A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit: The Vision of Mary McLeod Bethune

by Noliwe Rooks, Henry Louis Gates Jr. Narrated by Danielle Lee James

Overview

An intimate and searching account of the life and legacy of one of America's towering educators, a woman who dared to center the progress of Black women and girls in the larger struggle for political and social liberation

When Mary McLeod Bethune died, tributes in newspapers around the country said the same thing: she should be on the Mount Rushmore of Black American achievement. Indeed, Bethune is the only Black American whose statue stands in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol, and yet for most, she remains a marble figure from the dim past. Now, seventy years later, Noliwe Rooks turns Bethune from stone to flesh, showing her to have been a visionary leader with lessons to still teach us as we continue on our journey toward a freer and more just nation.

Any serious effort to understand how the Black civil rights generation found role models, vision, and inspiration during their midcentury struggle for political power must place Bethune at its heart. Her success was unlikely: the fifteenth of seventeen children and the first born into freedom, Bethune survived brutal poverty and caste subordination to become the first in her family to learn how to read and to attend college. She gave that same gift to others when in 1904, at age twenty-nine, Bethune welcomed her first class of five girls to the Daytona, Florida, school she had founded and which would become the university that bears her name to this day. Bethune saw education as an essential dimension of the larger struggle for freedom, vitally connected to the vote and to economic self-sufficiency, and she enlisted Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and many other powerful leaders in her cause.

Rooks grew up in Florida, in Bethune's shadow: her grandmother trained to be a teacher at Bethune-Cookman University, and her family vacationed at the all-Black beach that Bethune helped found in one of her many community empowerment projects. The story of how Bethune succeeded in a state with some of the highest lynching rates in the country is, in Rooks's hands, a moving and astonishing example of the power of a mind and a vision that had few equals. Now, when the stakes of the long struggle for full Black equality in this country are particularly evident-and centered on the state of Florida-it is a gift to have this brilliant and lyrical reckoning with Bethune's journey from one of our own great educators and scholars of that same struggle.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

★ 05/27/2024

Rooks (Cutting School), chair of Africana Studies at Brown University, meditates in this probing study on the “talismanic” significance civil rights trailblazer Mary McLeod Bethune (1875–1955) holds in the annals of African American political struggle. From the 1920s through the 1940s, Bethune “moved the needle” on issues including voting rights, child labor laws, and educational opportunities for African Americans. But those are simply “the things Bethune did,” Rooks writes. “To feel her impact, to understand her genius, is a more subtle matter.” Her legacy is nowhere and everywhere, Rooks suggests, overshadowed by movement superstars of the 1960s even as her radical thinking formed a foundational layer of civil rights history; it was Bethune, Rooks shows, who set the movement on the path away from “individualistic” uplift via mutual aid toward lobbying the U.S. government for structural change and collective betterment. Rooks also grapples with Bethune’s promotion of “Black capitalism”—a segregationist-inflected line of thinking that encouraged Black people to primarily do business within their communities—and her late-in-life involvement with the cultlike Moral Re-Armament movement, which sought to defeat capitalism, colonialism, and communism alike with radical selflessness. What emerges from Rooks’s ruminative narrative is a layered portrait of a roving mind that pushed constantly against bounded systems. It makes for a rewarding window onto the nuanced political thinking of the early civil rights movement. (July)

From the Publisher

Rooks restores [Mary McLeod Bethune] to the canon of fierce Black freedom fighters. . . . Rooks' redefining biography is essential reading.” —Booklist (starred review)

“A layered portrait of a roving mind that pushed constantly against bounded systems. . . . A rewarding window onto the nuanced political thinking of the early civil rights movement.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Pays tribute to a beloved foremother and celebrates Bethune’s commitment to ‘stand up and fight for change.’ A fine introduction to Bethune’s philosophy, as well as a thoughtful primer for today’s activists.” —Kirkus

"Professor Noliwe Rooks draws on her command of historical events, her lived experiences as a Black woman, and her gift as a storyteller to give us this priceless written portrait of the life, the work, and the legacy of an American shero, Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune." —Johnnetta Betsch Cole, seventh president and chair of the board of the NCNW, president emerita of Spelman and Bennett colleges

“In reflecting on Mary McLeod Bethune’s life and on her own, Noliwe Rooks offers a tribute to an inspiring leader and a meditation on race and history.” —Drew Faust, Arthur Kingsley Porter University Research Professor, Harvard University
 
“Noliwe Rooks's exceptional storytelling and impeccable research skills elevate this book to the pinnacle of works about Mary McLeod Bethune. It transcends historical narrative; it challenges us to reevaluate our understanding of Bethune's contributions and the lessons they offer us now.  Interwoven with the story of Bethune's indomitable spirit for advancing Black life is Rooks's own family history, rooted in Florida like Bethune and shaped by her legacy. Learning about Bethune through Rooks's lens is both a privilege and an honor for educators and readers alike.” —Bettina L. Love, William F. Russell Professor, Teachers College, Columbia University, and author of Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal

“In the skillful hands of Noliwe Rooks, this remarkable life story of a crucial figure in American history becomes something more: a mesmerizing personal meditation on racial justice, political power, and the yearning for a home.” —Paul Tough, author of The Inequality Machine and How Children Succeed

Kirkus Reviews

2024-04-05
A personal consideration of a pioneering civil rights leader’s ongoing significance.

Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955) fought for “full equality for the Negro in our time,” during the grim period between the end of Reconstruction and the post–World War II Civil Rights Movement. She founded schools, with an emphasis on educating Black girls, and she raised money to pay poll taxes and offered instruction on how to pass literacy tests for Black Americans trying to vote in the Jim Crow South. She served in the leadership of numerous civil rights and mutual aid organizations, from the NAACP to the National Council of Negro Women, and she advocated for the Black community as an adviser to three presidents. Although historian Rooks sketches Bethune’s achievements and traces the evolution of her thinking over the decades—from an emphasis on self-help to a focus on systemic change—this is not a full-scale biography. Instead, chapters on individual aspects of Bethune’s long, multifaceted career include the author’s reminiscences about her childhood sojourns with her grandparents in a Black Florida community called the Heights, the education at a Bethune school that enabled her grandmother to become a teacher, and other personal matters. Rooks believes today’s activists can draw several crucial lessons from Bethune’s example: the importance of publicly commemorating Black achievements as integral parts of American history; the key role played in the struggle for equality by Black women and the need to support them; Black capitalism as a vital element of collective empowerment; and the fundamental connection between Black liberation and the international battle against colonialism and imperialism. The author’s impassioned text pays tribute to a beloved foremother and celebrates Bethune’s commitment to “stand up and fight for change.”

A fine introduction to Bethune’s philosophy, as well as a thoughtful primer for today’s activists.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940160246819
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	07/23/2024
Series:	Significations
Edition description:	Unabridged