Chapter 2: Mary McLeod Bethune: The Significance of Rhetorical Action in the Development of a Black College Leader

The pre- to post-World War II era continued to be a period of racial consciousness and uplift for Black Americans. To this end, there were many avenues through which the acquisition of Black consciousness was achieved during the first half of the twentieth century. Much like her contemporaries, Bethune advanced educational thought rooted in four central themes: (a) demand for applied learning; (b) recognition of the importance of social standpoint and cultural identity scholarship; (c) a critical epistemology that both supported and resisted mainstream American ideals; and (d) moral existentialism grounded in a sense of communal responsibility (Evans, 2007, p. 8). In many ways, rhetoric endowed race leaders, including Black college leaders, with a venue in which to advance their agenda and reach audiences of all races. As a rhetorician, Bethune is able to make meaning of the social spaces she constructed, occupied, and within which she interacted. Goodsell (1988) references George Herbert Mead’s school of thought in which “symbolic interactionism” (p. 26) results when “the individual does not act in response to inner drives alone but also in relation to the role and the place that he views himself as occupying (p. 26). One could argue Bethune had to expand the scope of her own motivations in order to make meaning of her greater role and the societal space in which she sought to occupy and purpose on behalf of her race. This ideal of finding multiple meanings for her desired brand of servant leadership informs the way in which Bethune negotiates a social space for her life’s calling to remedy the broken spheres of race relations, education, economics, and social justice in the American South. The methodology employed to penetrate and affect change within these spheres—narrative language and thought or rhetoric—ultimately defines their social meaning. Of the three types of rhetoric, “judicial or forensic; deliberative; and demonstrative,” (Dixon, 1971, pp. 22–23) Black college leaders such as Bethune employed deliberative oratory, as it addresses a particular popular or political policy.