A movement can start in the least likely of places.
“Read Woke” is such a movement, a program that started in a school library in Georgia three years ago and is now being implemented in schools and libraries in the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom and Norway.
“Read Woke” is designed not only to encourage teens to read, but to empower them to become involved citizens by exposing them to relevant, topical literature students can relate to in their own lives.
Over the past three years, thousands of students have participated in the “Read Woke Challenge,” reading a list of titles selected on a set criteria. The books must challenge a social norm, give voice to the voiceless, provide information about a group that has been disenfranchised, challenge the status quo or have a protagonist from an underrepresented or oppressed group.
Knowledge is power, and the source of knowledge is most often found through reading.
A long awakening
Technically, “Read Woke” began in 2017 when Cicely Lewis, a librarian at Meadowcreek High School, a large high school near Atlanta where 97 percent of its students are minorities, was stirred to action by the events of the day that had serious implications for her students.
It was the time of talks of Muslim bans, police brutality against unarmed African Americans, threats to the DACA program and broad-scale deportation of undocumented Hispanics living in the U.S. At a high school where 70 percent of the students are Hispanic and 25 percent black, these issues weren’t abstractions. They were serious issues affecting the lives of many of her students.
Lewis decided to do something about that.
Yet in another sense, the origins of “Read Woke” began much earlier and by another person.
Dorothy Bell was a single mother of four girls in West Point. She loved to read and understood the importance of education.
“I didn’t have a lot of money and there weren’t a lot of things to do in West Point,” Bell said. “I loved going to the library. I figured if I loved it, the girls would, too.”
For Bell and her daughters, the Bryan Public Library became their main source of entertainment.
“I’d take the whole neighborhood — my girls, cousins and nieces,” Bell recalled. “Every summer, we went to the summer reading program. Every Saturday, we went to the library. That was just what we did.”
All of her girls liked to read, Bell said, and this was particularly true of her second daughter, who everyone called “Cissy.”
“I remember one Christmas, I decided to get them all books for Christmas instead of toys,” Bell said. “They all cried and cried, all except for Cicely. She loved it. All my girls liked to read. Cicely loved to read.”
Dorothy began to notice not only Cicely’s passion for reading but her determination.
“I came home one day when Cicely was in the sixth grade and she was crying because she had one grade that kept her from being on the honor roll,” Bell said. “I told her, ‘If that’s your goal you have to work real hard, do all your homework, study. You have to do the work. That’s the only way.’
“And that’s what she did,” Bell added. “She made honor roll every semester for the rest of her school years after that.”
‘I couldn’t put it down’
For most of her childhood in West Point, Lewis read whatever she could get her hands on. But it wasn’t until she was rooting around surreptitiously in her sister’s room for something to wear (“She was working and had money for nicer clothes,” Lewis said) that she discovered a book that would serve as a part of her own “Woke” journey.
“I found ‘Black Boy’ by Richard Wright in my sister’s things and I couldn’t put it down,” Lewis recalled. “It changed my life. He was bold. He was thirsty for knowledge despite his impoverished childhood.”
For the first time, Lewis had encountered someone in her reading she could relate to.
The search for other books that reflected her own experience as a black person continued when she arrived at the University of Southern Mississippi where she studied to be a teacher.
“I signed up for African-American Literature, and I remember being shocked when my professor walked in and she was a white woman,” Lewis said. “She introduced me to so many amazing texts and she handled the literature with such care and integrity. She truly changed my reading experience.”
That professor was Genevieve White, a Starkville native who is now a professor at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas. Although it’s been almost 20 years since Lewis sat in her class, West remembers her fondly.
“I remember Cicely as smart, perceptive and hungry for knowledge,” West recalled. “She thought deeply about the literature and what it could teach us about our nation and ourselves. The class was an African-American Literature course, but you can’t talk about the literature without also discussing history and culture.
“Like most of my students, (Lewis) had not had access to the wealth of African-American literature in high school,” she added. “I had not, either. It was my privilege to change that.”
Off to Atlanta
After graduation, Lewis was hired as a Language Arts and Spanish teacher at Meadowcreek.
It was there, as she formed relationships with her students, Lewis began to think about how she could help students understand the larger world around them.
“Every day, I would turn on the TV and witness some act of social injustice, from Trayvon Martin being killed to bathroom rights of transgender people being challenged to travel rights of Muslims being banned. Injustices were everywhere,” Lewis said. “I would come to school and talk to my students, and many of them had opinions (about what was happening), but not much knowledge. That made me more determined than ever to educate my students and make them more woke.”
To achieve that, Lewis left the classroom for the library, attending Georgia Southern to get her library sciences degree. In that new role, she began building a collection of relevant literature, scouring the internet and social media looking for authors and titles that told the intimate, personal stories of real-life relevance for her students.
Every year, Lewis had a themed reading program — Harry Potter was the theme one year. “Hit a Grand Slam Reading” was another.
By 2017, those themes seemed trivial.
“With our current political climate, I knew a cheesy theme would not suffice,” Lewis said “I had to address the issues but still remain open to serve the needs of all of my patrons.”
One day, she happened upon a copy of Essence magazine whose cover story featured prominent black women who were “woke” to fight against social injustice. They were all wearing, “Stay Woke” T-shirts in the magazine photos.
In an instant, Lewis had her reading program theme: “Stay Woke.”
It quickly became a phenomenon at the school as students poured into the program. Reading test scores took off. Circulation of the library books soared. Students stopped Lewis in hallways, eager to discuss the books they were reading or ask for more reading suggestions. Students eagerly completed the “Read Woke Challenge,” earning prizes, including a coveted “Read Woke” T-Shirt.
“Read Woke” spilled beyond the Meadowcreek campus to other cities and across borders and now an ocean.
“It took my breath away,” Bell said. “I said, ‘Cicely, this is like a miracle.'”
‘They need a light’
The literature offered in the “Read Woke” pulls no punches. Lewis said she is careful not to present her own views on the issues. But she does want students to have access to the material to form their own opinions.
Lewis’ program is not geared entirely to broad issues, but to personal issues, too.
Bell said that’s especially important.
“I think so many of these books help kids see that they are not alone,” Bell said. “All teenagers go through the same things, to a certain point. They need a light. I told Cicely she was a light for those kids.”
For Lewis, the light she helps provide was not there in her own childhood.
“I wish that I could have had more exposure to diverse texts in school,” she said. “Growing up as a girl with a father in prison, it would have been nice to read about other kids like me. I was so ashamed that my father was in prison and that he had been addicted to drugs.
“Now, I read books all the time about kids facing the same issues and I know (those books) would have helped me cope,” she added. “I’m just now coming to terms with it.”
Some issues, Lewis said, defy labels and are part of the universal human condition.
“Many people only think of race when they think of diversity,” Lewis said. “There are so many issues that make our students diverse.”
Above all, Lewis said, education remains the greatest tool a child will ever have.
“I have realized that education is the great connector,” she said. “It is the only way to escape poverty and the only way to battle racism, sexism and all the other ‘isms’ that affect our society.”
Lewis’ old professor is thoroughly impressed.
“She is obviously having a tremendously positive impact, both in the community and across the globe,” West said. ” She is not only helping them find their own answers to questions, but she is also turning them into life-long readers.”
Lewis chose the following books for her first “Read Woke Challenge” program in 2017:
■ “All American Boys” by Jason Reynolds and Brenden Kiely
■ “Dear Martin” by Nic Stone
■ “Girl Mans Up” by M-E Girard
■ “The Hate You Give” by Angie Thomas
■ “Hunger” by Roxane Gay
■ “I am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban” by Malala Yousafzai
■ “Juliet Takes a Breath” by Gabby Rivera
■ “The Librarian of Auschwitz” by Antonio Iturbe
■ “I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter” by Erika Sanchez
■ “Sugar” by Deirdre Riordan Hall
■ “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” by Michelle Alexander
■ “Turtles All the Way Down” by John Green
■ “Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass” by Meg Medina
Online
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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