Rooks, Noliwe: A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit: The Vision of Mary McLeod Bethune 2024
Twelve of us met in February to discuss Noliwe Rooks’ biography of Mary McCleod Bethune titled A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit. Bethune was born in South Carolina in 1875 and was from a large family. Her parents had been enslaved. Bethune was the first in her family to go to school. In our book discussion, at least four of the women around the table had never heard of Mary McLeod Bethune. Those of us who had heard of her, mostly only knew about her establishing a school for girls in Daytona, Florida in 1904, which later became Bethune-Cookman University.
Barb started us off, saying, “Thank you for what I should have learned in school.”
Marian replied, “I learned so much. I knew that she started a school for girls. I had no idea she was involved with the Tuskegee Institute; she was the person who went and initiated getting HBCUs to receive this government money for the civilian pilot program. I did not know about her raising money for people to pay their poll tax so they could vote. I was talking to another reader, who said, ‘We didn’t really learn anything about her personal life.’ And I said, ‘We didn’t.’ I wanted to talk about the picture of her on the cover. I’ve only seen pictures of her as an older adult.”
Robin told us that according to the book jacket, it’s based on a photograph of her in 1915.
Wendy shared, “I thought it was a great picture. Then there was a place in the book where it said she often wore her signature pearls and a hat.”
Ann said, "I was amazed at her personality and the number of things she did. I kept hearing feminist, civil rights activist, pragmatic achiever, always figuring out how she could do something and make it happen and at the same time she seemed to be very humble. I never felt that she was trying to show off. She seemed to just do things that needed to be done and the degree of courage that she had. Also, there was a religious part of her described in the last chapter, her wanting people to care about each other everywhere, despite the pain she had been through because of racism. I had never heard of her before, I’m really glad the book was written because I had no idea of her accomplishments or of the history of Florida.”
Marian pointed out that it was more of a history book than a biography.
Bonnie, who had lots of post it notes, said, “Ann just said something about her troubles because of racism, but it wasn’t just racism it was sexism. p.95 Mary Church Terrell, who was a Black woman herself, did not think women should strike out on their own and assume leadership positions with a national profile.
In 1945, Walter white, W.E.B. DuBois and Mary McLeod Bethune attended the five-week conference that led to the founding of the United Nations.
p. 156 ‘Bethune, White, and Du Bois developed a game plan aimed at convincing the US delegation to adopt a position denouncing colonialism and linking the oppression and exploitation of Black people in the United States to the denial of human rights for colonized people...The degree of their disunity became clear the day before the formal start of the conference when White and Du Bois, without consulting or informing Bethune, issued a statement on behalf of the Black delegation about their rejection of colonialism...’
When I read these books, I always say, the more things change, the more they stay the same. On p. 6 that Carlton woman called Bethune by her first name
‘Louise Charlton, who had been one of the organizers (of the inaugural meeting of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare) called on Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune, and she called her Mary; She said, Mary, do you wish to come to the platform? And Mrs. Bethune got up...and she said, ‘My name is Mrs. Bethune.’ So (p.7) Louise Charlton had to say Mrs. Bethune, will you come to the platform. Well, that sounds like a small thing now, but that was a big dividing line. A Negro woman in Birmingham, Alabama, called Mrs. Bethune at a public meeting.’”
Robin remarked, “I was really glad to learn about Mary McCleod Bethune. I knew her name, but I think it’s a crime the way we never learned about her. She was amazing. She was so brave. She could really just keep pushing. It started in the beginning when she said, ‘My name is Mrs. Bethune.’ That was just a great encapsulation of the way she just had that kind of sense of self which couldn’t have been easy. She was inspirational and I thought about that piece at the end about her having some regrets about her family. It’s hard to be a woman in the world and have your career and have your family. She did so much but it really weighed on her at the end of her life that she wasn’t there for her son.”
Barb added, “I was moved by so many things in the book. Part of it was the author’s personal connection to Bethune’s life and how that gave us another perspective. Her accomplishments were so numerous, but I had no idea that she created training and employment camps for Black women during the depression. Those WPA (Works Progress Administration) camps made so much difference in so many people’s lives. She made that happen for Black women on Black college campuses. Although she was officially part of the NAACP delegation to the founding of the United Nations, she wanted to represent the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). Her fascinating turn late in life to the organization for Moral Re-Armament (MRA), which had been established between the two world wars, was really something. Bethune would spend the rest of her life articulating the vison of a future world held together by an embrace of human rights for all especially Black women around the world and that her interest in the UN was in colonialism and issues that were not as much talked about. And the author pointed out that Bethune reconsidered her opinion on Capitalism and its effects on Blacks. I had never heard the term “race woman.” Bethune felt it was her obligation, as a person of color who had some influence and economic stability, to do what she could for her race. She lived out this obligation in so many ways.”
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| Noliwe Rooks, author |
Deb E. said, “I don’t know if I had heard of Mary McCleod Bethune, at least before I saw the movie Six Triple Eight, (the movie was about the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion). I think that Bethune was the force in getting the Black women battalion to deliver the mail. In talking to FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt, Bethune got permission for this battalion to go and solve the problem.”
Shelara: told us, “I knew about Mary McCleod Bethune. My mother told me about her when I was very young. We lived in DC, so I was familiar with the statue of Bethune. I think the book was good because it’s not a standard biography. I admired the author’s analogy of driving through the fog. I liked that the author focused on the particular milestones of Bethune’s life. I was particularly moved by Bethune’s Last Will and Testament, where she says, ‘I leave you love, I leave you courage, I leave you bravery.’ She was always dealing with racism. She was always dealing with sexism at the same time. Mary Church Terrell was always to me, a complicated figure. I can’t take away from her accomplishments, but she was a proponent of colorism. Ida B. Wells and Mary McLeod Bethune were victims of her colorism. Yet Mary McLeod Bethune and Ida B. Wells still did such great things despite racism, sexism, and then colorism from those of their own race.”
Carla contributed, “What stands out for me was when I was reading about all the things she was doing in Daytona. My grandfather is from Daytona Beach, so when I was a little girl, we visited. His mother had been very very poor. I had other relatives living there then they moved to New York to be able to work. If my grandparents hadn’t moved, my father probably would have never graduated from high school.”
Caroline added, “I listened to the book. I’m a history buff, but there were things about Mary McLeod Bethune that I didn’t know. That’s what I liked about the book; it was a history lesson, and I’m not surprised that Henry Louis Gates Jr. was involved in it. (Gates is the editor of the Significations Series, which includes A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit.) It’s just sad the way the educational system is set up. They only teach us certain parts of history. When I was in high school my teacher encouraged us to go find other books in order to find someone to write about, not to just look at the “history book” in front of you.”
Maria gave us, “I also listened to the book. Listening to it was very enjoyable. I recognized her name because I read about the Roosevelts: FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt. I took the point that the author made: that Mary McCleod Bethune was a very important person, but when you read about the Roosevelts, it seemed that Mary McCleod Bethune was just someone who was part of Eleanor Roosevelt’s group. So, I appreciated learning about everything that she did. She was an extraordinary woman.”
Wendy offered, “I had not heard about her, nor did I ever hear about her statue, which is a surprise because I spent a lot of time in D.C. In reading this book, I was struck by her personal strength and courage like the scene when the Ku Klux Klan rode to the school, how she went outside to meet them. She did so much for the local community, but she had this bigger systemwide awareness that her local efforts weren’t going to be enough. She knew what needed to change. She had the courage to get out there and talk to people and not let people stop her. She would find ways around things when people tried to get in her way. When she started her women’s group and she stopped them from leaving the conference to change their clothes, it was one example of her moral fiber. I was also struck by the description of the death of that town. The author’s grandparents lived in a house that was two miles away from the beach, yet they were charged taxes for ‘beach front’ property. That was so insidious and deliberate; it defeated the community. That’s another way to destroy the potential the people have to move forward and build. I felt so sorry that near the end of her life she had this question about whether she had been a bad mother.”
Deb G. commented, “I’m familiar with Mrs. Bethune but unfortunately, I did not know the true value of her accomplishments, I too, just as Caroline said, have trouble with these books because they do make me sad. I shy away from these books sometimes because the harsh realities of life printed on these pages can be very painful, especially if you’ve lived some of them. But there was one passage that Shelara read to me last night. Shelara can you read that?”
Shelara began reading: p. 19 “One evening, representatives of the Ku Klux Klan sent word that if she didn’t stop what she was doing, teaching reading and baking cakes and pies to raise the money to pay community poll taxes, they would come to her Daytona school for girls and burn it to the ground. They said they might not stop with buildings but might also harm her or her students. The night of their promised arrival, Klan members contacted sympathetic city officials and asked them to turn off all the streetlamps in the town of Daytona. They asked them to do it just as night fell. In the deepening dusk, eighty or so Klan members rode on horseback through the streets in full white-supremacist regalia, the only illumination visible to riders or watchers, the orange-tinted flicker of their burning torches, the only sound the beat of hooves coming near.
While the city officials had extinguished the lights in town, on campus where she was in charge, Bethune fought the dark with light. As the Klan caravan approached, she instructed the staff to turn on every light on the grounds and in all the school buildings. When the Klan entered the gates of the school, they found it illuminated and could well see Bethune standing straight as she faced them. Secreted out of view were a number of Black men from the community who had armed themselves and were prepared to do bloody battle to defend the school, the students, and Bethune, but Klan members couldn’t see them. What they did see was their group of 80 dwarfed by the 150 students, staff, and teachers who stood beside Bethune, singing to one another not to be afraid because ‘God Will Take Care of You.’ Whether it was the unexpected presence of light on campus, the Lord, the numbers of women and girls standing, singing, afraid but committed to their right to be, there was no violence that night. The white supremacists merely rode in one gate of the school and out the other. They never even slowed down.”
Robin said, “What I love is what comes next:
‘If their goal was intimidation, it did not work. The next morning, Bethune led a procession of 100 Black women to the polls to vote for the first time. Though they had arrived early, poll workers forced them to wait outside in long, winding lines. As usual, they were told that any who left the line for any reason would be denied the right to vote. Bethune, when recounting the scene, always ended with ‘but we voted.’”
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