“Center women’s labor here.” — margin note in Mary McLeod Bethune’s lesson book, ca. 1929
July 10, 2025, marks the 150th birthday of the woman who wrote that line.
Dr. Crystal A. deGregory
Center women’s labor here.
But at what cost? The same bell rings in different corridors now.
Fast-forward to 2025. Universities that once hashtagged #Equity during the height of Black Lives Matter are dismantling the very safeguards they pledged to build. Policies sunset, whole departments close, committees disband, and the invisible labor and mothering of Black women—work done in love and service—remains expendable. I confronted that expendability in my 2023 Diverse essay, “The Program Went On as Planned,” written after Temple University’s acting president JoAnne A. Epps collapsed and died while opening a convocation. The program continued shortly afterward.
Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) aren’t exempt. Just months later, Antoinette “Bonnie” Candia-Bailey, vice president for student affairs at historically Black Lincoln University of Missouri, died by suicide after alleging workplace bullying. A third-party review later labeled her claims “unsubstantiated,” but the ledger tallied neither grief nor labor. Bethune’s gospel, it seems, is unfinished business.
Built on little more than “a buck fifty” and Bethune’s audacious faith, her school ran on the stamina and self-determination of Black women who arrived straight from laundry kettles, orange groves, and kitchen shifts—most still wearing the day’s work on their aprons. Alumni oral histories from the 1970s record a laundress named Mrs. Pinkney who, after a ten-hour washday, stayed to drill younger pupils—teaching fractions to a teenage sugar-field hand so he could tally harvest wages. That barter—life skills for literacy—kept Bethune’s kerosene lamps burning long before white philanthropy lit its first match at the then-Daytona Literary and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls.
More than a century later, the barter persists. Black women faculty advise twice the number of first-gen students, chair diversity committees, and cover the costs of food, books, childcare, and more so vulnerable students have a fair shot at success—tasks rarely logged in tenure dossiers. This invisible labor and mothering exacts a toll in migraines, sky-high blood-pressure readings, and psychotropic prescriptions. Sometimes, a funeral.
What so obviously saps Bethune’s living legacy is not a shortage of vision but a shortage of infrastructure. A century after she hustled boiled-egg coins into a budget, HBCUs still patch-hole their ledgers with miracles. In FY 2023 alone, Congressionally promised Title III dollars fell short by roughly $124 million—money meant for evening childcare, mobile counseling vans, and hazard-pay stipends for the women who keep residence halls upright after midnight. Land-grant parity lags, too; 1890 campuses wait months for matching funds federal law says should arrive automatically.
The neglect is also administrative—a kind of “friendly fire” that surfaces whenever campuses ask more of Black women than they budget for. At HBCUs, we educate people out of supporting us, sending our best scholars elsewhere for graduate and professional degrees. Whether under-recycled bad presidents or demoted-up bad actors, vision blurs, mission fades, and hope dies. Purchase orders stall in upper offices while too many alumni track football stats instead of instructional lapses; some Title III dollars sit idle in reserve accounts even as labs beg for pipettes and transformative programs await a yes. The best and brightest talents—often Black women, weary and worn—leave the sector for the sake of peace—sidelined, siloed, and silenced.
Across higher education, we need fewer performative presidencies and more capable leadership because—as I remind every campus leader— “It is your job to find a way.” Until we do, broken molars will keep grinding through the night, and OSHA, Title VII, and ADA binders will stay closed until somebody else is gone.
Bethune warned us: institutions that prize ceremony over care will perish for lack of love. Her 150th birthday poses a blunt question: Will we keep gathering to clap at her statues while starving the living Black women whose invisible labor and mothering still hold these campuses together?
Where else do we go from here?
Count. Track the after-hours advising, pop-up counseling, and Saturday pantry runs that keep first-gen students enrolled; numbers move budgets faster than sympathy ever has.
Fund. Dedicate at least five percent of every Title III dollar and indirect-cost recovery to on-site childcare, elder-care stipends, and hazard pay for the women who stand night watch. Faith alone can’t foot the bill.
Enforce. Tie presidential bonuses and board renewals to reductions in unresolved grievance cases; anti-bullying and ADA rules must outweigh pageantry.
Teach. Launching this fall, the #BethuneAt150 Syllabus turns these measures into ready-to-use modules—an invitation, not a monument.
Here’s to the mothers who still wake campuses before sunrise, ringing unseen bells so others can dream aloud in daylight. May their wrists feel the weight of salaries, not just prayers. With faith, said Dr. Bethune—and says the Bible—nothing is impossible.
But faith without provision or protection is betrayal.
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Dr. Crystal A. deGregory is a Nashville-made historian, associate professor of history, and founding director of the Mary McLeod Bethune Institute for the Study of Women and Girls at Bethune-Cookman University. Host liaison of the 2025 Southern Association for Women Historians Triennial Meeting and creator of the forthcoming podcast Her Due and #BethuneAt150 Syllabus, she writes at the crossroads of Black higher education, culture, and justice.
