2nd THURSDAY BOOK CIRCLE – Education For Action
Looking for a more stimulating discourse to keep your justice meter humming? Our Education For Action Book Circle meets virtually on the 2nd Thursday of the month at 6:30 – 8:00 pm ET on Zoom featuring an exciting selection of motivational books that will inspire you to be the change you want to see in the world. With a local and national appeal, we encourage you to invite others to join these deep dive conversations on Civil Rights, Reparations, global equity movements and the personalities leading the charge for justice locally and around the world.
4th THURSDAY BOOK CIRCLE – Reading For Change
The 4th Thursday Reading For Change Book Circle is for book lovers looking for the perfect way to share thoughts and ideas on race, focusing on today’s writers and old favorites. From Michelle Obama’s Becoming, to Ben Campbell’s Richmond’s Unhealed History to James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, this group covers novels from the bestseller list to classic civil rights literature, to books written by up-and-coming authors. Enjoy fellowship and phenomenal reads most 4th Thursdays of the month on Zoom. 6:30 – 8:00 pm ET.
No meeting in November and December.
Co-Conveners: Cheryl Goode, Karen Franklin, Brett Hoag, Doug Steele, and Marsha Summers. For more information about Book Circle events or to be added to our mailing list contact us . To see a list of books our circle has discussed, please click here.
October 2022 (4th Thursday)
For our final gathering of 2022 we will discuss Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own by Eddie S. Glaude Jr. Here is a summary of the book, courtesy of the site Goodreads:
“We live, according to Eddie S. Glaude Jr., in a moment when the struggles of Black Lives Matter and the attempt to achieve a new America have been challenged by the election of Donald Trump, a president whose victory represents yet another failure of America to face the lies it tells itself about race. From Charlottesville to the policies of child separation at the border, his administration turned its back on the promise of Obama’s presidency and refused to embrace a vision of the country shorn of the insidious belief that white people matter more than others.
We have been here before: For James Baldwin, these after times came in the wake of the civil rights movement, when a similar attempt to compel a national confrontation with the truth was answered with the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. In these years, spanning from the publication of The Fire Next Time in 1963 to that of No Name in the Street in 1972, Baldwin transformed into a more overtly political writer, a change that came at great professional and personal cost. But from that journey, Baldwin emerged with a sense of renewed purpose about the necessity of pushing forward in the face of disillusionment and despair.
In the story of Baldwin’s crucible, Glaude suggests, we can find hope and guidance through our own after times, this Trumpian era of shattered promises and white retrenchment. Mixing biography–drawn partially from newly uncovered interviews–with history, memoir, and trenchant analysis of our current moment, Begin Again is Glaude’s endeavor, following Baldwin, to bear witness to the difficult truth of race in America today. It is at once a searing exploration that lays bare the tangled web of race, trauma, and memory, and a powerful interrogation of what we all must ask of ourselves in order to call forth a new America.”
Here is a short video of the author speaking to the importance of James Baldwin’s work to understanding racism in our time.