It’s Summer, Simon Says, Pick Up A Book!
Maria Gottemoller:
A young African American girl laughs joyfully while holding an open book, captured mid-reading.
Schools are out. Children are home. And somewhere across the country, I imagine a kid is being told exactly what historymaker and journalist Roland Martin was told every June: “We (have) to go to the library.”
I thought about that line more than I expected to. Maybe because I’m Gen Z and we are, by most accounts, the generation that killed longform media. We read tweets. We scroll headlines. We get our news from Tiktok comments. And let me not kid myself, I get it, our phones do everything. When you’re raised in the age of answers on demand, you don’t have to go searching. If I want to know how to do something, I type it in. If I want to learn about something, I let my tiktok algorithm lead me there. We’re allergic to anything that demands time. But if we just rewind the clock; ten, twenty, fourty, sixty, a houndred years we begin to see that summer life in Black America was CONSUMED by literature.
Before the internet, before smartphones, before God forbid, AI, Black America went looking for knowedge. They read. Because it was hot. Because they were tired. Beacuse they wern’t allowed to go to the theater. Because they were curious. Because for many it was the only thing that made the hours move.
Award winning journalist, political commentator, and one of the most recognizable voices in Black media today, Roland Martin, in perhaps the most extreme form, remembers it in a way that is, put simply, unbelievable.
“I mean I was--I read, I, I read so much out of school. It was different because again, growing up as a child, I mean during the summertime, we had to, we had to go to the library. My parents… mandated that we all had library cards. And so we had to go to the library every week during the summer, did not matter. And you had to check out a minimum number of books. Now, what would often happen is, I would max out. So they said, you could only check out fifteen books. I would check out fifteen books every week. I would read those fifteen books each week. Several summers, I read 300 books. I mean just consuming the books”
A young girl reads a comic book while seated on the floor of a newsstand, with her dog curled in her lap.
There’s something about that quote that feels honestly absurd at first. Are you seriously telling me you read fifteen books a week? Every week? But the more you sit with it, the less it feels like a flex you would see in an instagram caption and the more it reads like muscle memory. This was just what he did.
And he wasn’t alone.
Handy Lindsey Jr., who later became a philanthropic leader and advocate for public service, remembered a similar summertime pattern:
“Oh, I went… to the library a lot. During the summers when, you know,… school was closed, I created a reading list for myself. And this was back during the era of the book mobile during the summer when school was not in session. The book mobile would come to the school parking lot and, so it was sort of like bringing the library to the community. And, so I would go to the book mobile. I'd charge out the maximum which was six books, and two weeks later I'd be back to turn those in to charge out, to charge out another six books. So, you know, I spent an awful lot of my summers unlike most of…., the other kids in my neighborhood, I spent my summers… sitting on the porch or in a quiet nook reading books, and it just totally made my world so much bigger than it was otherwise.”
Children line up at a Chicago Public Library bookmobile parked along a city street in the 1940s.
This was them. On their own. Choosing to read. Roland Martin devoured fifteen books a week, not because anyone was breathing down his neck, but because he couldn’t not read. And Handy Lindsey Jr.? He created his own reading list. No one asked him to do that he just did because he wanted to.
That’s what floors me.
These were children, navigating long, hot summers with nothing but time and still, they chose books. Not once or twice, but over and over again. They trained their attention. They set goals. They filled their own time with something I now struggle to begin, even when it’s handed to me.
That instinct shows up again in the story of Avis LaVelle a political strategist and public affairs expert. LaVelle grew up on the South Side of Chicago, raised by a mother who had no formal degrees but held a lifelong, unwavering commitment to the pursuit of knowledge:
“My mother was a disciple of the written word. You know, she read every day. We are all readers in my family because some of my earliest memories with my mother are going to the Kelly Branch Library. You know, we'd walk over there, that's when they used to have the reading programs for elementary school kids. We got our library cards early, like five years old. Each of us had our own library card and we'd take our little field trips over there. During the summer, we'd read as many books as we could and get the stickers, you know, so we'd participate in their summer competitions. And, my family didn't have any money. So, we weren't going places for summer vacation. So, our summer vacations were, vacations that we took vicariously through our reading. You know, we read a lot every summer and we read through the school year of course, but, you know, it's the way that we got away.”
Exterior view of a historic Chicago Public Library Kelly Branch.
For LaVelle, reading was the summer vacation. In a family where summer trips to Florida or New York weren’t feasible, her library card became her ticket and her book became the Orlando getaway.
And somehow, that was enough.
It’s easy to romanticize that now, especially since I didn’t grow up with it. But the truth is, there was no other option. You made meaning from what you had, and for Black families across the country, that often meant books.
And while LaVelle made her summer escape armed with her library card, others found entire worlds in the books already lining their parents’ shelves. Former Secretary of the Army and Veterans Affairs, Togo D. West, Jr., found his way out by staying in. He scavenged through the house, ransacking his father’s collection, and pulled the one and only Perry Mason mysteries from the rubble.
Promotional image for a 1990s Perry Mason television movie/mystery drama.
”I read one summer, every single book written by Erle Stanley Gardner, including the ones he wrote under the name, A.A. Fair…I'd say right around seventh and eighth grade. I had found one of his books in my dad's bookcase and read it at an earlier age. And so when I'm wandering about the bookmobile, I'd go to the mysteries, and, in fact, that was not so unusual for me because prior to that, I used to ride my bicycle-- to the local branch of the Winston-Salem library… And there is where I found additional worlds because there weren't enough books just in the house… I read lots of different styles of writing. I read lots of interesting stories. And that was how I learned to entertain myself as a youngster. I can remember, retreating for a moment to my childhood.. I could go and sit in there[the oil furnace,] in a little nook behind it. And I could hear my mother saying, "Where is Pete?” "Where's Pete?" And Dad said, "I don't know. He's somewhere with his nose stuck in a book." So by the time I was reading all these Erle Stanley Gardner things, I was well into reading as my way of entertaining myself, and it is still to this day my preferred.”)
What Togo D. West Jr. reveals, almost in passing, is that sometimes the only quiet corner in your house is under a bed or tucked behind a furnace. And still, he read.
And here’s the thing: this wasn’t just the story of gifted kids or future cabinet secretaries. It’s about the way the world was set up.
Reading was everywhere because everything else wasn’t.
Which brings us to Arlene Maclin, a physicist and educator who grew up in rural Virginia, in a place where finding books seemed comparable climbing Mt. Everest. There was no library down the street. No money for weekly newspapers. No air conditioned building with endless shelves designated to the humanities. Just dirt roads, long distances, and the knowledge that if you wanted to read, you had to make it happen yourself.
Two men stand atop a horse-drawn wagon filled with hay in a rural Virginia agricultural field.
“ We didn't get any newspapers. We didn't, we didn't have any money to do that…In rural Virginia, we didn't have books at home, but there was what was called the Book Mobile that would come around in the summertime for schools. And it only came every two weeks. And you were only allowed to get three books. And I knew the schedule. So I made it, in the summertime, I made it my, it was on my schedule to just meet the Book Mobile. And it would stop there at the turn, at our turn, and I would go and get my three books that I would read maybe two or three times by the time it came back. And I had to turn those in and get three more. So that was a service, and that must have started when I was about ten, I would say nine or ten years old, and for rural Virginia kids. And so the Book Mobile would come. I would meet the Book Mobile and get my books and move, 'cause the only library in the county, public library was in Lawrenceville, which was eighteen miles away. That was a long ways away. So there were no libraries in our rural, little Rawlins.”
And honestly maybe that's what drew me to write this blog in the first place. The hunger. The fierce fascination with knowledge itself. Not because someone said, “You need to know this,” but because something inside these children already knew it was worth knowing.
But sometimes hunger just needs the right spark. It’s not that the fire isn’t there, it just needs direction. That was the case for Grayson Mitchell, a future public servant and civic leader whose summers weren’t shaped by scarcity, but by a familial push.
Students gather outside a prominent academic building at Florida A&M University, a historically Black college, during the mid-20th century.
“Because during the summers I'd spend most of my summers with my uncle and aunt down in Tallahassee and his wife. They were heavy academics and so were my parents. And they started--obviously I was bent towards it anyway, but I mean, I started reading getting into all kinds of books, doing Shakespeare when I was at a very young age and I enjoyed the attention that I was getting from the adults and the more they saw that I could absorb the more they put on me, so much so that I was actually teaching on the faculty of Florida A and M when I was thirteen, the summer I was thirteen years old I was actually teaching.”
Thirteen.
While other kids were going to Little League practice or passing notes at summer camp, Grayson Mitchell was standing at the front of a college classroom. That’s not just unusual. It’s insane. And again, it happened in summer. That small window of time when, if given the space, young people don’t just grow they excelled.
All it took for Grayson was a nudge from his aunt, an uncle, who saw something in him and kept pushing, but sometimes, the nudge isn’t so intentional. In Sonya Ross’s case, it came from a father who, frankly, just wanted her to stop bothering him.
Sonya Ross, who would go on to become a White House correspondent and accomplished journalist at the Associated Press, didn’t exactly grow up in a house that romanticized books. At one point, her father, fed up with signing permission slips from the library for her to check out adult books, literally gave her a different kind of assignment:
“Because I had the grades I had, my parents would put me in every summer program known to mankind… At age eight or nine I had the reading comprehension of a fifteen-year-old. So they {her parents} needed to do something with me to keep me reading. And, and so my parents would take me to the Collier Heights Library.. and I got tossed into some kid book club. {But} I plowed through the books for my age group very quickly, and I was always bringing permission slips home from the library. So, my dad got a little sick of this and said, "Here, read this," and began to hand me the newspaper every day. So he began to ply me with newspapers to keep me reading things. And I would bring the encyclopedia to the dinner table. So he wanted to cut that out and developed a, a habit of reading, and there the newspapers were this thick and full of stuff--different stuff every day. And that's where me and newspapers came together.”
Two young boys sit at a kitchen table reading the newspaper.
And here’s what’s so incredible; a summer moment, born not out of some thoughtful or grand parental vision, but out of mild irritation, a dad tired of signing slips, ended up changing the entire course of her life. The very thing that would later carry her name into press pools and presidential briefings, into rooms where the story gets told and recorded, started with that simple assignment: read this.
That’s the magic of this whole history; not that every child had access to everything, but that so many learned how to make something out of what they were given. It wasn’t about the stories alone. It was about what the stories made possible. Because what we see, again and again, thorugh these quotes is that an entire generation of Black children were quietly building something far larger than summer reading logs. They were singlehandedly building a lifelong relationship with knowledge, with the written word, with ideas, with upward expansion.
And what makes it even more bueatiful is that it wasn’t assigned. It wasn’t a school requirement or a teacher’s mandate. It was summer. Their own free time. It was what they chose to do when no one was watching, when the air was stifiling hot, when the parents were at work, and when there were no summer vacations.
So for all its heat and stillness, its long days and quiet hours, summer was never empty, it was the season where a generation of Black America sharpened its mind and set its course.
References:
Roland Martin (The HistoryMakers A2012.063), interviewed by Larry Crowe, May 2, 2012, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 3, story 3, Roland Martin talks about being a voracious reader as a child, going to the public library, and attending summer camps
Handy Lindsey, Jr. (The HistoryMakers A2012.020), interviewed by Larry Crowe, February 10, 2012, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 2, story 4, Handy Lindsey, Jr. talks about his early interest in reading
Avis LaVelle (The HistoryMakers A2004.123), interviewed by Larry Crowe, August 11, 2004, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 1, story 6, Avis LaVelle describes her mother and childhood visits to the library in the summertime
The Honorable Togo D. West, Jr. (The HistoryMakers A2007.054), interviewed by Larry Crowe, July 24, 2008, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 2, tape 6, story 9, The Honorable Togo D. West, Jr. talks about his love of reading
Arlene Maclin (The HistoryMakers A2013.001), interviewed by Larry Crowe, January 14, 2013, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 3, story 2, Arlene Maclin talks about her interest in books, radio and television growing up
Grayson Mitchell (The HistoryMakers A2003.295), interviewed by Larry Crowe, December 12, 2003, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 2, story 3, Grayson Mitchell describes teaching a summer English and reading course at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, Florida when he was thirteen
Sonya Ross (The HistoryMakers A2013.309), interviewed by Larry Crowe, December 4, 2013, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 2, story 8, Sonya Ross talks about how she first started reading the newspaper
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