Photo courtesy of the Indian Express
As an inventive and pioneering author, feminist, cultural critic, and professor, bell hooks left a long-lasting imprint on the black women’s movement. According to her niece, Ebony Motley, the poet died on Wednesday at age 69, surrounded by family and friends.
According to NPR, though there was no cause of death reported, Berea College in Kentucky, where hooks had taught since 2004, said in a news release that she had died after an extended illness.
“Berea College is grateful for her contributions to the campus community and will celebrate her life and legacy through the bell hooks center that opened on campus in fall 2021,” said the college in a statement. “The bell hooks Institute at Berea College will continue to be a valuable and informative beacon to her life’s work, continuing to remind humans that life is all about love. In her words, “To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds.” “
The Kentucky native maintained her self-identity by not spelling her name with capital letters. bell hooks was born Gloria Jean Watkins as the fourth of seven children in Hopkinsville, Ky., on Sept. 25, 1952. She used her pen name as a tribute to her great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks.
While growing up in the South, hooks attended segregated schools in her native Christian County, Ky. She earned a bachelor’s degree at Stanford University in California, a master’s degree in English at the University of Wisconsin, and a doctorate in literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, NPR reported.
The activist developed a love for teaching and became a professor at several colleges and universities like Stanford University, Yale University, Oberlin College in Ohio, and the City College of New York before returning to Kentucky to teach at Berea College.
She penned more than three dozen books, and her first poetry collection “And There We Wept” was published in 1978. Her famous book “Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism” followed in 1981. Three years later, her “Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center” examined and condemned the feminist movement’s inclination to highlight white women’s experiences while dismissing their Black women counterparts.
The activist addressed issues involving race, gender, class, sexuality, and geographic place in several of her published books and poem compilations. For example, she wrote about her native Appalachia and growing up there as a Black girl in the critical-essay collection “Belonging: A Culture of Place“ and the poetry collection “Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place.”
In a 2000 interview with All Things Considered, hooks explained how powerful love could be without romantic sentiments attached to it. “I’m talking about a love that is transformative, that challenges us in both our private and our civic lives,” she said. “I’m so moved often when I think of the civil rights movement because I see it as a great movement for social justice that was rooted in love and that politicized the notion of love, that said: Real love will change you.”
She went on: “Everywhere I go, people want to feel more connected. They want to feel more connected to their neighbors. They want to feel more connected to the world. And when we learn that through love, we can have that connection, we can see the stranger as ourselves. And I think that it would be absolutely fantastic to have that sense of ‘Let’s return to kind of a utopian focus on love, not unlike the sort of hippie focus on love.’ Because I always say to people, you know, the ’60s’ focus on love had its stupid sentimental dimensions, but then it had these life-transforming dimensions. When I think of the love of justice that led three young people, two Jews and one African American Christian, to go to the South and fight for justice and give their lives — Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner — I think that’s a quality of love that’s awesome. … I tell this to young people, you know, that we can love in a deep and profound way that transforms the political world in which we live in.”