The following documents are from the papers of Daniel Mortimer Williams (M95-2). Williams worked on newspapers in Texas, New York and Washington, D.C. and was chief editorial writer for the World-Telegram in the early 1930s. He also covered the White House and State Department for Trans-Radio Press during World War II.
Williams planned to write a biography of Mary McLeod Bethune and accumulated photographs, publications and newspaper clippings for the book. He conducted several interviews with Ms. Bethune in the summer of 1946, though the biography was never completed.
"I had no furniture. I begged dry goods boxes and made benches and stools; begged a basin and other things I needed and in 1904 five little girls here started school."—Mary McLeod Bethune.
This document is a transcript of an interview apparently conducted in about 1939 or 1940 by Dr. Charles Spurgeon Johnson, an authority on race relations who chaired the Sociology Department and was later the first black president at traditionally-black Fisk University.
Williams had begun turning the interview into a story. This is a typed copy of an early draft.
