Emma Gelders Sterne

Mary McLeod Bethune Emma Gelders Sterne

Here's the inspiring and true story of a young girl who was determined to read, and who went on to become a teacher, the founder of a college, an advisor to politicians, and a great humanitarian. Mary McLeod Bethune was the fifteenth child of hard-working parents, whose ancestry was one hundred percent African. She was their first child who was born free after the civil war.

Mrs. Bethune worked tirelessly to build up, through education, the magnificent heritage that Black people share. During her hardest years, she refused to give up on her dream of starting her own school for Black children. It eventually became Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach, Florida. Mrs. Bethune, born a few years after the Emancipation Proclamation, lived to see the historic Supreme Court decision on public school desegregation.