Excerpt from A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit by Noliwe Rooks, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Bethune prevailed and was soon able to get Tuskegee Institute, Hampton University, Virginia State, North Carolina A&T State, Delaware State, West Virginia State, and Howard University included among the colleges and universities participating in the federally funded Civilian Pilot Training Program. West Virginia State College became the first Black school to receive a military airplane in 1939. The Tuskegee Institute received its authorization and plane a few months later, in October of that same year. This was necessary forward movement but not enough to guarantee President Roosevelt would authorize the pilots to become a recognized military unit and fight in the war. Up until that point, most Black people in the military served in roles that were administrative or janitorial, or involved food service. They certainly did not fly planes. Bethune continued to strategize and soon devised a plan requiring the participation of her friend and ally of over a decade, Eleanor Roosevelt.

Roosevelt and Bethune together paid a visit to the Tuskegee Institute's Moton Field in 1941 and despite objections from her Secret Service detail, the first lady asked the chief flight instructor and Tuskegee pilot Charles Anderson if he would take her up in a plane. In what was "possibly the first time a Black man had ever flown a plane with a white woman as his passenger," Roosevelt spent more than an hour flying around in the skies over Tuskegee. Once back on the ground and in Washington, Roosevelt and Bethune used the success of the flight and the exhilaration of the experience to continue to entreat the president to integrate the military and allow the pilots to fly. In December 1942, the president issued Executive Order 9279 ending segregation in the military. Initially christened the Fighter Squadron, and then named the Tuskegee Airmen, the pilots trained at Black colleges became the first squadron of Black pilots to fight in World War II. I have a great-uncle, Virgil Richardson, who was a Tuskegee Airman. I grew up knowing that about him, but I did not know until researching Bethune's life that she was a large part of the reason he had the opportunity to soar.

Mrs. Bethune is generally remembered today as an educator. It is true that she believed deeply in the power of education; she owed a large debt to how it had shaped her life from the age of twelve, when she became the first in her family to sit in a classroom. But education is just part of her story. She was a woman of "firsts." The fifteenth of seventeen children born to her parents in Maysville, South Carolina, she was the first born free, not as enslaved property. She was the first Black woman to establish a historically Black college for Black girls in the eastern part of the United States. Bethune was also the first to found a hospital for Black people in the state of Florida. Her "firsts" are a song of Black survival and safety. Her life was a multipart composition that climbed octaves and harmonized the individual, the cultural, the political, and the economic. She was a political theorist and visionary, a pragmatist who shape-shifted, a woman of consequence who strategized how the federal government, voting rights, Black capitalism, economic development, Black organizations, and Black segregation could sustain Black men, women, children, and old people during the hand-to-hand combat phase of the Black freedom struggle that was the Jim Crow era. She was clear-sighted and truth-speaking about the evils of segregation and the South's desire for it. In the late 1920s she argued that the commitment to Black inferiority was stubbornly in defiance of the basic tenets of capitalism:

Excerpted from A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit by Noliwe Rooks. Copyright © 2024 by Noliwe Rooks. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.