It is an ordinary desk. Well-used, a little battered, crowded with ordinary objects once belonging to Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune. Yet, it was a holy place, that desk, says Dr.Yahya Jongintaba, professor of Religion and Humanities at Bethune-Cookman University. He will present the story of a lesser-known Bethune Wednesday night at Frist Presbyterian Church ─ a religious side of her that many may not be familiar with. His talk is one in a series of events being planned this year to celebrate the church’s 95th anniversary.
“Many people know of Bethune’s activism, her efforts on behalf of equality and education, but she is not as well known as a religious thinker,” said Jongintaba. “She was a deeply religious thinker and writer.”
Jongintaba, who is writing a biography of Bethune, has pored through her papers, her files and books on shelves at her eponymous foundation, once her home, on the B-CU campus. Most interesting of all, he said, what she underlined in those books.
Born in 1875, on a farm near Mayesville, South Carolina, Bethune was the 15th child of former slaves, and was the first in her family to go to school, at the age of 10 in a one-room school of the Trinity Presbyterian Mission. On the farm, she worked alongside her parents, but would later recall that learning to read had opened up the whole world to her, as she would later open it to others.
Jongintaba said that “her plans for the Mary McLeod Bethune Foundation were very spiritual. That was her intention for the place.”
He calls her “one of the first really distinguished and prolific religious thinkers of the 20th Century among African-Americans,” adding: “Usually Howard Thurman is given that distinction, but Mary McLeod Bethune was 25 years older. She influenced Howard Thurman, which he acknowledged in his eulogy to her, and in his autobiography.”
Thurman, theologian and educator, spent his childhood in Daytona Beach, and lived in Waycross, one of Daytona’s three all-black communities, where he was a member of the Mount Bethel Baptist Church. He attended high school in Jacksonville, the closest of only three high schools for African-Americans in Florida.
Bethune knew Thurman’s family when she started her school in 1904, Jongintaba said. “She would go to Howard Thurman's church to sing and to talk. She was a really good singer. And she would take up a collection.” It was her custom to hold children by the hand, he said, patting them on the head and talking to them. “Howard Thurman said he never forgot that. He stayed in contact with her his whole life.”
Bethune’s custom in later years, he said, was to get up in the morning, go downstairs, and before breakfast have what she called morning meditation, usually at her desk.
“She was consistent with it,” he explained. “She had a book of meditations that she read, and that little book has underscores in it, also. It was a congregational space for students, visitors, people from around the world.”
A holy place.
“Religion was not secondary for her.” And she was profoundly ecumenical, he said, in erasing lines between Christians, Jews and Muslims. “She thought of the church as a universal entity, not just a place where people gathered.
“She was free in that regard. She thought about politics, education, family, community … religiously.” Despite everything she saw and endured, Bethune was without bitterness,” he said. “It was amazing. She was endlessly forgiving and long suffering.”