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Title details for A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit by Noliwe Rooks - Available

A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit

The Vision of Mary McLeod Bethune

by Noliwe Rooks
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Audiobook
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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.

  • Creators

  • Series

    Significations

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    July 23, 2024

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780593864722
      • File size: 108681 KB
      • Duration: 03:46:24

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from May 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.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Soft-voiced narrator Danielle Lee James becomes the author as she recounts her research into the life, accomplishments, and trials of Mary MacLeod Bethune, who was often called the "First Lady of the Struggle" or "First Lady of Black America." Author Noliwe Rooks's brief academic work focuses on Bethune's political philosophy as it is intertwined with the life and legacy of this consequential twentieth- century woman who dared to fight the system for Black women and girls. Using subtle pauses and changes in pacing, James skillfully moves listeners' attention between discussions of Bethune's life and the author's reflections on Bethune's accomplishments, including her crucial work with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Presidents Truman and FDR, and other national leaders. M.B.K. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine
    • Library Journal

      December 6, 2024

      Another entry in the "Significations" series edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. A statue of Mary McLeod Bethune stands proudly in the statuary hall at the U.S. Capitol. The stone she is carved from is the last of the marble that came from the vein that gave the world Michelangelo's David. This one spoiler is just the tip of the iceberg from this book that will leave listeners wondering why they haven't heard this before. Bethune and her biographer Rooks (Africana studies, Brown Univ.; Cutting School: The Segrenomics of American Education) grew up in the same part of Florida, where Bethune started to parlay her influence; this personal connection to her subject makes Rooks's well-researched book intimate as well. Rooks identified herself as an example of Bethune's far-reaching influence, as Bethune set out to provide for the education of Black students and advocate legislation and social policies that provided equal opportunity for all. Actor and narrator Danielle Lee James causes listeners to feel almost as though they are listening to the author narrate her own work and relate all the anecdotes about her famous subject that she has discovered. The intimacy does not preclude precise diction that lays down the information garnered by the research. VERDICT Listeners will find Rooks's personal yet scholarly work fascinating.--Laura Trombley

      Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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