Last month, Noliwe Rooks, the chair of the Department of Africana Studies, was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for her 2024 book “A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit: The Vision of Mary McLeod Bethune.”
The book was nominated for Outstanding Literary Work in the nonfiction category and is the fifth book Rooks has published. It focuses on the life of Bethune, who is best known for counseling U.S. presidents, helping to create the United Nations charter and advocating for the rights of Black Americans, specifically Black women.
Rooks noted that the book uses a more personal writing style than that of typical academic literature. The book is a “mashup of moments” in Bethune’s life that inspired Black people in the 20th century — and even Rooks herself today.
“It’s not this objective work of scholarship,” Rooks said. “I am breaking down that fourth wall and telling you why it matters to me.”
The idea for the book was born when a representative from Penguin Random House reached out to Rooks. When asked who in the world she would write about if given the opportunity, Rooks chose Bethune.
This choice was inspired by Rooks’s upbringing in Florida, where Bethune “was such a larger-than-life kind of figure,” Rooks said.
Initially, Rooks knew of Bethune mostly for her work in founding Bethune-Cookman University in Florida, which opened in 1904 with five female students. But after sifting through the archives at Bethune-Cookman University for hours, Rooks realized there was much more to Bethune than the university’s founding.
In her book, Rooks narrates her own experience viewing Bethune’s statue in the U.S. Capitol. When gazing at the statue, it was difficult not to “ugly cry and breakdown in public,” Rooks said.
“She’s a woman who went from being a sharecropper … (who) didn’t learn to read until she was 12 years old, to someone who founds a school and serves presidents and engages with world leaders at something as momentous as the founding of the U.N.,” Rooks said.
What surprised Rooks most about Bethune was that the activist “did so much, both in the federal government, as well as in civil rights organizations,” Rooks said.
Keisha Blain, professor of history and Africana studies, described Rooks’s nomination as a “very significant” achievement and a “testament to the stellar quality of one’s work as well as the significance of the subject of one’s research.” Blain was previously nominated for an NAACP Image Award in 2022 for her book “Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America.”
“I am thrilled about my colleague’s nomination,” Blain wrote in an email to The Herald. “It’s certainly well deserved.”
Last semester, Rooks incorporated her research on Bethune into AFRI 0140: “First Lady of the Struggle: Mary McLeod Bethune and Global Black Freedom,” a course she taught in collaboration with Ashley Robertson Preston, an associate professor of history at Howard University.
Danica Damoah ’28, who took AFRI 0140 last semester, said the course “was definitely different, but in a very good way, because it made us think so actively.” She added that students heard from guest speakers familiar with the activist over the course of the semester.
“I didn’t know much about Mary McLeod at all before taking the class,” said Talib Reddick ’26, who also took Rooks’s course last semester. The fact that Bethune’s “history was overlooked was a little saddening.”
“Our history is being attacked,” Reddick said. “I love that Professor Rooks and books like this are being given a spotlight … because it’s very necessary in a time like this.”
Reflecting on her career, Rooks said she is especially proud of her first book, titled “Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture and African American Women.”
“It was, at the time, the first dissertation written about hair in politics,” Rooks said. “A lot of people write about hair now, but I’m a little proud of the fact that I did it first.”
Rooks’s sixth book, titled “Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children,” will be published on March 18. In the book, Rooks discusses the failures of integration while exploring four generations of her own family history with education, according to her website.
Rooks said regardless of accolades, she is “proud” of her work.
“It is the work I wanted to do,” she added. “I’ve had the privilege of exploring the people and the thinkers and the moments that I want to and exploring them the way that I want to.”
