PROGRAM
“Rooks restores [Mary McLeod Bethune] to the canon of fierce Black freedom fighters. . . . Rooks’ redefining biography is essential reading.” —Booklist
Roosevelt House is pleased to present a discussion of A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit: The Vision of Mary McLeod Bethune by Noliwe M. Rooks. In this intimate and gripping account, Rooks tells the extraordinary life story of a towering American educator—one who dared, within the larger struggle for political and social liberation, to put the progress of Black women and girls first. Among the powerful leaders she enlisted in her cause was Eleanor Roosevelt—with whom she met, on more than one occasion, here at the Roosevelt home that would later become Hunter College’s Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute. The author will be in conversation with leading scholar of the politics of race and education, Jeanne Theoharis.
When Mary McLeod Bethune died, tributes in newspapers around the country all 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. Now, seventy years later, Rooks turns Bethune from stone to flesh, showing her to have been a visionary leader—with important lessons still to teach us.
Her success was unlikely: the 15th of 17 children and the first born into freedom, Bethune survived brutal poverty and 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 29, she welcomed her first class of five girls to the Florida school that she had founded, and which became 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.
Noliwe Rooks is the chair of and a professor in Africana Studies at Brown University. Her work explores how race and gender both impact and are impacted by popular culture, social history, and political life in the United States. The author of four books and numerous articles, essays, and op-eds, Rooks has received research funding from the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. She lectures frequently at colleges and universities around the country and is a regular contributor to outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Time, and NPR.
Jeanne Theoharis is distinguished professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the author or co-author of nine books on the civil rights and Black Power movements, and the politics of race and education. Her widely-acclaimed biography The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks won a NAACP Image Award and the Letitia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians. Her book A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History won the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize in Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC, The Nation, Slate, the Atlantic, Salon, The Intercept, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.