In The Message, celebrated author Ta-Nehisi Coates tells the story about how a book club of women in North Carolina led a campaign to make a difference.
In 2023, Mary Wood, a teacher at Chapin High School had assigned one of Coates earlier books, Between the World and Me, to a group of advanced English students. Following complaints by several students to the school district, administrators recalled the books and ordered the teacher to terminate the unit.
But, a few years earlier, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, a local church-based reading group had begun reading Black writers and discussing racism. When its leader Bobbie learned what had happened at the school, Bobbie urged the book club to attend the school-board meeting to support the teacher.
They planned the action themselves, mobilising people on social media and resolving to all wear the same colour – blue – to show their collective strength.
Coates attended that meeting and describes it in detail in The Message (which is a glorious book and should be read in full!). The meeting was a powerful representation of community support for diversity.
Like most campaigns, their efforts delivered mixed results – Wood remained a teacher, but the course wasn’t suddenly reinstated.
But what it did demonstrate was how a book club can most certainly be a tribe and change public life. As Coates experienced, reading and reflecting on reading together can create knowledge, relationships and confidence that can move otherwise private people into public action.
