Suggested Readings
Read in order to discern "the noises."
You are the only you that has ever lived; your idiom is the only idiom of its kind in all of existence and if you cannot hear the sound of the genuine in you, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls…
The sound of the genuine is flowing through you. Don’t be deceived and thrown off by all the noises that are a part even of your dreams, your ambitions, so that you don’t hear the sound of the genuine in you, because that is the only true guide that you will ever have, and if you don’t have that you don’t have a thing.
Howard Thurman
(excerpts from his 1980 Commencement speech at Spelman College)
You are the only you that has ever lived; your idiom is the only idiom of its kind in all of existence and if you cannot hear the sound of the genuine in you, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls…
The sound of the genuine is flowing through you. Don’t be deceived and thrown off by all the noises that are a part even of your dreams, your ambitions, so that you don’t hear the sound of the genuine in you, because that is the only true guide that you will ever have, and if you don’t have that you don’t have a thing.
Howard Thurman
(excerpts from his 1980 Commencement speech at Spelman College)
Reading can unlock doors for which there are no keys.
Suggested Reading List
- Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City by Andrea Elliott
- Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion by Jonathan Wilson Hartgrove
- Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury & Healing, by Joy DeGruy, Ph.D.
- The Life of Olaudah Equino, written by Himself, 1789
- The Church Cracked Open, by Stephanie Spellers
- Healing Haunted Histories, by Elaine Enns and Ched Myers
- Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, by Joy DeGruy
- On Juneteenth, by Annette Gordon-Reed
- Plantation Jesus: Race, Faith, & A New Way Forward, by Skot Welch & Rick Wilson
- Nobody Cries When We Die: God Community, and Surviving to Adulthood, by Patrick B. Reyes
- Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi
- See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love, by Valarie Kaur
- Bleeding Out: The Devastating Consequences of Urban Violence - And a Bold New Plan for Peace in the Streets, by Thomas Abt
- Caste: The Origins of our Discontent, by Isabel Wilkerson
- Death & Rebirth in a Southern City: Richmond's Historic Cemeteries, by Ryan K. Smith
- Insane: America's Treatment of Mental Illness, by Alisa Roth
- Better Not Bitter: Living on Purpose in the Pursuit of Racial Justice, by Yusef Salaam
