Mary McLeod Bethune - Early Life

Early Life

Mary Jane McLeod was born near Mayesville, South Carolina, on a rice and cotton farm, in a small log cabin, the fifteenth of seventeen children to Samuel and Patsy McIntosh McLeod, both former slaves. Most of her siblings were born into slavery. Her mother worked for her former owner, and her father farmed cotton near a large house they called "The Homestead."

After demonstrating a desire to read and write, McLeod attended Mayesville's one-room schoolhouse, Trinity Mission School that was run by the Presbyterian Board of Missions of Freedmen. Her teacher, Emma Jane Wilson, became a significant mentor in her life. Wilson had attended Scotia Seminary (now Barber-Scotia College), so arranged for McLeod to attend the same school on a scholarship, which she did from 1888-1894. She then attended Dwight L. Moody's Institute for Home and Foreign Missions in Chicago (now the Moody Bible Institute), hoping to become a missionary in Africa. However, she was told that she would not be able to go because black missionaries were not needed, so she instead planned to teach.

She married Albertus Bethune in 1898 and they subsequently lived in Savannah, Georgia, for a year while she did some social work. She was persuaded by a visiting Presbyterian minister named Coyden Harold Uggams (grandfather of entertainer Leslie Uggams) to relocate to Palatka, Florida, to run a mission school. She did so in 1899 and began an outreach to prisoners and ran the mission school. Albertus left the family in 1907 and did not seek a divorce, but relocated to South Carolina. He died in 1918.