When he saw what it was doing for me and that I was able to help him master his letters, and words do that he could open his eyes, and he could see and he began to realize what it meant to get some learning and to, himself, be awakened to such extent as to go ten miles at night to the Maysville village and attend night school until all could read, write and apply himself.
Things got and remembered was what he got, what my immediate family got and the awakening came to mother and father when able to sit down and read the newspapers and magazines and the Bible to them – that they had in their own home somebody who could do that—that was the greatest thrill.
Of course, that was just the beginning of the thousands and thousands of lives that have been touched and awakened all along the way.
Johnson: I am very much interested in seeing just how a kind of family setting – however impoverished it may be, may have something that would set a person off…How did this radiate in the community?
Bethune: In this way – that a new standard for living was set up in many of the homes and different little school centers were set up and workers who did not have much money, but more than they had before; and the little Sunday School, and the little chorus, and things of that kind. It brought about a growth – a desire for learning. It gave to the masses there an understanding that they just did not have to continue in darkness – that there was a chance.
