Just ‘Whosoever’

Daughter of former slaves, Mary McLeod Bethune (1875–1955) served as director of the Division of Negro Affairs under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1935 she founded the National Council of Negro Women and was vice president of the NAACP from 1940 to her death. A deeply religious woman, Bethune in a 1941 essay reflected on how a teacher reading aloud John 3:16 to her as a child shaped her sense of self in a still-segregated America:

“With these words the scales fell from my eyes [Acts 9:18] and the light came flooding in. My sense of inferiority, my fear of handicaps, dropped away: ‘Whosoever,’ it said. No Jew nor Gentile, no Catholic or Protestant, no black nor white; just ‘whosoever.’ It meant that I, a humble Negro girl, had just as much chance as anybody in the sight and love of God. These words stored up a battery of faith and confidence and determination in my heart, which has not failed me to this day.

“I could scarcely wait to run home and tell my mother. For the first time, I gathered the family in a circle around me and read aloud to them from the Good Book. ‘Praise the Lord,’ cried my mother. ‘Hallelujah.’ That night I drove the first nail of my life work.”

Reflection

Read the famous passage from John 3. 

• Did reading Mary McLeod Bethune’s response to first encountering this verse change how you heard it? 
• What else stands out in Jesus’s teaching to Nicodemus? 
• How does Bethune connect “whosoever” with her life work in civil rights? 
• Do you know someone who needs this “battery of faith and confidence and determination”?