By Emma Collins • February 28, 2026 • Share
Mary McLeod Bethune was born on July 10, 1875, in a dirt-floor cabin in South Carolina—the fifteenth of seventeen children, and the first in her family born into freedom. Her parents, Samuel and Patsy McLeod, had been slaves. By age five, Mary was picking cotton alongside them. By age nine, she could harvest 250 pounds a day.
One afternoon, while helping her mother deliver laundry to a white family, nine-year-old Mary picked up a book from the children’s playroom. A white girl snatched it away: “You can’t read.”
Mary walked home in tears. That night, she prayed for one thing: the chance to learn.
A year later, a missionary school opened five miles away. Mary walked ten miles every day—five miles there, five miles back—to attend class. She was the only one of her siblings who could go. Every evening, she came home and taught her family everything she’d learned.
“The whole world opened to me when I learned to read,” she would later say.
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