bell hooks will forever be a foundational force in Black feminist thought | Barbara Ransby

She was able to touch so many people, at so many levels, across so many boundaries, because she was a brazen truth-teller and willing to be vulnerable

I first met bell hooks in the late 1980s at a feminist conference where I, and a slew of other graduate students, slept on the floor of her hotel suite because the meeting was overbooked. For the next three-plus decades we were colleagues, intellectual comrades and interlocutors who sometimes disagreed, but shared a bond of mutual respect and solidarity. I will miss her words and her presence in our lives.

bell hooks (AKA Gloria Jean Watkins), feminist writer, radical thinker and teacher, died on Wednesday, 15 December at the age of 69, at her home in Berea, Kentucky. She was the daughter of working-class parents born in a small town in the Jim Crow South. She eventually went to Stanford University on scholarship and worked as a telephone operator to cover her other expenses. Borrowing her nom de plume from her outspoken great-grandmother, hooks went on to become one of the foremost feminist intellectuals and radical writers of her time. Her writings spanned the spectrum from capitalism and imperialism, to education, masculinity, beauty and love. Her influence is vast and her death leaves a painful void for those who knew and loved her. The outpouring of respect and tributes are testimony to the reach, in breadth and depth, of her work and the power of her legacy.

Barbara Ransby is a historian, writer and activist. She is the author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement and a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she directs the Social Justice Initiative