During Black History or African American History Month, we take the time to remember and celebrate the lives of African Americans and their contributions to American society. This week, we focus on bell hooks, author, professor, and social activist, who recently died in December. A powerful voice in mending the rifts caused by ignorance, prejudice, past and present hurts, hooks advocated that the end goal of feminism and antiracism is the communal healing.
bell hooks (née Gloria Jean Watkins), 1952-2021, was a Black feminist writer who laid the foundation for Black and working-class women’s voices to be heard. She grew up in a small town in Kentucky with her father, a postal worker, her mother, a homemaker, and her four sisters and one brother.
She entered the school system during the turmoil of the Brown v. Board of Education trial. Her early education took place in segregated schools. Once the state integrated its educational system, however, she moved to a white-majority school where she was forced to face complex racial and gender hierarchies. Despite being exposed to the atrocities of white-supremacy, her tight-knit Black community taught her to find community among the oppressed, draw strength from those connections, and resist from the margins.
She continued her education at Stanford University, graduating with a degree in English literature in 1974. During her undergraduate education she began writing Ain’t I a Woman, titled after the famous speech by Sojourner Truth. Next hooks attended the University of Wisconsin, completing her Masters in 1976, and then went on to earn a doctorate in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1983.
Her teaching career began in the midst of her studies, first teaching ethnic studies in 1976 at the University of Southern California. She later taught at Yale, Oberlin, and the City College of New York. In 2004 she returned to Kentucky as a professor in residence at Berea College, where the bell hooks Institute was established in 2014 as a center for her writing and teaching.
Dr. hooks’ first book was a collection of poems published in 1978 titled, And There We Wept. This was the first time she used her pen name, bell hooks. The name pays homage to her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. hooks insisted her pen name remain in lowercase in order to stress the importance of her words and the substance of her books, instead of herself.
Works by hooks emphasize the importance of community and healing which was established in the young bell hooks through her Black community. Her voice resonates so deeply because she sees the end goals of feminism and antiracism as being a communal healing.
If you are interested in more information, check out the display on the second (main) floor of the Loras Library across from the elevators. It includes works such as: Salvation: Black People and Love, Black looks: Race and Representation, Bell Hooks' Engaged Pedagogy: A Transgressive Education For Critical Consciousness, Killing Rage: Ending Racism, and Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood. The display also includes many of her essays published in edited collections.