On Saturday, October 11, the Central Library is open to registered Heartland Book Festival attendees only. Regular services, such as hold pickups, public computers and phones, and public meeting rooms, will not be available.
Being black today means trying to make sense of unarmed men of color dying at the hands of police, of a country professing enlightenment while struggling – more than a century and a half after slavery’s end – to alleviate racial inequity and unrest.
Ta-Nehisi Coates eloquently expresses the frustration and fear inherent in the African-American experience in the seminal Between the World and Me, written as a letter to his 14-year-old son. The book is this year’s common read for first-year students at the University of Kansas.
Shawn Alexander, an associate professor of African and African-American Studies and director of KU’s Langston Hughes Center, discusses Coates’ powerful text as a jumping-off point for examining race in 2016-17.