MARY MCLEOD BETHUNE IN RELIGIOUS PERSPECTIVE: A SEMINAL ESSAY

Mary McLeod Bethune was born July 10, 1875 and died May 18, 1955. An educator and founder of Bethune-Cookman College, she became a valued counselor to four Presidents, the director of a division in a major government agency, the National Youth Administration, the founder of a major organization for human rights, the National Council of Negro Women, and a consultant to world leaders seeking to build universal peace through the creation of the United Nations. A descendant of slaves she made her heritage the basis of her struggle for the free exercise of power and influence. More than any other black leader during the interregnum between Booker T. Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr., she stood at the helm of the Negro's struggle for racial justice. She symbolized the pursuit of all women for sexual equality and greater participation in the seat of government.;Because religious faith was central to Mary Bethune's life and work her words and actions are best understood as data of religious experience. This study adumbrates the meaning of her life in light of her religious faith as concrete reality. In pursuing the relation of the reality of her faith to the quality of her leadership, this discussion takes the position that religious faith is inseparably connected with experience and that this faith is intelligible in that in any life there are two histories: the "external", an event or a series of events taken objectively; and the "internal", the assessed meaning attached to a particular event or sequence.;The significance which Mary Bethune ascribed to religious faith was integrally connected with her experience of God as the source of ultimate reality. She understood her rise to celebrity and to a position of international influence during a period of widespread social unrest in terms of the direct involvement of God in her personal history. Such an understanding fostered a profound sense of destiny and an experience of freedom which enabled her to overcome many of the barriers of race, sex, and class.;All who knew Mary McLeod Bethune acknowledged that she was a person of great religious faith. But how did her faith inspire her vision of leadership and to what end? What does her career suggest about the nature of religious leadership among blacks and women during the first half of the twentieth century? These are the questions which have guided this essay.