bell hooks, writer, theorist and activist

On this day, 25 September 1952, influential Black author, social activist, and feminist theorist, bell hooks was born into a working class family in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, then still racially segregated.

At 19, while going to university, she began writing her first major work: Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism.

hooks would go on to write over 30 books across her life, touching on subjects such as art, class, community, gender, history, intersectionality, love, mass media, pedagogy, race, sexuality, and more, often critiquing what she termed the imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.