05 - Women of Achievement by Benjamin Griffith Brawley

This remarkable volume, published in 1919 by the American Womens Baptist Home Mission Society, highlights the vital contributions of African American women. It eloquently addresses the often-overlooked invisible work performed by these women as mothers and wives, while also showcasing their significant roles in various industries, including medicine, education, and the arts. Additionally, this collection features inspiring short biographies of five courageous women who have made a lasting impact. - Summary by kathrinee

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Section four of Women of Achievement. This is a LibriVox recording.
All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more
information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. Recording
by Betty B. Women of Achievement by Benjamin Griffith Brawley,
Chapter five. Mary MacLeod Bethune on October third, nineteen hundred four,

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a lone woman inspired by the desire to do something
for the needy ones of her race and state, began
at Daytona, Florida, a training school for Negro girls. She
had only one dollar and a half in money, but
she had faith, energy, and a heart full of love
for her people. Today she has an institution worth not

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less than one hundred thousand dollars, with plans for extensive
and immediate enlargement, and her school is one of the
best conducted and most clear visioned in the country, which
has been the result of boundless energy and thrift joined
to an unwavering faith in God. Mary mac cleod was
born July tenth, eighteen seventy five, in a three room

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log cabin on a little cotton and rice farm about
three miles from Maysville, South Carolina. Being one in the
large family of Samuel and Patsy mac cleod. Ambitious even
from her early years, she yearned for larger and finer
things than her environment afforded. And yet even the life

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that she saw around her was to prove a blessing
in disguise, as it gave to her deeper and clearer
insight into the problems, the shortcomings, and the needs of
her people. In course of time, she attended a little
mission school in Maysville, and she was converted at the
age of twelve. Later she was graduated at Scotia's Seminary Conquered,

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North Carolina, and then she went to the Moody Bible
Institute in Chicago. In the years of her schooling, she
received some assistance from a scholarship given by Miss Mary Chrisman,
a dressmaker of Denver, Colorado. Mary mac cleod never forgot
that she had been helped by a working woman. Some
day she intended to justify that faith, and time has

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shown that never was a scholarship invested in better advantage.
In eighteen ninety eight, Mary MacLeod was married. She became
the mother of one son. Not long after, the family
moved to Palatka, Florida. Now followed the hard years of waiting,
of praying, of hoping. But through it all the earnest
woman never lost faith in herself nor in God. She

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gained experience in a little school that she taught, She
sang with unusual effect in the churches of the town,
and she took part in any forward movement or uplift
enterprise that she could. All the while, however, she knew
that the big task was yet to come. She prayed
and hoped and waited. By the fall of nineteen hundred four,

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it seemed that the time had come. In a little
rented house with five girls, Missus Bethune began what is
now the daytona normal and industrial institute for Negro girls.
By means of concerts and festivals. The first payment of
five dollars was made on the present site, then an
old dump pile. With their own hands, the teacher and

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the pupils cleared away much of the rubbish, and from
the first they invited the co operation of the people
around them by lending a helping hand in any way
they could, by being neighborly. In nineteen hundred five, a
board of trustees was organized and the school was chartered.
In nineteen hundred seven, Faith Hall, a four story frame

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house forty by fifty feet, was preyed up, sung up,
and talked up. And we can understand at what a
premium space was in the earlier days, when we know
that this building furnished dormitory accommodations for teachers and students,
dining room, reading room, storerooms, and bathrooms. To the rear

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of Faith Hall was placed a two story structure containing
the school kitchen and the domestic science room. In nineteen
hundred nine, the school found it necessary to acquire a
farm for the raising of livestock and vegetables and for
the practical outdoor training of the girls. After six weeks
of earnest work, the twelve acre tract in front of

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the school was purchased. In nineteen fourteen, a model home
was built in this year. Also, an additional west farm
of six acres, on which was a two story frame building,
was needed as for and procured. In March nineteen eighteen,
the labors of fourteen years were crowned by the erection
and dedication of a spacious auditorium, and among the speakers

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at the dedication were the Governor of Florida and the
Vice President of the United States. Efforts now look forward
to a great new dormitory for the girls. Such a
bare account of achievements, however, by no means, gives one
an adequate conception of the striving and the hoping, and
the praying that have entered into the work. To begin with,

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Daytona was a strategic place for the school. There was
no other such school along the entire east coast of Florida,
and as a place of unusual beauty and attractiveness, the
town was visited throughout the winter by wealthy tourists. From
the very first, however, the girls were trained in the
virtues of the home and in self help. Great emphasis

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was placed on domestic science, and not only for this
as an end in itself, but also as a means
for the larger training in cleanliness and thrift and good taste.
We notice strawberries are selling at fifty and sixty cents
a court, said a visitor, And you have a splendid patch.
Do you use them for your students or sell them?

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We never eat a quart when we can get fifty
cents for them, was the reply. We can take fifty
cents and buy a bone that will make soup for
us all, when a quart of berries would supply only
a few for one interested in education. Few pictures could
be more beautiful than that of the dining room at
the school in the morning of a day in mid term.

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Florida is warm, often even in midwinter. Nevertheless, rising at
five gives one a keen appetite for the early breakfast.
The ceiling is low, and there are other obvious disadvantages,
but overall is the spirit of good cheer and of home.
The tablecloths are very white, and clean flowers are on
the different tables. At the head of each. A teacher

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presides over five or six girls. The food is nourishing
and well prepared, and one leaves with a feeling that
if he had a sister or daughter, he would like
for her to have the training of some such place
as this, of such quality as the work that has
been built up, and all has been accomplished through the
remarkable personality of the woman who is the head and

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the soul of every effort, indomitable courage, boundless energy, fine tact,
and a sense of the fitness of things, kindly spirit
and firm faith in God have deservedly given her success.
Beyond the bounds of her immediate institution, her influence extends
about the year nineteen twelve. The trustees felt the need

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of so extending the work as to make the school
something of a community center, and thus arose the mc
cloud Hospital and Training School for Nurses. In nineteen twelve,
Moved by the utter neglect of the children of the
Turpentine camp at Tomocha, Missus Bethune started work for them
in a little house that she secured. The aim was

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to teach the children to be clean and truthful and helpful,
to sow and to sweep, and to sing. A short
school term was startled among them, and the mission serves
as an excellent practice school for the girls of the
senior class in the training school. A summer school and
a playground have also been started for the children in Daytona.

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Nor have the boys and young men been neglected. Here
was a problem of unusual difficulty. Any One who has
looked into the inner life of the small towns of
Florida could not fail to be impressed by the situation
of the boys and young men, hotel life, a shifting
tourist population, and a climate of unusual seductiveness have all

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left their impress on every side to the young man
beckons temptation, and in town after town one finds not
one decent recreation center or uplifting social influence. Fool rooms abound,
and the young man is blamed for entering forbidden paths.
But all too often the Christian men and women of
the community have put forth no definite, organized effort for

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his uplift. All too often their results a blasted life,
a heartache for a mother, or a ruined home for
some young woman. In Daytona, in nineteen thirteen, on a
lot near the school campus, one of the trustees, mister
George S. Duane, erected a neat, commodious building to be used,
in connection with the extension work of the institution, as

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a general reading room and home for the young Men's
Christian Association. And this is the only specific work so
being done for Negro boys in this section of the state.
A debating club, an athletic club, lecture club, and prayer
meetings all serve as means toward the physical, intellectual, and
spiritual development of the young men. A Better Boy's movement

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is also making progress, and the younger boys are becoming
interested in canning and farming, as well as being cared
for in their sports and games. No sketch of this
woman's work should close without mention of her ac activities
for the nation at large. Red Cross work or a
Liberty loan drive has a light called forth her interest

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and her energy. She has appeared on some great occasions
and before distinguished audiences, such as that, for instance, in
the Belasco Theater in Washington in December nineteen seventeen, when
on a noteworthy patriotic occasion, she was the only representative
of her race to speak. Her girls have gone into

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many spheres of life and have regularly made themselves useful
and desirable. Nearly two hundred are now annually enrolled at
the school. The demand for them as teachers, seamstresses or
cooks far exceeds the supply in great homes and humble
in country or in town, in Daytona or elsewhere north

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south east west. They remember the motto of their teacher
and of the Master of all, not to be ministered unto,
but to minister, And year after year they accomplished beds
and better things for the school that they loved so
well and through it for the Kingdom of God. Two
thousand years ago, the Savior of mankind walked upon the earth,

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a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And the
people hid, as it were, their faces from him. But
one day he went into the home of a pharisee
and sat him down to meet. And a woman of
the city, when she knew that Jesus set at meat
in the pharisees house, brought an alabaster box of ointment
exceeding precious, and began to wash his feet with her tears,

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and did wipe them with the hairs of her head,
and kissed his feet and anointed them with the ointment.
And there were some that had indignation among themselves, and said,
why was this waste of the ointment made? But Jesus said,
let her alone. She hath wrought a good work on me.
She hath done what she could. Verily, I say unto you,

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wheresoever this gospel shall be preached throughout the whole world,
This also, that she hath done, shall be spoken of
for a memorial of her to day, as well as
centuries ago. The Christ is before us around us, waiting.
We do not always know him, for he appears in
disguise as a little orphan, or a sick old woman,

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or even perhaps as some one of high estate. But
in need of prayer, let us do what we can.
Let each one prove himself an earnest follower. To such
end is the effort of Mary mac cleod Bethune. And
as we think of all that she has done and
is doing, let us for our own selves once more
recall the beautiful words of sister Moore. There is no

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place too lowly or dark for our feet to enter,
and no place so high and bright. But it needs
the touch of the light that we carry from the cross.
End of Chapter five