Statues Don’t Pay Stipends: Bethune at 150 and the Cost of Invisible Labor

“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. deGregoryIn 1904, before most of Daytona Beach even stirred, Mary McLeod Bethune slipped off her fraying apron, mounted a bicycle, and—so preoccupied with purpose—didn’t hear its tires crackle over oyster shells toward the rail depot. She sold boiled eggs to northbound travelers, the coins in her skirt pocket jingling as she pedaled back just in time to ring the brass bell that summoned her first pupils—five little girls and her son, Albert—to class. Bethune’s radical faith transformed that predawn grind into gospel long before “hustle culture” made overwork a badge of honor. Each ride was more than dollars and cents; it was a manifesto: women’s work—and the invisible labor and mothering sewn into its seams—belongs at the heart of education.

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.