BEREA, KY.
On a Friday morning late last spring, bell hooks was sitting comfortably on a couch perfectly situated in a spacious single-family home that Berea College purchased and had since converted into an Institute bearing her name.
On this particular day, hooks — arguably one of the nation’s most prominent authors and feminist scholars — was interested in talking legacy — hers and other Black writers.
That was the impetus for the creation of the bell hooks Institute, which was founded in 2014 by hooks and headquartered at Berea — the small liberal arts work college where no student pays tuition.
“I was seeing that so many individual Black writers and thinkers were dying without having protected their legacy,” says hooks, who is the author of numerous books including Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism and Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. “Sometimes as African-Americans we exist in a kind of schizophrenia. We know that imperialist White supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy is real but then we think, ‘If we just follow the rules, we’ll succeed.’”
hooks, who is close friends with feminist activist Gloria Steinem, says that she watched how so many worked across the years to safeguard Steinem’s legacy, but “when I looked around, especially for Black women writers, that’s not the case.”
For hooks, legacy is not the same as an archive, although both are critically important.
