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 different stages of her life wielded an unusual amount of power.” Yet in most historical accounts, she is overshadowed by her most famous champion, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, the star speaker on the second day of that conference and Bethune’s ally in activism. Rooks’s book rights that imbalance, and more.
Bethune was a political powerhouse who led national policy initiatives during a time when a Black woman merely sitting at the same table with her White counterparts was risky. She was also breathtakingly brave. Setting the stage, Rooks describes the unsettling night in 1920 during which Bethune led a group that stared down 80 hooded, torch-wielding Ku Klux Klan members at the Daytona, Florida girls school she founded. Following the passage of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote, the Klan incursion was retaliation for Bethune’s election organizing. The Klan brought dozens of men in robes, but they were “dwarfed” by the people they were trying to intimidate: “150 students, staff, and teachers who stood beside Bethune.” On that basis alone, Bethune should be legendary.
When Bethune came into this world, her birth marked a significant American milestone. The 15th of 17 children in a Maysville, South Carolina family, Mary McLeod was “the first born free, not as enslaved property.” Her story is about a family’s journey from enslavement to their daughter becoming “the first Black woman to establish a historically Black college.” As Rooks notes, the Daytona day school was the first for “Black girls in the eastern part of the United States.”
Though Bethune is best known as an educator, “education is just part of her story. She was a woman of ‘firsts’,” including “the first to found a hospital for Black people in the state of Florida.” Moreover, and this is one of Rooks’s most central motifs, Bethune was an undersung, fierce, and visionary political operative in the service of Black upliftment and liberation.
Bethune spoke frankly in the 1920s against Jim Crow, saying, “The South has definitely committed itself to the task of keeping the Negro in his place… To keep [Negroes] inferior they must be huddled in segregated ghettoes without drainage, light, pavement, or modern sanitary convenience. They must be denied justice and the right to make a decent living.”
Bethune made voting and education her top priorities … arguing that “the ballot and the book were powerful and necessary tools capable of keeping Black people safe as they forged a path toward freedom in the United States.”
During the 1940s, Bethune pushed for and secured the inclusion of Black schools in key federal programs championed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration, including one that paved the way for the Tuskegee Airmen. As Rooks demonstrates, the path for those iconic Black pilots began with Bethune’s prodding FDR to include Black colleges and universities in the new Civilian Pilot Training program, an initiative designed to improve the nation’s readiness for war. In 1942, her actions culminated in a pivotal step in the integration of the United States military at a time when the southern wing of FDR’s own party was openly and virulently segregationist. Ultimately, Bethune’s policy proposals — promoted by her friend and longtime ally, Eleanor Roosevelt — helped initiate a shift of Black voters away from a Republican Party that had long rested on goodwill and laurels as the party of Abraham Lincoln, the “Great Emancipator.”
Rooks reports that Bethune also made voting and education her top priorities when she shifted to focus on systemic obstacles to Black advancement, arguing that “the ballot and the book were powerful and necessary tools capable of keeping Black people safe as they forged a path toward freedom in the United States.”
In some ways, we are still fighting these struggles — still lobbying for much of the change and opportunity Bethune championed in education, work, and even citizenship and voting access. But this book is a reminder and painstakingly researched reflection that brings us closer to understanding the woman and leader Bethune was.
Rooks’s own grandmother graduated from Bethune-Cookman University and knew Bethune personally, and by showing how Bethune’s story impacted the lives of those in her family, Rooks adds immediacy and perspective to A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit. However, despite that familiarity, Rooks didn’t expect to encounter a sometimes radical and visionary leader when she began her research.
Based on her prior reading, Rooks still thought of Bethune as someone “who might be considered to have been more an accommodationist to White power than an activist dedicating her life to banishing to hell any talk of Black inferiority.” Digging into the archives, she admits that perception was the first thing she knew she had gotten wrong.
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Two years ago, Bethune’s statue — carved in rare Italian marble and weighing two tons — was installed in the United States Capitol’s Statuary Hall. (It replaced a statue of another Floridian, Confederate general Edmund Kirby Smith.) In a chapter titled “Meeting Bethune,” Rooks describes seeing the figure for the first time as a deeply moving, tear-inducing, and almost religious experience.
Rooks tells Bethune’s story in detailed, yet mostly accessible prose. There may be one too many inventories of accomplishments and a few metaphorical drifts, but overall, Rooks paints a gripping picture of the treacherous waters Bethune navigated and all she accomplished against the most unforgiving terrain. This work deserves the broadest possible audience.
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