Narrator: Funding for this program is made possible in part by the KET Endowment for Kentucky Productions.

Silas House: She's one of the great geniuses of our time and she forever changed the conversation about gender and race and orientation and pop culture.

Beverly Guy-Sheftall: Bell Hooks was a famous black feminist intellectual who spent most of her waking hours reading and writing.

Qrescent Mali Mason: Anyone who picks up a Bell Hooks book earnestly should be able to come out of it understanding what it said and being able to enact something from what they learned.

Kevin Powell: I think that Bell arguably in the last 40 years is the most important public intellectual that we've had in America regardless of identity.

Narrator: "If one has chosen to live mindfully, then choosing a place to die is as vital as choosing where and how to live.

Choosing to return to the land and landscape of my childhood, the world of my Kentucky upbringing, I am comforted by the knowledge that I could die here.

This is the way I imagine .

I close my eyes and see hands holding a Chinese red lacquer bowl, walking to the top of the Kentucky hill I call my own, scattering my remains as though they are seeds and not ash, a burnt offering on solid ground vulnerable to the wind and rain -- all that is left of my body gone, my being shifted, passed away, moving forward on and into eternity.

I imagine this farewell scene and it solaces me, Kentucky hills were where my life began."

Kevin Powell: Who is Bell Hooks?

Wow.

Mmm.

Human being, woman, black woman, Kentuckian, cosmopolitan, feminist, revolutionary, thought provoking, provocative, funny as hell, my mentor, mother figure.

I'm trying not to start crying already.

Crystal Wilkinson: She is probably one of the most prestigious scholars and thinkers in the country and in many parts of the world.

Gloria Steinem: I would describe Bell Hooks as one of the most universal writers and universal people.

Her contribution to the feminist movement was to make the feminist movement more universally understood because she was a universal person, because she included but went beyond gender, race, class, geography.

It's hard to imagine anyone who wouldn't be enchanted, educated, made happier by her books.

Kevin Powell: I believe Bell felt the goal of feminism was to end patriarchy period, ending male domination, ending male violence against women and girls, ending homophobia, ending transphobia.

I believe that Bell also felt the goal of feminism was to make sure people understood the contributions of women and girls to the entire planet, that we had to balance this out.

She made it a point even though she was an academic, she really embraced popular culture.

I mean, she could talk about movies, about hip hop, a range of stuff.

You know, I think it made her accessible to a lot of people.

I think one of her books out of her maybe 40 really represented her life's work is Feminism is for Everybody.

I think that that was sort of the center of her work that yes, of course, equal rights for women is for women but it's also for everybody that giving women rights empowers the children, empowers the women, and also empowers the men.

Narrator: "When I talk about the feminism I know -- up close and personal -- they are quick to tell me I am different, not like the "real" feminists who hate men, who are angry.

I assure them I am as a real and as radical a feminist as one can be, and if they dare to come closer to feminism, they will see it is not how they have imagined it."

Shadee Malaklou: Bell Hooks was born Gloria Jean Watkins and later she adopted the pen name and that is the name of her great maternal grandmother.

She chose to not capitalize Bell or Hooks because she said herself that she wanted the attention to be on the work and not on her as a personality or her ego.

She wanted to have her identity as a critic and a writer separately from her real self.

And so she didn't want people to associate Gloria Watkins with the writer critic.

Narrator: "One of the many reasons I chose to write using the pseudonym bell hooks, a family name mother to Sarah Oldham, grandmother to Rosa Bell Oldham, great-grandmother to me, was to construct a writer-identity that would challenge and subdue all impulses leading me away from speech into silence.

I was a young girl buying bubble gum at the corner store when I first really heard the full name bell hooks.

I had just backson.

Even now I can recall the surprised look, the mocking tones that informed me I must be kin to bell hooks -- a sharp-tongued woman, a woman who spoke her mind, a woman who was not afraid to talk back."

Gwenda Watkins Motley: She was always told you're just like granny Bell or you're just like your great grandma or you're just like Bell Hooks because I understand that Bell Hooks was quite outspoken as Gloria is.

Crystal Wilkinson: A lot of writers during that time where Bell was actually young and a burgeoning writer were lower casing their names I think to emphasize sort of the struggle as being a communal one for women and sort of de-emphasizing the large I meaning, me the individual.

She used the name Bell Hooks in place of her own to pay honor, to pay homage to her ancestor, but also to take attention away from herself, from Gloria.

Narrator: "At the moment of my birth, two factors determine my destiny, my having been born black and my having been born female."

Gwenda Watkins Motley: Gloria was born September 25th, 1952, in Hopkinsville, Kentucky.

There were seven of us.

Our oldest sister was Sarah named after our grandmother Sarah.

And there was Theresa and then one brother Kenneth, then Gloria and Valerie and Gwenda.

That's me.

And then our youngest sister, Angela.

Our parents were Veodis Kendrick Watkins and Rosa Bell Oldham Watkins.

Dad was maintenance at the post office here in Hopkinsville.

And mom was a stay-at-home mom for most of our growing up and then sometimes she did domestic.

Our parents were your typical parents, children are seen and not heard.

Hopkinsville, our little beloved community, tobacco was the major industry.

And I would say at the time of our growing up, maybe 40% African American, it was just a wonderful community.

We knew our neighbors.

If you act it out in any way and someone saw you, they felt perfectly okay with correcting you then.

We're at 607 East 1st Street, the home of the Watkins family.

Back here was the stockyard and right at the stockyard was also the railroad track.

So we heard the train often at night, it lulled us to sleep.

Gloria was a nerd.

We teased her because she was the only one of us who wore glasses.

So of course, we called her four eyes.

She was serious.

Almost daily we would be going to the library.

Gloria would of course get 10 books and Valerie and I would get one book and we'd get something like Nancy Drew, that's the kind of stuff we liked.

Gloria, of course, would be getting Marcus Garvey, something really heavy.

Gloria always stayed in the room reading.

She did all the time, every day.

Sometimes even at night, we would call down to mom and say, "Make Gloria turn the light off, we can't sleep."

And if she wasn't reading out loud, you could hear her turning the pages or you could hear her scribbling.

That is just what her life consisted of, even as a child.

The principal was our pastor during our elementary years.

And so most of the teachers went to Virginia Street Church and so we saw them every day.

It just was a wonderful education.

It was a wonderful time for us.

We were childhood friends.

We were neighbors, attended elementary through high school together.

School was a big part of our lives.

We had been in a segregated school system and that is what nurtured us as we grew up in the '60s, it was a time of transition.

When we went to 10th grade, that was the time when all of our schools in Hopkinsville were fully integrated.

You see the historic Crispus Attucks High School, Gloria was the fourth sibling and last to be able to attend before integration.

Blacks were bused to the white school.

So all of my siblings who were still in school were, of course, bused.

Gloria talks about this, the loss of that school, the loss of your teachers who knew you, who knew your family, who cared about you, who knew what kind of student you were, who knew how to nurture you educationally, and then you lose that and you go to the white schools with white teachers.

Not the same, not the same.

I think of all of us, Gloria felt it the most.

Narrator: "School changed utterly with racial integration.

Now, we were mainly taught by white teachers whose lessons reinforced racist stereotypes.

For black children, education was no longer about the practice of freedom.

Realizing this, I lost my love of school.

The classroom was no longer a place of pleasure or ecstasy.

School was still a political place since we were always having to counter white racist assumptions that we were genetically inferior, never as capable as white peers, even unable to learn."

Marcia Johnson: In one way it was kind of frightening because you were leaving a world that you knew so well into another world.

And then yet at the same time, you felt this responsibility to show that you belong there.

But I think she and I both determined that we were going to excel because our families instilled in us early on that education was important.

They were not able to get the education they wanted.

So we were kind of like their hope for the future.

Gwenda Watkins: I think Gloria was like the one black person who had the most white friends and you have to understand that this was the beginning of integration and our parents were like, no, uh-uh, you can't bring home the white people.

And to her, why, why not?

There were many times that she felt she wasn't understood or she didn't feel as valued because first of all, you have a young mother who quit school and married and along comes this child number four, who decides I'm gonna break out of that mold, I'm gonna ask questions, I'm gonna be bold.

She was observant yet sensitive and she was really intelligent.

And so I think at times it was a little challenging for mom to raise a child who seemed rebellious or a child who seemed smarter than you.

There was that we're not quite sure what to do with Gloria.

Narrator: "Try to imagine what it must have been like for them, each of them working hard all day, struggling to maintain a family of seven children, then having to cope with one bright -eyed child relentlessly questioning, daring to challenge male authority, rebelling against the very patriarchal norm they were trying so hard to institutionalize.

It must have seemed to them that some monster had appeared in their midst in the shape and body of a child - a demonic little figure who threatened to subvert and undermine all that they were seeking to build.

No wonder then that their response was to repress, contain, punish.

No wonder that Mama would say to me, now and then, exasperated, frustrated, w where I got you from, but I sure wish I could give you back.'"

Qrescent Mali Mason: Bell is at Stanford in the early '70s .

So she's entering into feminist movement initially through academia.

She's been thinking about issues of domination, like in her home life, thinking about, you know, the ways that her family interacted with one another.

She's attuned to feminist movement but also saying like, these feminists are boujee, these feminists seem not to understand sort of the issues of the working class.

So she's entering into a movement that I feel like, you know, understands itself to be like very progressive.

And I think Bell is uniquely positioned to see the ways in which it's not being progressive and not living up to its own ideals.

Ain't I a Woman?

Is a piece of prose that I was introduced to as a young black girl.

Sojourner Truth gives a speech at the Ohio Convention in 1851.

The sort of oratorical phrase that she uses over and over again is ain't I woman.

And when she repeats this sort of ain't I woman, what she's pointing to is the ways that she's not being conceptualized as a woman in the same way that white women are.

So, for example, she talks about toiling in the fields, having given love to her children, but having them taken away or like, I don't get a jacket put over a puddle for me when I walk over the street, ain't I woman, right?

I also a woman.

So Bell takes up ain't I a woman, uses it as the title of her first book to make that historical reference to Sojourner Truth, where Sojourner Truth is articulating the very point of that book, which is that racism and sexism have been coupled in the lives of black women.

So she's wanting to sort of show us this is not a new story, this is a very, very, very old story.

Narrator: "No other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence as have Black women.

We are rarely recognized as a group separate and distinct from black men or as a present part of the larger group women in this culture.

When Black people are talked about the focus tends to be on Black men, and when women are talked about the focus tends to be on white women."

Qrescent Mali Mason: When we talk about the waves of feminism, if we look at the first wave, we look at the achievement, so to speak with the first wave, voting rights, but voting rights for whom, right?

So black women are still not able to vote in that situation.

And there also the abolition is happening and so they're all these kind of debates around like abolition.

Like, if black people get the right to vote, women get the right to vote, what are we gonna do about black people?

So even in that first wave, we see that our conception of the wave metaphor is focused on what are the political sort of goals and achievements of white women.

Narrator: "Black women were placed in a double bind, to support women suffrage would imply that they were allying themselves with white women activists who had publicly revealed their racism, but to support only black male suffrage was to endorse a patriarchal social order that would grant them no political voice.

To a very grave extent women obtaining the right to vote was more a victory for racist principles than a triumph of feminist principles."

Qrescent Mali Mason: We move on to the second wave.

This is happening sort of in the '60s and '70s.

White women's kind of concerned about entering the labor market.

Black women have historically already been in the labor market, right?

So again, when we identify the second wave, the second wave is premised upon the issues of white middle-class women.

Narrator: "Work has not been a liberating force for masses of American women.

And for some time now, sexism has not prevented them from being in the workforce.

The racism and classism of white women liberationists was most apparent whenever they discussed work as the liberating force for women.

In such discussions it was always the middle-class housewife who was depicted as the victim of sexist oppression and not the poor black and non-black women who are most exploited by American economics."

There was a public view of the movement that wasn't exactly like the movement.

I mean, for instance, the first big event here in New York was a march on Fifth Avenue and the New York Times said it looked like everywhere America, you know, with all possible types of women.

But when the media wrote about the movement, it was made to seem, I think, more white and middle class than it actually was.

Even though the very first poll about the feminist movement showed that black women were twice as likely to support it as white women, that wasn't the view in the press.

Beverly Guy-Sheftall: So when Bell Hooks is talking about the women's movement, she's not talking about what it actually was.

She was talking about the way it was written about and she was very critical of the way the history of the women's movement was told.

It was told as if it was just white women, and black women were not interested.

The contemporary women's movement was always multiracial, always.

But white feminist scholars narrated the movement as if it were white.

I would say Bell Hooks' biggest contribution, historically speaking, was critiquing Betty Friedan's "Feminine Mystique."

She was the first black feminist critic who pulled the covers off of the ways in which the women's movement had been constructed.

And she took those so-called canonical texts, The Feminine Mystique being one, and talked about how it did not capture the realities of women in the world and didn't capture the realities of women in the U.S., and not just race but around class too, that it didn't tell us anything about poverty.

We met 1981 at the National Women's Studies Conference.

I met her promoting her book Ain't I a Woman?

She gave me a flyer, got the book and we started talking.

So I said, where are you staying?

Later, and she said, "I don't have a room, I couldn't afford a room.

So I don't know where I'm staying."

So I said, well, you can come to my little raggedy dorm room, you can sleep in my bed and I'll sleep on the floor.

And I think it's really good for people to hear that she didn't have any money.

I bring together standpoints that are often not brought together in our nation.

You know, I bring together thoughtfulness about race, gender, class.

I think black women feel tremendous anger and rage about our continued devaluation in this society as we rightly should.

And that because so many people, including black men, often do not understand the context, the historical context that has produced that pain and that rage.

Qrescent Mali Mason: Bell is particularly interested in black women and understand sort of black feminism to be a kind of lens that allows us to be attended to those exclusions, allows us to be attended to the experiences of those who are on the margin.

Narrator: "It is essential for continued feminist struggle that black women recognize the special vantage point our marginality gives us and make use of this perspective to criticize the dominant racist, classist, sexist hegemony as well as to envision and create a counter-hegemony.

I am suggesting that we have a central role to play in the making of feminist theory and a contribution to offer that is unique and valuable.

Our emphasis must be on cultural transformation: destroying dualism, eradicating systems of domination."

Systems of domination are all of those, I'm trying to use non-academic language to some extent, all of those structures, legal aspects that exist in all societies, what we would call ISMs, that make it difficult for people to live free lives.

So there are systems which tell black people that they have to be in this particular kind of place.

There are systems that tell women that they need to be in certain kinds of places.

And the system for that is patriarchy.

Systems that tell poor people who don't have certain kinds of resources that they need to stay in certain places that we call classism.

They are systems that create serious power imbalances.

That oppressive power ends up harming those who are oppressed, ends up sort of cutting off possibilities for them.

And Bell sort of famously articulates or tries to pinpoint particular systems that she thinks lead to various sort of lived experiences of domination.

It is obvious that the dynamics of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy is meant to render us, it's socially unacceptable and it's very troubling because I think that we have to always look at what the demonization of Black womanhood in light of white supremacy, in light of capitalism and patriarchy.

So there's a phrase that I will continue to say, which is imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy.

And in sort of articulating that particular phrase, what Bell is doing is helping us identify the systems at a poll domination and then sort of link that to the experiences of those who are excluded or marginalized.

She wanted to talk about their specificity.

She wanted to talk about how they sometimes acted alone and sometimes piled up and acted together.

She wanted to name them because once you name it, people are gonna ask you, what do you mean by white supremacy?

What do you mean by patriarchy?

And then she could expound.

How do you call a little kid who's dark skinned, who's, you know, washing themselves with bleach?

You can't say this kid is a racist in the classical sense of prejudicial views against people of color or black people.

To me, white supremacy is a useful term because it encompasses the fact that we can have a five year old who's looked at enough television in our nation to have an understanding that white is better.

Qrescent Mali Mason: Bell was just out here saying white supremacy and I just felt like, why is that phrase, it's so grading, it's so harsh, it's so...

But for her, it was really important to link racism to the structure, to the system that supports it.

Beverly Guy-Sheftall: She'd like the term white supremacy more than racism because if you just say racism frequently, people say, well, everybody's racist.

So she wanted to really talk about how the system of white supremacy operated and produced racism.

When I'm talking about white people who are racist, I have to work to make sure that my language isn't bringing all white people into that because I know that's not so.

When I'm talking about men who are misogynist and patriarchal, I have to work to use a language that doesn't just make it seem like this is who all men are.

How do men in our culture move into a space where they can have that healthy masculinity, that is not the patriarchal dominating masculinity, but one that allows them to claim the space of their own hearts?

Beverly Guy-Sheftall: I think Bell Hooks more than any other feminists also made feminism attractive to men.

She believed that since men were the primary perpetrators of patriarchy that it was really important to seduce them into reading and becoming feminists because otherwise, and she was right, the world is definitely not gonna change.

Qrescent Mali Mason: What I think Bell would argue is that patriarchy is harmful to men as it's harmful to all of us because it keeps us from living our full lives.

It keeps us from accessing all of our possibilities.

And so, for example, with men, you think about sort of the way that patriarchy requires of men, certain ways of being, right, and less access to their emotion, the assumption that they don't have care, the requirement to take up and uphold certain forms of violence, and enacting violence and domination to others, that that's also wearing on the soul, right?

That's a task to your humanity.

She was trying to express that it was the removal of boundaries, not the initiation of any other boundary.

And she certainly welcomed men, black and white, into the movement.

Narrator: "Males as a group have and do benefit the most from patriarchy, from the assumption that they are superior to females and should rule over us.

But those benefits have come with a price.

In return for all the goodies men receive from patriarchy, they are required to dominate women, to exploit and oppress us, using violence if they must to keep patriarchy intact.

Most men find it difficult to be patriarchs.

But they fear letting go of the benefits.

I believe that if they knew more about feminism, they would no longer fear it, for they would find in feminist movement the hope of their own release from the bondage of patriarchy."

Kevin Powell: She always said to me, "Kevin, I work with you and other men and boys because I realized that you all have to do the work."

Bell's whole point was we got to redefine manhood.

You know, manhood is ego, senseless competition, violence, domination of people.

Why is it okay for you to dominate folks who are not you?

And then specifically for us as black men, how can you talk about racism?

Then you turn out to be a sexist pig.

You know, how can you talk about racism and be a homophobe or a transphobe?

Beverly Guy-Sheftall: She talked about the trauma of growing up in a patriarchal family with an authoritarian father that she didn't necessarily even feel safe around.

This was especially important for a black woman to talk about because the myth is that black families are matriarchal.

That's Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

And that the problem with black families is that black wives and mothers are overbearing and emasculating.

So for Bell Hooks to come out and say, I grew up in a patriarchal family with an authoritarian father, this defied stereotypical notions of what black families are like.

There are things that I have to say about black children and how they're parented, that would sound harsh to a lot of people.

Black folks because of our history in America don't like to talk about certain things that go on in our community and our family, even though they go on just like in every other community, every other family.

She was willing to go to some places that a lot of us don't go to, which is, I'm gonna talk about the family dynamics, including talking about her father, and that being her introduction of patriarchy.

Narrator: "My brother was playing with his marbles on the floor.

I wanted to play, but he did not want me to.

I threatened to walk through the wonderful design he was making and scatter the marbles everywhere.

Hearing the threat, the conflict between us, Daddy urged me in his harsh commanding voice to leave my brother alone.

I walked through the marbles with glee and abandon.

Daddy was deeply enraged by this rebellious act and I was whipped and whipped.

The intensity of his rage frightened my mother.

My sisters even prevented my brother from taking pleasure in the whipping.

No one was allowed to comfort me.

It was then that I learned that Mama did not have power over Daddy, or even equal power.

His was the final word, the final say, his voice that of the dominant one.

He was the man."

I was scared.

I was scared because it's like... if you've believed in something your entire life, you know, I'm a sports head, I'm a video game head, I'm a hip-hop head, I grew up listening to classic rock.

I was fighting.

I was doing things that "boys" are taught that we're supposed to do, and don't show emotions, don't cry, don't express yourself.

And all of a sudden, you're reading something from Bell Hooks and she's challenging all of that, and it shifted my work.

You know, I began to realize that I can't just write about race and racism.

I gotta start talking about manhood, about sexism, about patriarchy.

I've gotta be honest about my own challenges and struggles, like Bell Hooks, you know, because up until Bell, I mean, I was just on the dudes.

Here's Norman Mailer, here's Malcolm X, here's, you know, I just read the male writers like most of us do and she made me rethink all of that.

Like, how do you not read works by women?

How do you not listen to their voices?

Crystal Wilkinson: When I met Bell in '93, the first room that I entered that Bell was in was not full of academics.

That room was full of mail carriers and hairdressers and people who cleaned up and sanitation workers and all women, but from all walks of life.

Beverly Guy-Sheftall: She wanted her writings to be primarily able to be read by everybody, literally everybody, not just people who had sat in college classes.

She wanted it not to have all of the protocols of the academy footnotes, bibliography.

So she didn't want a person to pick up one of her books and put it down because one felt that this wasn't written for me.

Narrator: "My decisions about writing style, about not using conventional academic formats, are political decisions motivated by the desire to be inclusive, to reach as many readers as possible in as many different locations.

Recently, I have received a spate of letters from incarcerated black men who read my work and wanted to share that they are working to unlearn sexism.

In one letter, the writer affectionately boasted that he has made my name a 'household word around that prison.'

All our feminist theory directed at transforming consciousness, that truly wants to speak with diverse audiences, does work: this is not a naive fantasy."

I was aware of Bell Hook's success in navigating the educational system because I knew she held a BA degree from Stanford, an MA from the University of Wisconsin Madison, and a PhD from the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Female Speaker: In 1985, Bell Hooks taught African and African-American studies and English at Yale University.

In 1988, she was an associate professor of Women's Studies and American Literature at Oberlin College.

And in 1994, she accepted the post of distinguished professor of English at the City College of New York.

Honored as a leading public intellectual by the Atlantic Monthly as well as one of Utne Reader's 100 visionaries who could change your life, Dr. Maya Angelou said each offering from Bell Hooks is a major event.

Silas House: She was just such a big part of the national conversation in so many ways and she shaped it for two or three decades, at least.

Shadee Malaklou: She wanted to engage public culture, public opinion, and she was always a cultural critic.

Films aren't fantasy, films are making culture.

People are learning more about race and gender from films and then they are poring over those Bell Hooks' books.

I think it was 2015, she was doing a residency at the New School here in New York City and she asked me to do a conversation with her, but Bell never prepared you for the conversation.

So you never know what she's gonna say.

And that was one of the conversations with Bell unloaded on Beyonce, I was like, okay.

And she unloaded on Ta-Nehisi Coates, his book had just come out, and I was like, okay.

White people are so enamored of Ta-Nehisi Coates's book, but you won't find anything in his book about gender, about teaching his son to see women differently.

You just have to be prepared for it.

But what Bell didn't realize I would get the flack for stuff that she said, I'm like, I have no control.

No one can control what Bell is gonna say.

She's gonna speak her mind.

But, you know, that was actually part of the beauty of being around her.

She was exciting and dangerous.

It's difficult when you're misunderstood.

You know, it's difficult when people stand up and say, you know, why do you hate Spike Lee so much?

And I say, you know, actually, there are moments in Spike Lee's films that I think are incredible that I love.

But that doesn't mean that I don't have a real critical commentary about his work.

And I know that as a teacher, I'm constantly encouraging my students to recognize the difference between a critical commentary about something that can illuminate it for you that can help you to see it in a different way and something that's just trashing, because I think that part of the danger for free speech in our society is the deep longing people have both in our personal and public lives to avoid conflict, to avoid hurting someone's feelings to not, you know, be polite.

She was a very complex person so she definitely could test you, like, intentionally she would light a fire under you.

Even her closest friend.

So I've experienced that many, many times.

Beverly Guy-Sheftall: Funny, complicated, sometimes unpredictable, inquisitive, and honest.

I would really say candid and honest.

She talked a lot about her loneliness, for example.

Rarely I think do friendships also have a deep political aspect to them.

So we would talk about books.

We would talk about whatever is happening in the world from a black feminist perspective.

But I would say most of our relationship was what I call regular girlfriend stuff.

Gloria Steinem: I would describe Bell as a great girlfriend, in every way.

You trusted her, you wanted to both read her books and go shopping with her.

She was, I would say, "chosen family" in the best sense of family.

She was totally herself, so that allowed those of us who were her friends to be totally ourselves too.

Beverly Guy-Sheftall: She would send you love notes.

She would -- not love notes in the traditional sense, but she would spend time writing to people I think that she cared about.

And in those writings, you could experience love.

I think her generosity was not the kind of generosity that people associate with what I would call conventional generosity, giving people things, you know.

I think hers was more time seriousness, asking you what you thought about something.

Have you seen this movie, have you read this, and really being interested in what you had to say about it.

So that's how I would say she showed love.

Kevin Powell: My memory is sitting in her apartment, I would just sit on the floor literally at her feet as she kind of just talked and shared things with me.

And I thought that was love.

Narrator: "Visionary feminism is a wise and loving politic.

The soul of our politics is the commitment to ending domination.

Love can never take root in a relationship based on domination and coercion.

The radical feminist critique of patriarchal notions of love was not misguided.

However, females and males needed more than a critique of where we had gone wrong on our journeys to love.

We needed an alternative feminist vision."

It was very like Bell to -- you might say reclaim love because it was not a subject of intellectual inquiry.

Building a world on love instead of domination was something that clearly started from the bottom up.

It was not gonna be born at the United Nations or at a national level.

I remember when Bell told me she's gonna write a book about love.

I was like, what, Bell, love?

She said, "Yeah, Kev, because people don't believe in love.

People need love."

But she also felt that we're not gonna get around all these systems of oppression that she's writing about if we don't deal with this revolutionary principle of love.

When I began writing this book, I went back to Martin Luther King's "Strength to Love," which was such a marvelous book.

And he was one of the first leaders in our society to really talk about love, not as a sentimental emotion.

You know, many of my readers, my Bell Hooks' readers who are used to the hard hitting, you know, social -- Host: Feminist.

Exactly, have said to me, well, why love?

You know, people have said to me, we hope we're not gonna lose that, you know, that biting intervention.

And I said, but to talk about love and the relationship between love and ending domination, whether we're talking about racism, homophobia, class elitism.

The book doesn't just try to look at our personal relationship to love, but what's happening to us as a nation as we move away from the kind of ethic of love that many of us felt undergirded all the great social movements, movements for social justice in our society.

Beverly Guy-Sheftall: And she got lots of criticisms about it because people thought she had abandoned her radical politics rather than seeing her notions about love is also being radical.

She was very clear that she was talking about a political idea in a culture and in a world that actually socializes us not to love each other.

And she definitely felt like marginalized people that it was a radical act to love yourself in a culture that tells you that you're unworthy.

In All About Love, she distinguishes care from love.

And I think she felt a bit misunderstood by her family.

She said that they cared for her, but often they didn't see her.

And so how could that be love?

Love is about accountability.

I think for Bell it was about being seen.

I felt as a child what it was like to be loved and to be recognized.

And then I felt that love move away, particularly talking about my relationship with my father.

But I couldn't tell anyone because we're not allowed to talk about not being loved in our culture.

We're made to feel that everybody knows love.

I mean, I talk in the book about all of these people who say, you know, my dad beat me or mom did this, but she really loved me.

And a key chapter in the book is the chapter on children where I'm saying that no, in fact, if we are being abused in any way, we are not being loved.

I also think that she really wanted a long term loving relationship, but I think she understood somewhere because of imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy that there's a lot of shortcomings with us men.

And so she didn't really get the kind of love that I think she deserved in terms of intimacy on a consistent basis, you know.

I know she wanted it.

She talked about it a lot.

It was what she longed for.

All the time I don't think she felt loved.

And so if it's something you long for, you long for it for everybody, not just yourself.

But it was the one thing I think, I mean, she has fame, she had wealth, but I don't think she had the love that she wanted.

Narrator: "When I was a child, it was clear to me that life was not worth living if we did not know love.

I wish I could testify that I came to this awareness because of the love I felt in my life.

But it was love's absence that let me know how much love mattered."

She said this to me and I'll quote her, "To me, I think the world has lost the love.

And if we could come back to love, things could be different."

Narrator: "All awakening to love is a spiritual awakening."

I think before I even read All About Love, I knew that quote.

Every time I hear that quote or I read it, I hear her voice and I hear the depth of the quote.

"All awakening to love is a spiritual awakening."

I hear her say that and know that underneath her just saying it, she's living that.

Silas House: I wouldn't necessarily call her a religious person.

On the other hand, I would call her a deeply religious person.

I don't feel like she adhered to any one organizational religion and often was very critical of organized religion.

I think just the mystery of a creator, of a spiritual life was very appealing to her.

You know, it was interesting for somebody who had -- she had answers, she always had answers about things.

She just, she read so well and was so informed that she always knew the answers to things, but she couldn't necessarily do that, you know, when talking about spirituality.

So I think there was a real appeal in that.

Gwenda Watkins Motley: She studied the Buddhist religion and she felt, oh my God, they're about love.

Look at all these characteristics of being loving, being forgiving, being kind.

So she decided she wanted to be a Buddhist Christian.

She didn't just say that, she studied.

She met with Thich Nhat Hanh.

She was concerned about her soul.

Even as a child, she was very focused on religion.

Crystal Wilkinson: Unlike other writers and scholars who may have had their spiritual practice over here, their scholarly work over here, her spiritual practice I think was incorporated in her life as a scholar, as a teacher, and as a writer.

This sort of quest for, quest for peace, quest for becoming more whole was a daily practice for Bell.

Narrator: "My belief that God is love -- that love is everything, our true destiny -- sustains me.

I affirm these beliefs through daily meditation and prayer, through contemplation and service, through worship and loving kindness."

Gloria Steinem: We all would have liked her to remain here in New York.

But I think her return to Kentucky was important to her.

There is a circularity to our journeys.

I think coming back to where we began and knowing it for the first time is a almost universal human experience.

I think you never really forget your roots no matter where you come from, you know.

And it made her, you know, her love of reading, of education came from Kentucky.

Her work ethic came from Kentucky.

Her sense of family and loyalty and community came from Kentucky and she just took it wherever she went.

Narrator: "Like poke, a Kentucky favorite which changes the flavor when added to turn up collard or mustard greens, the hillbilly culture, the backwoods ethos is that particular ingredient which shapes and forms me.

It is that foundation that leads me to embrace wholeheartedly the reality that I am indeed a Kentucky writer."

Crystal Wilkinson: One of the things she talks about in "Belonging" is this sort of identity, the hillbilly identity.

I think what she means like her connection to Kentucky is communal for one.

An actual physical connection to the land is one and the other one is community, like the ability to not just be working for yourself.

Bell Hooks: Because I think the South has a unique sensibility that for me informs my work, the civility, the courtesy, the kind of things I evoke, the community.

Part of what has been, for me, a radicalization of my being is trying to in a sense claim a new sense of a Southern sensibility.

I heard her talk a lot about the idea of being a hillbilly as being sort of a revolutionary, being able to take care of yourself, knowing how to do things, you know, like knowing how to preserve food, knowing how to make a quilt.

And that was something that even after she had lived in California and New York and, you know, all over and was such an urbane person, I think those things were still really important to her.

And while I think Bell experienced great love and great safety in rural Kentucky and hillbilly culture, she also experienced a lot of discrimination, of course.

And so it was really complicated for her.

Narrator: "My college years began that process of feeling split in my mind and heart which characterized my life in all the places I moved to, California, Wisconsin, Connecticut, Ohio, New York.

At heart I saw myself as a country girl, an eccentric product of the sense and sensibility of the Kentucky backwoods.

And yet the life I lived was one where different ethics, values and beliefs rule the day.

The issues of honesty and integrity that had made life clear and simple growing up were an uneasy fit with the academic and literary world I had chosen as my own."

In Kentucky she was discriminated against as a black woman.

In California she was discriminated against as a black woman and as a country person, as a person with a rural accent and rural values.

Often we put all of the bigotry on the South or Appalachia or Kentucky or rural places and she really illuminated for a lot of people, no, this is everywhere and everybody has to claim this.

Narrator: "If psychologists are right and there is a core identity imprinted on our souls in her childhood, my soul is a witness to this Kentucky, so it was when I was a child and so it is in my womanhood."

Like a homing pigeon, like a homing bird, home was special to her.

I think she moved home because she could, she wanted to provide assistance and provide comfort for her parents who were both aging.

She wanted to position herself to make a difference in Kentucky and thought that Berea was the place to do that.

One of the things that drew Bell to the Berea community was John Fee's mission of Berea College out of one blood-one people and was one of the first institutions to integrate black and white education.

She was able to start the Bell Hooks Institute and she was able to donate her papers to Berea so that her legacy continues.

And she was able to have that sort of gathering place where people from the community and people from the college and people from surrounding towns would come and listen to the guests that she brought there.

In some ways, even before she passed, it was like a living testimony.

Gloria Steinem: When she was ill, she would be sitting on her couch and that couch was like the center of the universe.

People came to visit her, to bring her food.

She made us laugh.

You felt that even in this kind of obscure Kentucky place, you were in the center of the universe because Bell was there.

I mean, I never thought I would have to live in a world without Bell in it.

I don't really have a lot of regrets.

I don't wanna use that word, but Bell had invited me to come to Berea, you know, to do a conversation with her.

It broke our heart that I had to cancel the trip.

And I would call, I would call and I would just get her voicemail, you know.

And then in December 21, I got a call saying you gotta come to Kentucky, Bell doesn't have that much longer to live.

Once I was allowed to the house, I was able to sit there for like three or four hours.

Me and Bell.

It was devastating to see her in that state.

She couldn't speak.

There was an oxygen tank.

So what I did, I held her hand the whole time and I would rub her knees and I would say, Bell, can you hear me?

I would tell her that I loved her.

I remember thinking to myself, you've got work to do.

You gotta be a better man even than you think you are now, way better, and you gotta honor her and her work.

Everything she poured into, you have to go forward with it.

And within a week she was gone.

Beverly Guy-Sheftall: I think she thought the feminism would be such a revolutionary idea that all of the systems of oppression would be gone.

Bye-bye.

Not reformed, but gone, eradicated.

And then I think she thought then people would really be able to, to live in loving peaceful spaces with each other because all of those ISMs and systems that kept us away from each other would have vanished.

But I think that she was very pessimistic, maybe in the last five years or so that we would ever see this world.

She actually thought that no one would remember her after she was gone.

She talked about that a lot.

"Do you think people will read my books?"

Gloria Steinem: Bell's legacy, first of all, is in every lecture she ever gave, every essay or book she ever wrote.

So I hope that the fact that this report on her life exists is gonna send people out to bookstores everywhere and say, what, you don't have books of Bell Hooks?

There's something wrong with your bookstore.

That is so, so, so important.

I think people will find a teacher and a friend.

I think Bell would want everyone to be a feminist.

That's her legacy.

Narrator: "Imagine living in a world where there is no domination, where females and males are not alike or even always equal, but where a vision of mutuality is the ethos shaping our interaction.

Imagine living in a world where we can all be who we are, a world of peace and possibility.

Feminist revolution alone will not create such a world, we need to end racism, class elitism, imperialism.

But it will make it possible for us to be fully self-actualized females and males able to create beloved community, to live together, realizing our dreams of freedom and justice, living the truth that we are all 'created equal.'

Come closer.

See how feminism can touch and change your life and all our lives.

Come closer and know firsthand what feminist movement is all about.

Come closer and you will see: feminism is for everybody."

Voiceover: Funding for this program is made possible in part by the KET Endowment for Kentucky Productions.