Thursday, March 28, 2024

Tarpley: Celebrate the legacy of Bethune, Coleman

By Sister Shirley Tarpley

Mary McLeod Bethune was born in South Carolina, the 15th of 17th children. She was a slave before emancipation, when the Union won the Civil War. In her early years, she picked cotton and attended a Methodist mission school.
In 1888, Bethune received a scholarship to Scotia Seminary in North Carolina. After graduating in 1893, she enrolled at what is now Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. She became a teacher in several Presbyterian schools in Georgia and South Carolina. Moving to Florida, and realizing that the workers being brought in for railway construction needed schools for their families, Bethune opened the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute in 1904, with only a few students. She focused the school on educating girls, who had few other opportunities for education. At first, the school focused on elementary classes, and later secondary courses. While first stressing industrial training and religious instruction, gradually the school moved to more academic subjects.

The school was supported in part by whites, including northerners with summer homes in the area, and such industrialists as James M. Gamble of Proctor and Gamble — who served as president of the school’s board of trustees from 1912 until his death; and Thomas H. White of the White Sewing Machine Company.

In 1911, the school added nursing classes and a hospital, because students could not be admitted to the local, whites-only, hospital, it closed in 1931.

In 1923, the school merged with the Cookman Institute for men in Jacksonville to become Bethune-Cookman College.
The school, which had begun with a handful of students, grew to a peak of 1,000 students and won full accreditation; in 1939 it opened as a junior college and in 1941 it was a four-year college.

Bessie Coleman was born in Atlanta, Texas, the 10th of 13th children born to Susan and George Coleman. Her father was one-quarter African-American and three-quarters Choctaw and Cherokee Indian. Her mother was African-American. When she was two years old, her family settled in Waxahachie, Texas, and ran a cotton-picking business.
In 1901, Coleman, frustrated by the racial intolerance and barriers because her father went back to Indian Territory (Oklahoma); leaving the mother with four daughters under the age of nine.

The mother recognized that Coleman was gifted in math. At the age of eight, Coleman worked as the family bookkeeper. She learned to read and write by reciting from the Bible each evening and she went to the one-room school in Waxahachie (a four-mile walk every day), completing all eight grades. She borrowed books from the library and read them to the family at night — often they were of African-American heroes: Paul Laurence Dunbar, Harriet Tubman and Booker T. Washington. After high school Coleman enrolled at the Colored Agricultural and Normal University (a teachers college) in Langston, Oklahoma. It was here she read about the Wright Brothers and Harriet Quimby, a woman pilot.
Coleman’s brother was a World War I veteran and talked about French women that flew airplanes. Her brother inspired her to become a pilot. She learned to fly in a French Nieuport Type 82 plane. On June 15, 1921, Bessie received her pilot’s license from the renowned Federation Aeronautique Internationale. Coleman was proclaimed “the world’s greatest woman flyer.” She was a success — praised in both white and black newspapers. She became famous; her fans called her Queen Bess or Brave Bessie.

In 1929, Lt. William J. Powell founded the Bessie Coleman Aero Club, the aviation school she’d longed to establish in Los Angeles. In 1931, the Challenger Pilots’ Association of Chicago did their first annual fly-over above Lincoln Cemetery, in honor of her. In 1995, the U.S. Postal Department issued the Bessie Coleman stamp. And finally, in 2000, Bessie Coleman was inducted into the Texas Aviation Hall of Fame.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

online wholesale business for goods from
China