TweetI’ve spent the past two days in my hometown of Asheboro, North Carolina, talking to residents in the small Randolph County community about books — the banning of them as well as the reading of them. Last night, Jessi Bowman, a senior at nearby Randleman High School, held a “Banned Books Read-off” at the Asheboro…
TweetIf you don’t think race played a role in the banning of Invisible Man from a rural county school system in piedmont North Carolina, you haven’t listened to the nuances in the reasoning of the men who chose to censor the Ralph Ellison classic. On Wednesday, after outrage over the Randolph County Board of Education’s…
TweetEarlier this morning, I sent the following letter to the Randolph County Board of “Education.” For those who haven’t read the news, this board voted to ban Ralph Ellison’s literary classic Invisible Man from the schools’ reading list. For me, this terrible decision was very personal. I was educated in the small Randolph County town of Asheboro. So, I…