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The Vision of Mary McLeod Bethune
by Noliwe Rooks
Book Reviewed by:
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"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 firsfthe ont 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.
Excerpted from A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit by Noliwe Rooks. Copyright © 2024 by Noliwe Rooks. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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