"most of the women of the world-Black and First World and white who work because we must-most of the women of the world persist far from the heart of the usual Women's Studies syllabus. Similarly, the typical Black History course will slide by the majority experience it pretends to represent. For example, Mary McLeod Bethune will scarcely receive as much attention as Nat Turner, even though Black women who bravely and efficiently provided for the education of Black people hugely outnumber those few Black men who led successful or doomed rebellions against slavery. In fact, Mary McLeod Bethune may not receive even honorable mention because Black History too often apes those ridiculous white history courses which produce such dangerous gibberish as The Sheraton British Colonial "history" of the Bahamas. Both Black and white history courses exclude from their central consideration those people who neither killed nor conquered anyone as the means to new identity, those people who took care of every one of the people who wanted to become "a person," those people who still take care of the life at issue: the ones who wash and who feed and who teach and who diligently decorate straw hats and bags with all of their historically unrequired gentle love: the women."
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Civil rights activistsEducators from the United StatesWomen activists from the United States20th-century African-American womenActivists from South Carolina
Original Language: English
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Sources
June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die (2003)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mary_McLeod_Bethune
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Mary McLeod Bethune
Mary McLeod Bethune (née McLeod; July 10, 1875 – May 18, 1955) was an educator, philanthropist, humanitarian, womanist, and civil rights activist who lived in the USA. Bethune founded the National Council of Negro Women in 1935, established the organization's flagship journal Aframerican Women's Journal, and presided as president or leader for a myriad of African American women's organizations including the National Association for Colored Women and the National Youth Administration's Negro Divi
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