The F Words: Libraries

Libraries have played an important part in the development of my sense of justice and my social consciousness. In my teens I used to read books by Black authors of the Harlem Renaissance: writers like Langston Hughes,  Claude McKay, James Weldon Johnson, and Countee Cullen.  Nobody assigned me these books. Nobody told me about them. Somehow, in browsing the library’s shelves, I came upon these books and was interested in what they had to say.

Of course I was only one of millions of teens who,...