"Be a Daniel!"

She was a Negro and virtually a pauper, but plucky little Mary McLeod Bethune was also a dreamer. In 1904, with only $1.50 in cash, she started a school for Negro girls in Daytona Beach, Fla., and then she wanted none other than Soap Tycoon James N. Gamble, son of the founder of Procter & Gamble, to be a trustee. "But where," asked Gamble as he gazed at her shacklike building on the former city dump known as Hell's Hole, "is this school of which you wish me to be a trustee?" "In my mind," replied Mary Bethune. "And in my soul." James Gamble soon learned that nothing on earth could stop Mary Bethune.

She not only got her school, she also be came something of a legend in her life time. A devout Methodist, she would start each morning with a prayer, e.g., "With this new day, O God, let some new strength be mine." And each day, some new strength was indeed hers, until Mary Bethune became known throughout the nation as the First Lady of her race.

Piercing Eyes. The daughter of two former slaves and one of 17 children, she was born in a log cabin near Mayesville, S.C. At nine she could pick as much as 250 lbs. of cotton a day; at eleven she began her daily five-mile trudge to school at a small Presbyterian mission. At 15, she boarded a train for the first time in her life and set off for the Scotia Seminary in Concord, N.C., and later to the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. There she found herself the only Negro in a sea of strangers. "White people's eyes pierced me," said she. "Some of them were kind eyes; others would like to be but were still afraid." After graduation she taught in Georgia, married a fellow schoolteacher, Albert Bethune, moved on to Daytona Beach.

By that time she already had plans for a school of her own. To raise money, she baked sweet potato pies and sold them from door to door. She peddled fried fish, sang in local hotels. She borrowed a shack, collected boxes for furniture, squeezed elderberries for ink. used charcoal slivers for pencils. When the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute opened, its student body was five girls and her son.

With the help of James Gamble and other men of means, it grew into a flourishing secondary school and later, after merging with the neighboring Cookman Institute for Men, into a full-fledged four-year coeducational campus. Bethune-Cookman's assets rose to more than $3,500,000, its enrollment to 750, its faculty to 52. Meanwhile, Mrs. Bethune was making a name for herself in other ways.

"Be a Daniel!" she urged her followers.

"Take the vow of courage." "I Believe in You." Her plump figure, invariably supported by a favorite cane, became a familiar one at Negro rallies throughout the U.S. She founded the National Council of Negro Women (more than 800,000 members), was special adviser to Franklin Roosevelt on minority problems ("Mrs. Bethune, I believe in you"), served as special assistant to the Secretary of War on WAC training. In all her work, she was a symbol and part of the progress of the Negro race itself.

"Now," she once said, "I have come to the point where I can embrace all humanity --not just the people of my race or another race. I just love people." Last week, when Mary Bethune died in Daytona Beach at 79, just one year after the U.S. Supreme Court's decision against segregation in the schools, she had seen her greatest dream come true. "There is," she once said, "no such thing as Negro education--only education. I want my people to prepare themselves bravely for life, not because they are Negroes, but because they are men."

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