A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursui t \;Noliwe Rooks
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\nWh en Mary McLeod Bethune died\, tributes in newspapers around the country sa id the same thing: she should be on the Mount Rushmore of Black American a chievement. Indeed\, Bethune is the only Black American whose statue stand s in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol\, and yet for most\, she remains a ma rble figure from the dim past. Now\, seventy years later\, Noliwe Rooks tu rns Bethune from stone to flesh\, showing her to have been a visionary lea der with lessons to still teach us as we continue on our journey toward a freer and more just nation.
\nAny serious effort to understand how t he Black civil rights generation found role models\, vision\, and inspirat ion during their midcentury struggle for political power must place Bethun e at its heart. Her success was unlikely: the fifteenth of seventeen child ren and the first born into freedom\, Bethune survived brutal poverty and caste 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\, a t age twenty-nine\, Bethune welcomed her first class of five girls to the Daytona\, Florida\, school she had founded and which would become the univ ersity that bears her name to this day. Bethune saw education as an essent ial dimension of the larger struggle for freedom\, vitally connected to th e vote and to economic self-sufficiency\, and she enlisted Eleanor Rooseve lt\, Harry Truman\, Franklin D. Roosevelt\, and many other powerful leader s in her cause.
\nRooks grew up in Florida\, in Bethune&rsquo\;s sha dow: her grandmother trained to be a teacher at Bethune-Cookman University \, and her family vacationed at the all-Black beach that Bethune helped fo und in one of her many community empowerment projects. The story of how Be thune succeeded in a state with some of the highest lynching rates in the country is\, in Rooks&rsquo\;s hands\, a moving and astonishing example of the power of a mind and a vision that had few equals. Now\, when the stak es of the long struggle for full Black equality in this country are partic ularly evident&mdash\;and centered on the state of Florida&mdash\;it is a gift to have this brilliant and lyrical reckoning with Bethune&rsquo\;s jo urney from one of our own great educators and scholars of that same strugg le.
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