A Passionate Mind In Relentless Pursuit: The Vision Of Mary Mcleod Bethune (Significations),New

An intimate and searching account of the life and legacy of one of Americas towering educators, a woman who dared to center the progress of Black women and girls in the larger struggle for political and social liberationWhen Mary MacLeod Bethune died, many of the 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 of the U.S. Capitol, and yet for most Americans, 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 towards 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 15th of 17 children and the first born into freedom, Bethune survived brutal poverty and caste subordination to become the first in her family to learn to read and to attend college. She gave that same gift to others when in 1904, at age 29, Bethune welcomed her first class of five girls to the Daytona, Florida school she herself had founded. In short order, the school enrolled hundreds of children and eventually 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 selfsufficiency. She played a big game, and a long game, enrolling 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 grandparents trained to be teachers at BethuneCookman University, and her family vacationed at the allBlack beach that Bethune helped found in one of her many entrepreneurial projects for the community. The story of howin a state with some of the highest lynching rates in the countryBethune carved out so much space, and how she catapulted from there onto the national stage, is, in Rooks hands, a moving and astonishing example of the power of a will and a vision that had few equals. Now, when the gains and losses in the long struggle for full Black equality in this country feel particularly nearand centered on the state of Florida, it is an enormous gift to have this brilliant and lyrical reckoning with Bethunes journey from one of our own great educators and scholars of that same struggle.