As I make a new round of edits to my memoir, I have been digging ever deeper into my father's papers and into events from half a century ago. My father was a librarian who believed first and foremost in the importance of the "world of the mind." He fought for open and universal access to books, all books, and therefore found himself in the crosshairs of small-town racists, big-city mayors, even the FBI.
Recently, I came across a speech he gave in 1969 to the Hungry Club, a forum hosted by an Atlanta YMCA which gathered the city's Blacks and whites for discussions on the issues of the day. (If you'd like to know more about the Hungry Club, check out this article from the Atlanta Inquirer.) My father was then the Director of the Atlanta Public Library, and was about to mount a pitched and controversial campaign to build a new library downtown.
The speech could have been written yesterday. It begins like this: "What is happening to man in our time? This question surfaces repeatedly in the mind of any sane person reading his daily paper." He goes on to relate in broad brushstrokes the unrest of that era, including "personal and group aggression and violence...policemen forming off-duty, rightist, vigilante groups...anarchistic attacks..."
But as an educator and a reader, what struck me most were the things he said about books. I hope you will click on the link below and read the whole thing, but here's a bit of his prescient thinking:
"The fragmentation of our society makes it inevitable that there be many more kinds of people we don't know than those we know well. In this sense, the novelist performs a real function of social importance. For it is no longer seeing 'how the other half lives' but seeing how the other 99% live. Maybe you don't wish to know them personally, but one thing is sure: our lives are more and more influenced by persons we don't know and by their problems. Thus, the serious novelist is asking us to look before it's too late."
The more things change...
Here is the SPEECH.
If I may end on a more lighthearted note, I will just say what I say at the end of each podcast: Cheers! And let's all read more.
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