A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit

May 1, 2024
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.

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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.

Starred review from June 1, 2024
Mary McLeod Bethune is an African American icon, especially in her home state of Florida, where she founded the girls' school that would become Bethune Cookman University. Yet today she is vaguely recalled as ""an educator"" rather than for her courageous activism and political organizing for African American and women's rights. Fellow Floridian Rooks restores her to the canon of fierce Black freedom fighters, reminding us of Bethune's advocacy for voting rights and economic independence for African Americans and how she saw education as essential to achieving those goals. Rooks focuses on key moments in Bethune's career and how she anticipated contemporary debates over respectability politics, decolonization, and institutional racism. A commanding figure, Bethune once led her Black female students in facing down a mob of armed Klansmen. She urged Black society ladies to make common cause with rural and working-class Blacks in lobbying against systemic racism. Bethune insisted that the National Association of Colored Women actually support women economically and politically, declaring that Black women "must have some voice in the laws which shall govern her and her children and send her sons to death." Later she sought to establish an all-Black beach resort to enable Black families to relax free of harassment and build a self-sustaining Black economy. Rooks' redefining biography is essential reading.

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