by Steven Ragsdale
Our ancestors fought for the right to read. Today, with books competing against screens and artificial intelligence, we risk losing more than a pastime.
I cannot forget the day Ms. Elma, an elder Black neighbor, left me an unexpected envelope. I was a college sophomore trying to stretch every dollar, when I realized I could not afford a required textbook. I mentioned it in passing to my mom. Ms. Elma caught three buses to work cleaning rooms at a chain hotel.
A few days later, I found an unstamped envelope in our mailbox with my name on it. Inside were four $20 bills and a note that simply said, “Stay in school.”
I bought the book that afternoon. It is still on my shelf, not because of the science I learned from it, but because of what her generosity made me realize.
That memory gave me chills when I came across a troubling pattern in how Americans spend their time. A large national study tracking two decades found that reading for pleasure has steadily declined.
I get it. With social media in just about everyone’s hand, there had to be a drop in reading. And the trend is especially disadvantageous in Black communities, where the gap in leisure reading has widened. I often wonder what happens when the quiet act of reading disappears.
For Black Americans, reading has never been a casual pastime. It was an economic necessity and, for centuries, a form of survival. Frederick Douglass learned to read in defiance of laws designed to keep him in bondage, understanding that literacy was inseparable from freedom. He was devastated when his prized home library burned in Rochester. W.E.B. Du Bois used books to argue for the intellectual dignity of Black life. Zora Neale Hurston and James Baldwin wrote and read their way into articulating identities the world often refused to recognize.
Reading was not simply about enjoyment. It was about recovering history, asserting humanity and imagining futures that had been historically denied.
Today, information is everywhere and attention increasingly fractured. Search engines answer questions before we finish typing them. Artificial intelligence can summarize a collection of articles or books in seconds. These tools provide incredible power and access earlier societies could not have imagined.
Yet I wonder whether ease of access is quietly replacing the deeper discipline of sitting with a text long enough for it to change us.
A friend often reminds me of an African saying that when an elder dies, a library is lost. It speaks to oral traditions, but the idea lingers. What is a community that no longer wants to read or pass down its stories with care, but a place where libraries risk going silent even while the shelves remain full?
I think again of Ms. Elma, a woman who struggled to read mail and medicine bottles herself but understood the weight of a book in a young person’s hands. What does it mean when information is endless, but our commitment to curiosity and understanding moves toward extinction?
(Reprinted from the Philadelphia Tribune)
