- Kimberley Guillemet
Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune was born in 1875 in a small log cabin on a rice and cotton farm in South Carolina. She was the fifteenth of seventeen children born to Sam and Patsy (McIntosh) McLeod, both former slaves.
Her parents wanted to be independent, so they sacrificed to buy a farm for the family. As a child, Dr. McLeod Bethune observed that the only difference between herself and white children was the ability to read and write. She set out to change that by learning as much as she could.
When Dr. McLeod Bethune began attending her town’s one-room schoolhouse for Black children; she was the only child in her family to attend school. She would go home from school each day and teach her family what she had learned each day.
Dr. McLeod Bethune attended Scotia Seminary (now Barber-Scotia College) and later 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 Black missionaries were not needed.
Dr. McLeod Bethune and her husband Albertus Bethune married in 1898. Together they had a son named Albert.
Dr. Bethune started the Daytona Literary and Industrial Training Institute for Negro Girls in 1904 with $1.50, vision, an entrepreneurial mindset, resilience, and faith in God. She created “pencils” from charred wood, ink from elderberries, and mattresses from moss-stuffed corn sacks. Her first students were five little girls and her five-year-old son, Albert Jr. In less than two years, the school grew to 250 students. Recognizing the health disparities and lack of medical treatment available to African Americans in Daytona Beach, she also founded the Mary McLeod Hospital and Training School for Nurses, which at the time was the only school of its kind that served African American women on the East coast.
Daytona Institute would continue to increase in popularity, and merged with the Cookman Institute of Jacksonville, Florida in 1923 and became Bethune-Cookman College.
Tireless, talented and committed to service, Dr. Bethune held leadership positions in several prominent organizations even while also leading her school. In 1935, she founded the National Council of Negro Women, which would become a highly influential organization with a clear civil rights agenda.
She was appointed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the National Youth Administration in 1936. By 1939 she was the organization’s Director of Negro Affairs, which oversaw the training of tens of thousands of Black youth. She was the only female member of President Roosevelt’s influential “Black Cabinet.” She leveraged her close friendship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to lobby for integrating the Civilian Pilot Training Program and to bring the Program to the campuses of historically Black colleges and universities, which became the alma maters of some of the first Black pilots in the country.
This text is excerpted from: https://www.cookman.edu/history/our-founder.html and
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_McLeod_Bethune. To read more about Dr. McLeod Bethune’s life and legacy, visit those websites, as well as: https://www.biola.edu/talbot/ce20/database/mary-mcleod-bethune. To view footage and hear one of her most notable speeches, visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npy6NFFahes and
- Kimberley Guillemet
Charlotta Amanda Spears Bass was born on February 14, 1874, to Hiram and Kate Spears in either Sumter, South Carolina or Little Compton, Rhode Island. Upon graduation from high school, she enrolled in Pembroke College, a women's college which is now part of Brown University. When she was twenty years old she began working for the Providence Watchman, a local Black newspaper, and remained there for about ten years.
Bass later moved to Los Angeles, California and began working for $5 a week as an “office girl” at a newspaper that was then called The Eagle. The paper’s office was nestled on Central Avenue, the “Black belt of the city” as The Eagle described it — a neighborhood full of churches, clubs and Black-owned businesses, and home to the West Coast jazz scene.
When the editor John J. Neimore became ill, he asked Bass to take over the operations of the newspaper. Shortly after Neimore's death, Bass learned that "this Black-founded newspaper was owned by a white man, who offered his support only if [she] would become his 'sweetheart.'” Rather than take him up on his offer, Bass borrowed $50 from a local store owner to purchase the deed, becoming the first African-American woman to own and operate a newspaper in the United States. She renamed the newspaper The California Eagle due to increasing social and political issues in the region.
Early on, Bass hired an experienced editor from The Topeka Plaindealer, J.B. Bass, who served as the managing editor of the paper. He would soon become her husband. As joint publishers, they grew The California Eagle into the most widely circulated Black newspaper on the West Coast with a circulation of 60,000.
The newspaper served as a source of both information and inspiration for the Black community, which was often ignored or negatively portrayed by the predominantly white press. It illuminated Black life in a way that was not illuminated in other papers, covering issues such as housing rights, labor rights, voting rights, and police brutality. It is also credited as pioneering multiethnic politics through its advocacy of Asian-American and Mexican-American civil rights in the 1940s.
Bass entered politics in the 1940s, running for the Los Angeles City Council under the slogan “Don’t Fence Me In” — the title of a popular song of that era that she repurposed to condemn housing discrimination. She had been a longtime Republican, but voted for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, in 1936. She later denounced both parties for neglecting Black and women’s rights. She helped found the Independent Progressive Party of California in 1947, and pitched an unsuccessful bid for Congress in 1950.
Bass sold the newspaper in 1951 and co-founded Sojourners for Truth and Justice, a Black women’s group. In 1952, Bass became the first African-American woman nominated for Vice President, as a candidate of the Progressive Party. She was the running mate of lawyer Vincent Hallinan and their bid was launched on a platform of “peace and prosperity.” Though Bass did not win, she made history.
Bass retired to what was then a Black resort town southeast of Los Angeles, Lake Elsinore. During her retirement years, she maintained a community library in her garage for the young people in her neighborhood. It was a continuation of her long fight to give all people opportunities and education.
Considering the sum of her career as she was completing her autobiography, Forty Years (1960), Bass wrote: “It has been a good life that I have had, though a very hard one, but I know the future will be even better. And as I think back I know that is the only kind of life: In serving one's fellow man one serves himself best …”
To learn more about Mrs. Bass’ tremendous life and legacy, please visit: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/obituaries/charlotta-bass-vice-president-overlooked.html, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotta_Bass, and https://laist.com/news/la-history/charlotta-bass-first-woman-of-color-to-run-for-us-vice-president. To view footage of Mrs. Bass, please visit: https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/charlotta-spears-bass-first-black-woman-vp-nominee-epkd15/15441/.
- Kimberley Guillemet
Ella Fitzgerald was born on April 25, 1917, in Newport News, Virginia. She was the daughter of William Fitzgerald and Temperance "Tempie" Henry. Her parents never married and her father left her mother shortly after she was born. She began her formal education at the age of six and was an outstanding student. Starting in third grade, she danced and performed for her peers on the way to school and at lunchtime.
In 1932, when Fitzgerald was fifteen, her mother died from injuries sustained in a car accident. Her stepfather took care of her until April 1933, at which point she moved to Harlem to live with her aunt. Fitzgerald soon began skipping school and her grades suffered. She worked as a lookout at a bordello and with a numbers runner. When the authorities caught up with her, she was placed in foster care and then a reformatory in New York.
During 1933 and 1934 she sang on the streets of Harlem, until she had her big break on November 21,1934, when she made her debut in one of the earliest Amateur Nights at the Apollo Theater and won first prize. She later said, "Once up there, I felt the acceptance and love from my audience. I knew I wanted to sing before people the rest of my life."
In January 1935, Fitzgerald won the chance to perform for a week with the Tiny Bradshaw band at the Harlem Opera House. Although the program director, Chick Webb, was reluctant to sign her because she was a 'diamond in the rough’, he offered her the opportunity to test with the band when they played a dance at Yale University. Met with approval by both audiences and her fellow musicians, Fitzgerald was asked to join Webb's orchestra and gained acclaim as part of the group's performances at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom.
Throughout the ‘30s and ‘40s, Fitzgerald continued to win singing contests, work with bands, and record hit records. Her first million-seller, a novelty tune called "A-Tisket, A-Tasket," became a major hit on the radio and was also one of the biggest-selling records of the decade.
Despite her success, Fitzgerald faced discrimination as during that era, band singers were mostly blond, sophisticated and had mainstream physical features. Fitzgerald was often called “awkward and gawky” and in the words of one newspaper writer, "a big, light-colored gal." This superficial criticism notwithstanding, no one could dispute that Fitzgerald had impeccable timing and perfect pitch. In fact, band musicians would tune their instruments to her voice. Endlessly inventive, only on one record did she sing the same way twice. There was no sad edge to her voice — Ella Fitzgerald had listeners smiling by the second note.
Influenced by her work with Dizzy Gillespie'’s big band, she pioneered “scat” singing and incorporated it as a major part of her performance repertoire. While singing with Gillespie, Fitzgerald recalled, "I just tried to do [with my voice] what I heard the horns in the band doing."
She also began appearing on television variety shows. She quickly became a favorite and frequent guest on numerous programs, including "The Bing Crosby Show," "The Dinah Shore Show," "The Frank Sinatra Show," "The Ed Sullivan Show," "The Tonight Show," "The Nat King Cole Show," "The Andy Willams Show" and "The Dean Martin Show."
Dubbed "The First Lady of Song," Ella Fitzgerald was the most popular female jazz singer in the United States for more than half a century. In her lifetime, she won 13 Grammy awards and sold over 40 million albums. Her voice was flexible, wide-ranging, accurate and ageless. She could sing sultry ballads, sweet jazz and imitate every instrument in an orchestra. She worked with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman and many more. She performed at top venues all over the world and packed them to the hilt. Her audiences were as diverse as her vocal range. They were rich and poor, made up of all ethnicities, all religions and all nationalities. In fact, many of them had just one binding factor in common - they all loved Ella Fitzgerald.
To learn more about Ms. Fitzgerald’s tremendous life and legacy, please visit:
http://www.ellafitzgerald.com/about/biography, https://www.npr.org/2010/03/29/125170386/ella-fitzgerald-americas-first-lady-of-song and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ella_Fitzgerald. To view footage of Ms. Fitzgerald, please visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myRc-3oF1d0.