One Peanut at a Time is a journey of a lady, an educator, a political activist, and a CEO of the Cleaster Mims College Prep and International Boarding schools. Like a long-distance runner, she learned from her life as a sharecroppers daughter how to plan and reach one goal after the next. Cleaster Whitehurst started her destiny in Enterprise, Alabama, where she weathered storms and overcame barriers in her life with courage, confidence, and even a high level of peace in her climb. This little sharecropper girl grew up, succeeded, and eventually received an award from the president of the United StatesPresident Bill Clintonfor her service to our nation.

“Dr. Cleaster Whitehurst-Mims is an extraordinary and innovative educator, political activist, and philanthropist whose journey carried her from the peanut fields to founder and chief executive officer of her own private boarding school. The lessons of faith, fortitude, and frugality learned while working on the land became the spiritual tools she used to confront life's challenges, fight life's foes, and conquer life's adversities in order to pull and pick others up from the dust of despair. ‘One Peanut at a Time’ is a step-by-step guided tour of eighty years of living and learning, patience and persistence, selfless sacrifice and service.”
—Jan-Michele Lemon Kearney, Esq.


“‘One Peanut at a Time’ reveals the life of a sharecropper's daughter who was nurtured on the land and encouraged by a close, spiritual family and knitted in a unified black farm community. In Dr. Cleaster Whitehurst-Mims' humble background, love reigned supreme. The earth yielded more than copious peanut crops. It cultivated a life of self-determination, commitment, and self-confidence that prepared her to rise up and to build for herself and others. “
—The Cincinnati Herald