Elderberry Ink and the Training That Lasts

On October 3, 1904, Mary McLeod Bethune welcomed five little girls and her own son into a rented cottage in Daytona Beach, Florida. She had one dollar and fifty cents to her name. There were no textbooks, no chalkboards, no proper supplies. So Bethune improvised. She burned splinters of firewood into charcoal pencils. She crushed elderberries to make ink. She hauled discarded packing crates from local merchants and fashioned them into desks.

The fifteenth of seventeen children born to former slaves Samuel and Patsy McLeod in Mayesville, South Carolina, Bethune knew what it meant to hunger for learning. A single scholarship to Scotia Seminary had changed the trajectory of her life as a girl, and she was determined to pass that gift forward. She sold sweet potato pies to keep the little school running. She knocked on every door she could find. She refused to quit.

That rented cottage grew into the Daytona Literary and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls, which merged with Cookman Institute in 1923 to become Bethune-Cookman College — an institution that has shaped thousands of lives across generations.

Proverbs 22:6 tells us, "Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it." Elderberry ink fades from the page, but truth written on a young heart endures forever. The most lasting investment we ever make is not measured in dollars. It is measured in the lives we train with whatever God has placed in our hands.