Mary; she said, Mary, do you wish to come to the platform? And Mrs. Bethune got up . . . and she said, my name is Mrs. Bethune. So, Louise Charlton had to say Mrs. Bethune, will you come to the platform. Well, that sounds like a small thing now, but that was a big dividing line. A Negro woman in Birmingham, Alabama, called Mrs. Bethune at a public meeting!

When she stood, filled her lungs, and exhaled the word Bethune in the alto tone and deliberate cadence that enthralled audiences, she announced that something new and distinct was possible, as clearly as if she had woven those exact words into sentences. She confirmed what all must surely have known, that erasing the color line involved more than where and with whom they sat but included calling a Black woman by the name to which she chose to answer. Mary, the name used to summon her to the podium, might be any number of people, but at that time, in that moment, there was only one Mrs. Bethune. A Black woman born poor and raised in the Jim Crow South, who had spent at least a decade at that point also working with government officials and wealthy philanthropists "up south" in the North, she well knew that publicly correcting a white woman risked more than rebuke; she understood that it could invite physical or economic harm. But she also knew her name and she had every reason to believe others knew it too.

By the time Mrs. Bethune rose and made clear how she should be addressed, she had spent the past decade providing her expertise to three US presidents. Her path to a seat at the national public policy table began in 1927 when Bethune attended a lunch hosted by Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who a year later would be elected governor of New York. When the white women in attendance, unused to socializing with Black people, refused to be seated with Bethune, Roosevelt placed Bethune beside her and invited any who objected to the seating arrangements to feel free to leave. The two developed a close friendship and political partnership that lasted through Eleanor's moving into the governor's mansion and later becoming the first lady.

Roosevelt advocated for Bethune to become an adviser to presidents, and the first knock on her door came in 1928, when Calvin Coolidge named her a delegate to a conference addressing child welfare in Washington, DC. Again, she was the only Black person invited to take part. That opportunity led to others. A year later, in 1929, Herbert Hoover asked her to serve on the National Commission for Child Welfare. In that role, she helped to design national surveys on health conditions, infant mortality, and public health programs. The results led to the establishment of the short-lived Child Health Day, programs to professionalize training for midwives, the passage of child labor laws, and vaccination programs to eliminate smallpox and diphtheria. In 1936, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed her to the National Youth...

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Verlag
Penguin Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593492420
ISBN 13 
9780593492420
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
208
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
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preigu
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