February 17, 2025

During Black History Month, we invite you to read some of the works written by authors speaking to the next generation. Our suggestions include:

–Langston Hughes’s poem, “Mother to Son” (first published in 1922 in The Crisis, the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); in 1926, the poem was included in his Hughes’s poetry collection, The Weary Blues)

–James Baldwin’s “A Letter to My Nephew” (published as “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation,” in The Fire Next Time (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2013)

–Imani Perry’s Breathe: A Letter to My Sons (Boston: Beacon Press, 2019). Perry offers a layered meditation.

–Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (New York: Random House, 2015)

–Mary Beth Clack, Mary Blocher, Cindy Coldren, Pat Krol, Liz Levin