Bessie DeGraw

Bessie DeGraw Profile

By Albert Dittes

M. Bessie DeGraw (Sutherland) devoted her distinguished teaching career to Adventist educational reform. She became part of the porogressive program of Edward A. Sutherland early in her career and worked closely with him for the next 60 years, becoming his wife during his last year of life.

Ellen White calls for educational reform and Booker T. Washington's story, along with the school for educating newly-freed negroes he attended in Virginia, inspired Bessie DeGraw as a young professional.

Her career began after the SDA Church had operated a college in Battle Creek, Michigan, for years but had just started work on the grade school and academy levels. Her obituary stated she had once been educational secretary of the Lake Union, and it must have been in this capacity that she wrote a profound article in September, 1901, Review & Herald proposing a pre-college Christian education system.

“When it is once established that the denomination should maintain schools for its children and youth, the next question is, What is the work to- be done in the primary and intermediate schools?” she wrote.

Her article answered this question and apparently became the foundation for Adventist early education.

“ In planning a course of study, certain physical and spiritual laws must be followed. It is not right to launch out at random. These laws are outlined in the word of God, and the true educator is he who studies Christian education from this basis, and who conducts Christian schools upon this foundation. It is necessary, therefore, to give more than a passing glance to some Scriptural texts and some statements in the Testimonies.”

" Let me say, before going further, that “The Desire of Ages” is the best textbook on psychology and child study that it is possible for you to find,” she continued “If teachers will study this book,— not read, but study it,— they will find that it contains principles of eternal truth for the educator. The very basis of a course of study is given in the following words relating to the child Jesus : " The powers of mind and body developed gradually, in keeping with the laws of childhood.”

Her article then recommended a spiritual-and-mental training curriculum for grades 1 to 10.

The efforts of some professional educators to help the underprivileged negro race also impressed her.

“Dr. Frissell, the present principal of Hampton Institute and successor of General Armstrong, emphasizes the value to a student of working his way through school, and speaks especially of Hampton Institute's plan to teach students to be self-governing,” she wrote in a 1909 Youth’s Instructor article. “He says: ‘On account of the lack of a feeling of personal responsibility on the part of the negro, there is an imperative need of the right kind of leaders among them.”

The fundamental principles of education Dr. Frissell enunciated to lift the negro from slavery became part of the philosophy of Madison College, the self-supporting school she helped to pioneer.

“In order to develop this capacity for leadership they must gain the power of self-government, and learn how to control others during their school life. The more a student can be made to feel a sense of responsibility for.the good conduct of the institution, the better. Self-government and self-support ought to be prominent features in every colored normal. Nothing should be given that the student can earn.”

Booker T. Washington applied these principles at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, the school he made world-famous.

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“The power of initiation that belongs to Mr. Booker Washington could only have come through a training which placed heavy responsibility on the individual,” she added. “Not only did he work his own way through school, but during his school life he had much to do with the government and instruction of his fellow students. He was trained in an institution that was a sort of an industrial village, where he had a taste of the duties and responsibilities of actual life."

M. Bessie DeGraw was born January 13, 1871, at the home of her maternal grandparents in Binghamton, New York, the oldest of the four children of Dr. Fred H. DeGraw and Mary Seymour De-Graw, whose home at the time of her birth was Laclede, Mo.

Her mother died when she was only eight years old, and her father placed her in the home of Mrs. Marian Stowell Truesdale, whose family along with the J. N. Andrews family were among the first Sabbath-keeping Adventists. The Truesdales lived in Trenton, Mo., where Bessie’s father had established a dental practice, but he died soon after she moved into the Truesdale home and received excellent training.

Bessie attended the public schools near her home and graduated from Central Missouri State Normal School, Warrensburg, in 1891. She taught the following year in Webb City High School and attended Battle Creek College 1892-93 "to learn more about the Bible." Here she met Percy T. Magan, then head of the Bible and history department, who became a lifetime friend. The following year, at the age of twenty-two, she accepted a call to the newly established Walla Walla College and worked closely with young President E. A. Sutherland and his faculty in enacting major educational reforms Ellen White urged in letters from Australia.

Miss DeGraw taught and assisted with administrative work four years in Walla Walla College, four years at Battle Creek, and three years at Emmanuel Missionary College (now Andrews University), being at the time she one of the few professionally trained Seventh-day Adventist teachers.

She continued her pioneering work in education at Madison starting in 1904. Enabling the students to work their way through school, the staff at early Madison had to work on wages of $13/month ($340 now) They were promised a raise should the farm yield a good crop some year, but that proved impossible for a long time. They also gave the students a voice in the school government.

She was the public relations voice of the Madison school, continually writing about it in various SDA publications.

She was one of the pioneers in the introduction of a vegetarian diet in our denominational institutions, locating our schools in rural settings, with the Bible, agriculture, other industries, self-government, self-support, and health training as basic in the allround plan for training students.

A prolific writer, she assisted Elder S. N. Haskell in writing the books, Daniel the Prophet and The Seer of Patmos. She served as editor of The Advocate, a Journal of Christian Education, being responsible for its first issue published in January, 1899. She also assisted E.A. Sutherland with the books, Studies in Christian Education, Living Fountains or Broken Cisterns, and many other educational documents, including several early textbooks. She edited the Madison Survey, a public relations journal for many years.

George Peabody College for Teachers awarded her a Masters degree in the 1930s, and she completed the requirements for a Ph.D. degree at the age of 61.

Miss M. Bessie DeGraw married the widowed Dr. E. A. Sutherland in 1954. He died the next year, and she passed away June 7, 1965, at the age of 94.

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