“Kids can’t be what kids can’t see.”
That motto is the guiding vision behind attorney Freddie Stokes’s mission to place books in barbershops that young black boys could identify with, after learning of the initiative a year ago. His goal is to place 75 books about successful black men in participating barbershops around Mobile and Pritchard, Alabama, with money raised from parents and local businesses.
Some of the most popular books so far include “Malcolm Little: The Boy Who Grew Up to Become Malcolm X;” “Twelve Rounds to Glory: The Story of Muhammad Ali;” “Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope,” and various Dr. Seuss books.
Stokes’s rocky childhood propelled his literacy project. He grew up in public housing in Mobile in what he describes as “the worst community in West Alabama.”
He found no positive role models in his community nor in the books he read at school, which he believes led to his and his friends’ low self-esteem and lack of achievement. All that changed when in third grade, he watched his teacher tearfully read a story about a fictional slave girl. She told her students that they had the ability to dream and the power to achieve their goals.
Stokes grew up changed, and after becoming an attorney went to work for Teach for America, an organization that recruits professionals to teach for two years in impoverished areas.
“I made sure that I introduced books into the classroom that my students could relate to,” he said. “I saw better results when I connected things we read about to real-life stories and people my students could identify with.”
After beginning work as a criminal defense attorney, he made the connection between his clients’ violence and their low self-esteem, lack of education and devaluation by society. “I knew that if our boys read more, they would be less violent and more literate,” he said.
With his barbershop-library movement, Stokes is hoping to counteract a stunning illiteracy rate among black boys: just 10 percent of eighth-grade black boys are capable of reading at grade level.
“We can’t wait on President Obama to give grants for books in barbershops. We have to do the work, and we can’t always wait on government,” Stokes said.
Featured image by H.L.I.T., available under a Creative Commons 2.0 license.
