Mary mcleod bethune biography book

The new biography of famed educator and civil-rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune is called A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit. That may seem audacious, but author and academic Noliwe Rooks leaves no doubt that it is accurate.  

In giving her book an unabashedly striking title, Rooks, the chair of Africana Studies at Brown University, follows Bethune’s example by demonstrating that it matters what we call things.

On the first day of the inaugural Southern Conference for Human Welfare in 1938, Bethune demanded that her White peers address her with respect by calling her “Mrs. Bethune,” using her last name and courtesy title just as they would for a White speaker — rather than simply “Mary.” (Underscoring the weight of that subversive act, Rooks’s first chapter is called “I am Mrs.

Bethune.”)

The person who stood up at that 1938 meeting and insisted on respect, Rooks writes, “was a woman of drive, impact, and acclaim who at diff