An Annotated Bibliography of Mary Mcleod Bethune’s Chicago Defender Columns, 1948-1955

When Mary McLeod Bethune started writing a regular, weekly public affairs column for The Chicago Defender, she had seen America from Reconstruction to the rise of the civil rights movement. She had stood down the Ku Klux Klan to lead people to the pulls after the ratification of the Woman’s Suffrage Amendment in 1920. She had advised US presidents. She had founded a college in the deep South and an organization for women in the nation’s capital. In the late in40’s until her death in the middle 1950’s, this distinguished educator and advocate wrote at least 300,000 words for the Defender. This annotated bibliography divides the columns into issue-oriented categories, and each section contains a brief abstract, followed by a list of citations and excerpts from that group of editorials. This volume will of interest to those working in the history of journalism, women’s studies, Black studies, and social issues.