Lunch and Learn - "A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit" with Noliwe Rooks

Lunch and Learn celebrates Black History Month with special guest Noliwe Rooks, author of A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit: The Vision of Mary McLeod Bethune, in conversation with the Prince George's County Office of Human Rights and the Prince George's County Memorial Library System. 

Join us here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j73hteWEE-A

"An intimate and searching account of the life and legacy of one of America's towering educators, a woman who dared to center the progress of Black women and girls in the larger struggle for political and social liberation. When 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 the rotunda of the U.S. Capital, 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 self-sufficiency. 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 Bethune-Cookman University, and her family vacationed at the all-Black beach that Bethune helped found in one of her many entrepreneurial projects for the community. The story of how-in a state with some of the highest lynching rates in the country-Bethune 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 near-and centered on the state of Florida-, it is an enormous gift to have this brilliant and lyrical reckoning with Bethune's journey from one of our own great educators and scholars of that same struggle." -provided by the catalog. 

An interdisciplinary scholar, Noliwe Rooks is the L. Herbert Ballou University Professor of Africana Studies, and the chair of Africana Studies at Brown University. Her work explores how race and gender both impact and are impacted by popular culture, social history and political life in the United States. She works on the cultural and racial implications of beauty, fashion and adornment; race, capitalism and education, and the urban politics of food and cannabis production. The author of six books and numerous articles, essays and Op-Ed’s, Rooks has received research funding from the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson School among others. She lectures frequently at colleges and universities around the country and is a regular contributor to popular outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Time Magazine and NPR.