Mary McLeod Bethune: Building a Better World, and: Breaking the Ice: The Story of Mary Ann Shadd (review)

Mary McLeod Bethune: Building a Better World edited by Audrey Thomas McCluskey and Elaine M. Smith. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999, 392 pp., $39.95 hardcover.

Breaking the Ice: The Story of Mary Ann Shadd directed by Sylvia Sweeney. New York: Icarus Films, 1999, 23 minutes, $225.00 VHS.

Since the early 1970s, when teachers such as Toni Morrison and Barbara Christian developed courses on black women writers at Yale and Berkeley, interest in primary texts by African American women has led to the recovery and reproduction of out-of-print and unpublished letters, essays, poetry, and novels. The best work has approached these acts of recovery comprehensively, providing readers with analytic introductions and historical contexts in tandem with well-edited primary documents. For example, under the auspices of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. reissued narratives by black women writers from 1890-1910, two decades Gates dubbed "The Black Woman's Era" of American literature. The result of this collaboration was The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers (1988), an archive of literary achievement by African American women previously unavailable for classroom or scholarly use. Or consider Jean Fagan Yellin's edition of Harriet Jacobs's 1861 text of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1987), a volume that has established Jacobs's autobiography as the most widely taught slave narrative written by a woman. In addition to Yellin's thorough introduction and annotations, she includes accompanying photographs, maps, and previously unpublished correspondence that provide illuminating insight into Jacobs's account. The value of these and other similar projects is clear: a body of diverse and engaging literature by African American women is now available for modern-day teachers, critics, and students.

Audrey Thomas McCluskey and Elaine M. Smith continue the comprehensive recovery work epitomized by Gates and Yellin in their collection of letters, lectures, and essays by Mary McLeod Bethune, the first black woman in American history to serve as a Presidential appointee. Simultaneously historical and heuristic, Mary McLeod Bethune: Building a Better World includes a series of critical introductions to various selections of primary documents by Bethune—documents that reveal her crucial and conflicted role in American politics between the end of Reconstruction and the movement for Civil Rights.

Building a Better World disabuses the reader of the notion that Bethune was only a "female Booker T. Washington," as she was once famously called (Literary Digest 1937, 8). Best known (if known at all) in her own time for founding Bethune-Cookman College during the Jim Crow era, Bethune's subsequent depictions have consistently been limited to her role as teacher. The memorial sculpture of Bethune in Washington D.C. shows her handing a book to children, and even a quick perusal of the language used to describe Bethune in most biography titles demonstrates this one-sided portrayal. Yet during her own lifetime, Bethune's public persona ran the gamut from educator to administrator, patriot to political activist, proclaimed anti-Communist to devout pluralist. As McCluskey acknowledges in the opening chapter, "One of the difficulties historians face in rendering assessments of a complex person such as Bethune is that she defies sociological categories and stereotypes" (15).

In order to address her multifaceted character, Building a Better World chronicles Bethune's life by organizing over seventy original source documents into six thematic concentrations with incisive critical introductions by either McCluskey or Smith. The first segment places Bethune's work in an historical context, designating her 1944 declaration, "Certain Unalienable Rights," as a prototypic display of her philosophical beliefs. McCluskey argues that Bethune's seemingly contradictory stances—one in favor of racial integration and the other in support of black-controlled institutions—were, in fact, in keeping with the post-Reconstruction paradigm of "race uplift ideology." Bethune's adherence to this ideology...