Mary Mcleod Bethune Quotes

Invest in the human soul. Who knows, it might be a diamond in the rough.

The whole world opened to me when I learned to read.

Without faith nothing is possible. With it, nothing is impossible.

Forgiving is not about forgetting, it's letting go of the hurt

The true worth of a race must be measured by the character of its womanhood.

For I am my mother's daughter, and the drums of Africa still beat in my heart.

Cease to be a drudge. Seek to be an artist.

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 a respect for the use of power. 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.

The drums of Africa still beat in my heart. They will not let me rest while there is a single Negro boy or girl without a chance to prove his worth.

You are very kind and very intelligent and those elements are not always found together. Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, and my mother - yes, you belong in that category. Here, give me a kiss.

Without faith, nothing is possible. With it, nothing is impossible.

If we have the courage and tenacity of our forebears, who stood firmly like a rock against the lash of slavery, we shall find a way to do for our day what they did for theirs.

To those of you with your years of service still ahead, the challenge is yours. Stop doubting yourselves. Have the courage to make up your minds and hold your decisions. Refuse to be BOUGHT for a nickel, or a million dollars, or a job!

Rosa Parks drew solace & sustenance from the long history of Black resistance before her time, placing her action & the Montgomery bus boycott in the continuum of Black protest. Her speech notes during the boycott read: 'Reading histories of others--Crispus Attucks through all wars--Richard Allen--Dr. Adam Clayton Powell Sr. & Jr. Women Phyllis Wheatley--Sojourner Truth--Harriet Tubman, Mary McLeod Bethune. For Parks, the ability to keep going, to know that the struggle for justice was possible amidst all the setbacks they encountered, was partly possible through reading & referencing the long Black struggle before her.

In 1920, Mary McLeod Bethune, an American educator, stateswoman, philanthropist, humanitarian, womanist, and civil-rights activist traveled through her home state of Florida to encourage women to vote, facing tremendous obstacles at every step along the route. The night before Election Day in November 1920, white-robed Klansmen marched into Bethune’s girls’ school to intimidate the women who had gathered there to get ready to vote, aiming to prevent them from voting even though they had managed to get their names on the voter rolls. Newspapers in Wilmington, Delaware, reported that the numbers of Black women who wanted to register to vote were “unusually large,” but they were turned away for their alleged failure to “comply with Constitutional tests” without any specification of what these tests were. The Birmingham Black newspaper Voice of the People noted that only half a dozen Black women had been registered to vote because the state had applied the same restrictive rules for voting to colored women that they applied to colored men.

The Freedom Gates are half-ajar. We must pry them fully open.

A vocal group of Negro leaders, including a courageous and influential Negro woman named Mary McLeod Bethune, was beginning to help women officers and military officials break down even more barriers than the initial campaigns by the Negro press. The first fights were for Negro soldiers to serve in combat and for Negro women to be allowed in the women’s army. Segregation in civilian life was still very much the law of the land, but the wartime needs in all areas of the military forced the government to admit that they would need to make some exceptions in order to win the war.

Mary McLeod Bethune.

There can be no divided democracy, no class government, no half-free county, under the constitution. Therefore, there can be no discrimination, no segregation, no separation of some citizens from the rights which belong to all.… We must gain full equality in education… in the franchise… in economic opportunity, and full equality in the abundance of life.” —MARY MCLEOD BETHUNE As

Dad had bought a stack of these biographies, towering over one hundred now. Martin Luther King Jr. Frederick Douglass. Mary McLeod Bethune. Richard Allen. Ida B. Wells. Dad kept urging me to pull from the tower for every writing project.

Then others, like Mary McLeod Bethune, the educator who, twenty years ago, started a school for girls that continues to thrive.

A woman is free if she lives by her own standards and creates her own destiny.” —Mary McLeod Bethune, educator, philanthropist, activist