Hopkinsville

A segregated western Kentucky tobacco town where bell hooks was born in 1952, the household she grew up in became the first evidence for her argument that domination is taught at home before it is taught anywhere else.

Hopkinsville sat in the dark tobacco country of western Kentucky, segregated by law and by habit, and bell hooks grew up in a house her father ruled and her mother served. She was bussed to an integrated school and counted the loss of her Black teachers as a real loss. She took her great-grandmother's name and kept it in lower case so attention would fall on the work rather than the author, and began her first book on Black women and feminism as an undergraduate.