bell hooks, a well-known author, activist, professor and scholar who was a fierce advocate for Black feminism, died on Wednesday. She was 69 years old.
hooks published more than 40 books, numerous scholarly works and chapters, gave lectures and appeared in documentaries. She examined American society with a critical lens, showing how the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy, were deeply intertwined and inseparable from each other. 
bell hooks
Profiled by Diverse in 2018, hooks served for many years as the Distinguished Professor in Residence in Appalachian Studies at Berea College in Kentucky, where she opened the bell hooks institute in 2014 to preserve her legacy and the legacies of other Black feminist authors.
“Her sophistication theoretically, her extraordinary courage on the page, her relentless truth telling, produced generations of victors,” said Dr. Eddie S. Glaude Jr., chair of the department of African American studies and James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Scholar at Princeton University. “She shaped and informed Black feminism but also the field of African American studies in its contemporary iteration, and so many every day ordinary people, too.”
Born in the hills of Kentucky on Sept. 25, 1952 as Gloria Jean Watkins, hooks attended a segregated school and experienced the trials of integration into a predominately white public school. She became an English professor at the University of Southern California in 1976 and published her first book of poetry in 1978 under the moniker bell hooks, in honor of her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. hooks chose to leave the letters in her name non-capitalized. Doing so distinguished her from her great grandmother and, she said, put more emphasis on the body and context of her work.
Her writings were incredibly accessible, meant for smart readers, not just academics. In 1981, hooks published Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism, where she explored the lingering effects of racism and sexism on Black women and their expected role in society. She argued that the feminist movements of the time often excluded poor and non-white women.
“To this day, Ain't I a Woman is the most consequential of all her many books, in terms of giving leaders a sense of longer, Black, feminist history that’s critical of the mainstream,” said Dr. Robin D. G. Kelley, a distinguished professor and Gary B. Nash endowed chair in U.S. history at the University of California, Los Angeles. “She turned a lot of heads. And then followed suit with Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, and Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black.”
