Adversity Defines You!

God is pleased with you when, for the sake of your conscience, you patiently endure unfair treatment. 1 Peter 2:19

Mary McLeod Bethune was the fifteenth of seventeen children born to her parents, two freed slaves. Mary worked in the cotton fields as a child, but she received a scholarship to the Moody Institute for Home and Foreign Missions in Chicago (later the Moody Bible Institute), where she was the only black student.

She dreamed of going to Africa to minister to the needs of her ancestors but was told that there were “no openings for Negro missionaries in Africa.”

But often it is our response to obstacles and setbacks that most defines us. Instead of being discouraged, Mary became an assistant teacher and then received an appointment to the Haines Institute in Augusta, Georgia. She married, had a son, and continued her mission work by starting a school, where she stayed for five years. Then, with the encouragement of a pastor, she started the Daytona Literary and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls.

For the next twenty years Mary divided her time between making the school a success and stepping into public leadership. She led a drive to register black voters (and was “visited” by members of the Ku Klux Klan for her efforts). She organized a movement against school segregation and served under several U.S. presidents, including Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Over the years the school she had founded grew to include a high school and then a junior college, which finally merged with a men’s college to become Bethune-Cookman College, the name by which we know it today.^a