‘BEING A BLACK WOMAN WRITER is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from. It doesn’t limit my imagination; it expands it. It’s richer than being a white male writer because I know more and I’ve experienced more.’       

                                          —Toni  Morrison

I COULD SEE THE DOVES FROM MY DESK

It was a brick school

a grade school

a Catholic grade school

with the priest’s house 

sharing the parking lot 

it was that close

there was a big church there too

I don’t remember if there was a convent

for the nuns who taught at the school

one taught across the hall from me

she had those felt hand-made wall hangings

with doves on them and peace

she also had a Corita Kent poster and 

she played folk songs on a guitar

it was 1970

she’s no longer a nun

I was teaching there to avoid going to Vietnam

so I liked the doves 

she had on the wall.

 

‘IF YOU GIVE PEOPLE LITERACY, bad ideas can be attacked and experiments tried, and lessons will accumulate.’

                                        —Steven Pinker

 

‘People don’t realise how a man’s whole life can be changed by one book.’ 

                          —Malcolm X

 

THE NEW YORK TIMES has this week given more space to Scarlett Johansson suing Disney than they give in a year to the issue of the city’s schools’ failure to teach every school kid to read well.

 

Rosenwald Schools. You may not have heard of them. Amazing that we didn’t know or hear much if anything about them. Booker T. Washington got with Julius Rosenwald head of Sears in Chicago in 1911 and from those discussions came a commitment from Rosenwald to help build and fund schools for under-served Black students in the South. From 1912 to 1937 Rosenwald helped underwrite 4,978 schools. Maya Angelou attended a Rosenwald School, so did Medgar Evers. John Lewis did too. He wrote the foreword to this book done by Andrew Feiler a photographer who took photos of some of the structures that still stand. Here’s a connection to an enlightening talk with Feiler which I just watched. I ordered the book from my bookstore after I watched:

https://youtu.be/Eh8hLzy5K6w

 

Bob Moses a pioneer of the civil rights movement dies at 86.

In a 2014 interview with Julian Bond, Mr. Moses credited his parents with fostering his love of learning, recalling that they would collect books for him every week from the local library in Harlem.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/25/us/bob-moses-dead.html?referringSource=articleShare