The international community as well as a number of celebrities are mourning the death of bell hooks, the trailblazing feminist, author, professor and cultural critic who wrote the groundbreaking book, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. She was 69.
Her niece, Beverly Motley, confirmed to media outlets including NBC News that hooks died on Wednesday, Dec. 16, 2021, surrounded by family in her home state of Kentucky.
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The brilliant and prolific author preferred to spell her name without capital letters as a way to de-emphasize her individuality in favor of her ideas and humanity. She penned more than three dozen wide-ranging books, including her debut nonfiction work, a collection of poems entitled And There We Wept, in 1978.
Her fame and legend were cemented with the publishing of her influential book, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism followed in 1981. In 1984, hooks followed that up with the fiery Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center which dissected the feminist movement’s propensity to elevate privileged White women over their nonwhite counterparts.
She was born in the Appalachians in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, on Sept. 25, 1952. Later, she adopted her internationally famous pen name, Bell Blair Hooks, which was a tribute to her maternal great-grandmother.
A gifted student, hooks nevertheless endured the tail end of the infamous Jim Crow era and graduated from a segregated high school in her native Christian County, Kentucky.
Despite the steep socioeconomic obstacles, hooks was accepted into Stanford University in California, one of the most acclaimed post-secondary schools in the country and the world. She eventually obtained her master’s degree in English at the University of Wisconsin and a doctorate in literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Basing her life on her love of teaching and writing, hooks returned to undergraduate alma mater, Stanford University, to teach and then took a professorship at two other elite institutions, Yale University and Oberlin College in Ohio. She also taught at the City College of New York before returning to her home state in Kentucky to teach at Berea College.
The latter institution now boasts the bell hooks center.
Flip the page to view the responses to hooks’ death from the likes of Vice President Kamala Harris, movie director Ava DuVernay and Cornel West, and the full report from NBC News.
