The life of legendary American educator and Black civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955) receives long overdue attention in historian Noliwe Rook's poignantly personal A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit. This is the second entry in Penguin Press's Significations series, curated and edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in which prominent writers and thinkers "reckon with the life, work and significance of a range of essential Black American figures."

Rooks, professor and chair of Africana Studies at Brown University, introduces readers to Bethune, a woman whose many firsts are "a song of Black survival and safety": in her family, Bethune was the fifteenth of seventeen children and the first to be born free; she was the first woman to establish a historically Black college for girls; and she was the first Black woman to head a U.S. federal division (the Division of ...