In her last will and testament, she wrote to future generations:
“I leave you love. I leave you hope. I leave you the challenge of developing confidence in one another. I leave you a thirst for education. I leave you faith. I leave you racial dignity. I leave you a desire to live harmoniously with your fellow men. I leave you, finally, a responsibility to our young people.”
Mary McLeod Bethune died of a heart attack on May 18, 1955, at her home in Daytona Beach. She was 79 years old.
Newspaper columnist Louis E. Martin wrote: “She gave out faith and hope as if they were pills and she some sort of doctor.”
Today, Bethune-Cookman University stands on the former dump where she scavenged supplies. A statue of her in Washington, D.C.’s Lincoln Park was the first monument to honor an African American woman in a public park in the nation’s capital. Her home is a National Historic Landmark. She’s honored on a U.S. quarter. Two statues represent her—one in Florida’s Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol, alongside Rosa Parks.
From $1.50 and a dump to the White House.
From charred wood and elderberries to a college educating thousands.
From a child who walked ten miles to school to a woman who advised presidents and helped draft the UN charter.
Mary McLeod Bethune proved that with faith, determination, and resourcefulness, impossible becomes inevitable.
Sometimes changing the world starts with $1.50, a dump, and an unshakeable refusal to give up.
