Joan remained in her position until 1990 and served on the Children’s Television Workshop board for years afterward. I served for a few years on the board alongside her, where I saw firsthand Joan’s dedication to educating children. When asked about her “legacy” a few years ago, Joan scoffed, “A legacy is when something’s over; this just keeps going.” She’s right: Sesame Street is still going strong, and so is Joan.
Joan helped revolutionize children’s television in the 1960s, and she isn’t finished yet. Sesame Street is now in more than 150 countries, and Sesame Workshop is bringing play-based learning to hundreds of thousands of children in refugee camps and communities around the world. In 2007, Sesame Workshop created the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, a research lab that is now studying how to design entertaining and engaging educational programming for children using digital media.
Both Maria and Joan had to fight for the chance to follow their passion into higher education and a meaningful career. It can’t have been easy. But they were determined to do it anyway, and because they did, the world of education has never been the same.
Mary McLeod Bethune
Chelsea
By the time she was nine years old, Mary McLeod could pick 250 pounds of cotton a day; that would make about five hundred T-shirts today. Although Mary was born in 1875, after slavery, for many black Americans, bondage didn’t end with the Emancipation Proclamation or after the Civil War.
Even after they were freed, Mary’s parents, Patsy and Samuel McLeod, worked for years for their former master. Eventually, they earned enough money to buy five acres of the land made profitable only by their labor; on that land, Mary’s father and brothers built the cabin in which she would be born. After Mary’s birth, her parents continued to work in the fields; her mother also took in white people’s washing, including that of her former master’s family. Mary would go with Patsy as she made laundry deliveries. In white people’s homes, Mary wondered about the toys and books white kids had, once asking herself if “the difference between white folks and colored is just this matter of reading and writing.” On one visit, a white child told her that she wasn’t supposed to read and should not touch the books. “When she said to me, ‘You can’t read that—put that down,’ it just did something to my pride and to my heart that made me feel that someday I would read just as she was reading,” Mary later said.
It wasn’t until almost two decades after the Civil War that Mary’s hometown of Mayesville, South Carolina, had a school open to black students. Emma Wilson, a black missionary who founded the school, asked the McLeods if they wanted to send their children. They could afford to send only one, and they decided on Mary. She walked five miles each way to make it to class and home again. After school, she would often teach her family what she had learned that day, then do her homework by candlelight.
Impressed by Mary, Ms. Wilson selected her to receive a scholarship to further her studies at Scotia Seminary in North Carolina. Mary left home when she was thirteen years old. After graduating from Scotia, she received a scholarship to the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. Mary dreamed of being a missionary in Africa. But when she applied, the Presbyterian Mission Board rejected her application, informing her that there were no opportunities for black missionaries in their programs. Mary decided to return to Mayesville and took a job teaching at the school she had once attended. She would go on to teach at several schools across the South; while working in Augusta, Georgia, she met Albertus Bethune, whom she would marry in 1898.
The Bethunes moved to Florida in 1899, and Mary started selling insurance to support her family. Five years later, Mary realized a long-held ambition: She opened her first school, the Daytona Literary and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls. Without the support of a church or wealthy benefactor, Mary had to raise the funds to build and support the school herself, while working on its curriculum and hiring faculty. She purposefully opened her school in a poor neighborhood of a city where Jim Crow segregation was the law and a state where black Americans were routinely lynched. Surrounded by racist violence, she wanted to give black children a chance to get the education she believed all children deserved.
Initial enrollment at Mary’s school was five girls, each of whom paid fifty cents a week. Within two years, there were 250 students. She also began offering night classes for black adults, particularly women, who wanted to learn to read and write. She would later focus on teaching exactly what was needed to pass the literacy tests required to vote.
“There can be no divided democracy, no class government, no half-free county, under the constitution. Therefore, there can be no discrimination, no segregation, no separation of some citizens from the rights which belong to all.… We must gain full equality in education… in the franchise… in economic opportunity, and full equality in the abundance of life.”
—MARY MCLEOD BETHUNE
As demand grew, Mary realized she needed more space—something that would require more money than she could raise through tuition, or selling homemade pies, another job she took on to support the school. She began raising money from wealthy white families, asking for donations from those who came to Daytona for the winter months. Looking for additional support, she also traveled the country; she won over the Gambles, the Rockefellers, and the Carnegie Foundation. Mary then leveraged her wealthy white supporters to fight for full accreditation so her school could offer middle and high school.
In 1920, the Ku Klux Klan threatened Mary, but she made it clear she and her school weren’t moving. In 1923, Mary began the process of merging her school with the Cookman Institute for Men in Jacksonville to form what is now Bethune-Cookman University. Mary became the first black woman to serve as president of a historically black college and university (HBCU), and Bethune-Cookman remains the only HBCU founded by a black woman.
Even though she is best known for her work in education, Mary confronted racism and segregation anywhere she saw them. When hospitals in Daytona refused to care for black patients, she opened the McLeod Hospital and the McLeod Training School for Nurses. Not until the 1960s would black patients be legally integrated into Daytona’s public hospital system. Even then, black patients continued to receive substandard care.
After the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, Mary led voter registration drives, working to register black women to vote. The hateful, racist attacks she encountered during her drives only made Mary more determined to work on a national level to champion black women. In 1924, she was elected president of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, where she was vocal in her support for expanding vocational training to black Americans. This put her at odds with Ida B. Wells, the great journalist, advocate, and anti-lynching activist, who criticized Mary’s narrow focus. Wells argued that “to sneer at and discourage higher education would mean to rob the race of leaders which it so badly needed… all the industrial education in the world could not take the place of manhood.”
In 1935, Mary founded the National Council of Negro Women to help connect black women and organizations across the country. In 1936, at Eleanor’s encouragement, President Franklin Roosevelt appointed Mary as director of the Division of Negro Affairs at the National Youth Administration, a New Deal agency focused on providing work and education to young Americans. (By the end of her life, Mary would have worked for or served on committees under five American presidents.) In 1938, she helped organize the first National Conference on Negro Women at the White House, and two years later, she was elected the vice president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
During World War II, Mary served as assistant director of the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), which served to facilitate women’s official involvement in the war effort. She ensured that the WAC would be open to black women and that units would be integrated—at least on paper. In practice, only some WAC units accepted black women. (The army itself wouldn’t adopt a policy of integration until 1948, after the war, and wouldn�
�t enforce that policy for many years to come.) Mary also fought to include black pilots in the Civilian Pilot Training Program, a government-sponsored effort to increase military preparedness, and lobbied government officials, including President Roosevelt, on behalf of black women who wanted to enlist in the military. She would later organize the first officer candidate schools for black women to provide the training needed to earn an officer’s commission.
During this period, Mary was again the target of the Ku Klux Klan and other racists for championing black Americans’ rights and opportunities. Once again, she ignored their attacks and continued her work. She cofounded the United Negro College Fund, which has since supported more than 450,000 college students.
Toward the end of her life, Mary wrote her last will and testament. The words are inscribed on the side of her memorial statue in Washington, D.C. I remember visiting the statue in high school and reading her words: “I leave you love. I leave you hope. I leave you the challenge of developing confidence in one another. I leave you a thirst for education. I leave you a respect for the use of power. I leave you faith. I leave you racial dignity. I leave you a desire to live harmoniously with your fellow men. I leave you a responsibility to our young people.”
HILLARY
Her memorial statue was unveiled on July 10, 1974, which would have been Mary’s ninety-ninth birthday. Approximately eighteen thousand people from all over the country came to witness this historic occasion. At the unveiling, Cicely Tyson read Mary’s last will and testament, and Representative Shirley Chisholm spoke about how Mary had inspired her. The statue was the first monument of a black woman to be placed in a public park in Washington, D.C.—and, sadly, one of very few still to this day.
In 2018, amid a national outcry over the continued existence of monuments to Confederate traitors, the Florida legislature voted to replace the statue of Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith in the National Statuary Hall Collection at the U.S. Capitol Building with one of Mary McLeod Bethune. She became the first black American chosen by any state to be commemorated in the collection.
Esther Martinez
Chelsea
Before Christopher Columbus arrived in Hispaniola in 1492, an estimated three hundred distinct indigenous languages were spoken across what is today the United States and Canada. But when Esther Martinez, a member of the Pueblo people whose Tewa name was P’oe Tsawa, was born in 1912, indigenous languages in the United States were already in steep decline—the consequence of purposeful efforts to eradicate them under a system of brutal colonization. After spending her early years in Colorado, Esther became one of the Native American children sent to schools with the objective of aggressive assimilation. At her school in New Mexico, Esther was punished harshly for speaking her native Tewa. The efforts to suffocate her Tewa didn’t succeed. When she graduated from high school in 1930, Esther still knew that her native language had immense value.
After raising her ten children with her husband, and supporting her family by working as a janitor and in other service jobs, Esther went to work at a middle school in San Juan Pueblo—now known as Ohkay Owingeh—New Mexico. A chance meeting with linguist Randall Speirs in the 1960s helped her find her life’s purpose. “He went up and spoke to her in our Tewa language,” said Esther’s grandson Matthew Martinez Jr. “She was stunned and taken aback, how this white guy could crisply pronounce the language.”
Speirs encouraged Esther to document her language, and he taught her the fundamentals of linguistics. Working with Speirs and her family, she helped compile the first Tewa dictionary. It was an involved, painstaking process. “When my grandfather said something that I didn’t know,” she said, “I would ask him and he would write it on a paper. It took me a long time.” She also translated, for the first time, the New Testament into Tewa, and a traditional Tewa children’s story, “Naughty Little Rabbit and Old Man Coyote,” into English. She later wrote a book of many stories translated from Tewa.
“Stories were told to teach us tips for survival and for socialization in the community. They were fun. Our whole life is about storytelling.”
—ESTHER MARTINEZ
Esther began teaching Tewa at Ohkay Owingeh Community School; she would eventually become its director of bilingual education. It was a very different environment from the schools she had attended as a girl in Santa Fe and Albuquerque decades earlier; its philosophy today is “Don’t teach me my culture; use my culture to teach me.” Esther’s work as a teacher was widely recognized, and she won multiple awards, including from the National Council of American Indians and the New Mexico Arts Commission. In addition to her teaching, Esther embraced her role as a tradition bearer for her pueblo, giving advice to families, helping parents choose traditional names for their children, and sharing Tewa stories in their original language.
Her storytelling took her around the country, from schools to national parks. She also shared her knowledge generously with linguists, other academics, and anyone who believed in the importance of Tewa. In 2006, the National Endowment for the Arts made Esther a National Heritage Fellow. She was killed in a car accident shortly after the ceremony.
HILLARY
Less than three months after Esther’s tragic death, President George W. Bush signed the Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act, providing new funding for the preservation of Native languages. I was honored to support the bill while I served in the Senate.
When Esther was just a child, the people who were supposed to educate her tried to take Tewa from her. It took bravery to defy those efforts, and a love of her culture to preserve Tewa and ensure that it didn’t disappear. Thanks to her legacy, multiple efforts to preserve, document, and expand Native languages have received federal support through the Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act; it is a small fraction of what is needed to undo the centuries of targeted destruction. Today, approximately 150 Native North American languages remain actively spoken across the United States, but many of those languages are spoken by only a few thousand or a few hundred people. The best way to respect Esther’s work would be for the United States government to fully fund all efforts to preserve Native languages, and revive those that haven’t been spoken in decades or even centuries.
Daisy Bates
Hillary
In her memoir, Daisy Bates wrote about learning as a young child that her mother, Millie Riley, had been raped and murdered by three local white men in the small south Arkansas town where they lived. Daisy was only a few months old at the time. Knowing about both her mother’s murder and the failure of local police to pursue the killers fueled an anger inside Daisy, as well as a desire for vengeance that led her to identify and silently confront one of the men when she was just eight years old. He begged her to leave him alone, and later drank himself to death and was found in an alley.
After the murder of her mother, Daisy was raised by her father’s close friends Orlee and Susie Smith. Her father fled town to protect his own safety; Daisy never saw him again. But her adoptive father saw something in Daisy that worried him. According to Daisy, he gave her this advice on his deathbed when she was a teenager: “You’re filled with hatred. Hatred can destroy you, Daisy. Don’t hate white people just because they’re white. If you hate, make it count for something. Hate the humiliations we are living under in the South. Hate the discrimination that eats away at the South. Hate the discrimination that eats away at the soul of every black man and woman. Hate the insults hurled at us by white scum—and then try to do something about it, or your hate won’t spell a thing.” Those words guided her in the years to come.
Daisy married Lucius Christopher Bates, known as L. C., in 1942, when she was twenty-seven; together, they moved to Little Rock and started the Arkansas State Press, a weekly statewide newspaper. The paper quickly became a voice for civil rights, and in 1952, Daisy was elected president of the Arkansas Conference of the NAACP, a position she used to advocate strongly for the desegregation of s
chools. Even though the U.S. Supreme Court decided in the landmark 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education that segregated schools were illegal under the Constitution, schools in Arkansas refused to enroll black children. Owing to her position with the NAACP and her newspaper’s strong stand for immediate desegregation, Daisy endured harassment and death threats, while the newspaper faced financial loss when white advertisers boycotted it.
During one of the racist assaults on her home, Daisy later recalled, “two flaming crosses were burned on our property. The first, a six-foot gasoline-soaked structure, was stuck into our front lawn just after dusk. At the base of the cross was scrawled: ‘GO BACK TO AFRICA! KKK.’ The second cross was placed against the front of our house, lit, and the flames began to catch. Fortunately, the fire was discovered by a neighbor and we extinguished it before any serious damage had been done.” Despite the dangers, when the time came for courageous leadership, she was ready.
In 1957, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus defied a court order to desegregate Little Rock Central High School, and his defiance became the center of the nation’s attention in the struggle over integration. In response to Faubus’s actions, the Arkansas State Press printed a front-page editorial that read, “[I]t is the belief of this paper that since the Negro’s loyalty to America has forced him to shed blood on foreign battle fields against enemies, to safeguard constitutional rights, he is in no mood to sacrifice these rights for peace and harmony at home.”
The Book of Gutsy Women Page 8
