Ta-Nehisi Coates spoke at Widener University yesterday

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates spoke at Widener University yesterday and I wasn’t allowed to tell you about it. I really don’t think y’all would have bum-rushed the lecture but Widener had limited seating which was mostly reserved for the freshman class, all of whom are required to read The Beautiful Struggle.

I happened to read The Beautiful Struggle about this time last year and it instantly became one of my favorite books. It’s mostly a story about him and his father and their issues growing up in the ‘hoods of Baltimore and D.C. Because I’m about 15 years older than Ta-Nehisi and probably close to 10 years younger than his father, I found myself in both characters.

I’m impressed that Widener is requiring ALL freshman to read this book. It’s certainly one that all young inner city black males should read by the time they get out of high school. 

Here is Coates' official Bio:

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle. 

Coates was born in 1975 and raised in West Baltimore. His father, Paul, was an enigmatic god to his sons: a Vietnam vet who rolled with the Black Panthers, an old-school disciplinarian and new-age believer in free love, an autodidact who launched a publishing company in his basement dedicated to telling the true history of African civilization. Most of all, he was a wily tactician whose mission was to carry his sons across the shoals of inner-city adolescence—and through the collapsing civilization of Baltimore in the Age of Crack—and into the safe arms of Howard University, where he worked so his children could attend for free.

Among his brood of seven, his main challenges were Ta-Nehisi, spacey and sensitive and almost comically miscalibrated for his environment, and Big Bill, charismatic and all-too-ready for the challenges of the streets. The Beautiful Struggle follows their divergent paths through this turbulent period, and their father’s steadfast efforts—assisted by mothers, teachers, and a body of myths, histories, and rituals conjured from the past to meet the needs of a troubled present—to keep them whole in a world that seemed bent on their destruction.

With a remarkable ability to re-imagine both the lost world of his father’s generation and the terrors and wonders of his own youth, Coates’ The Beautiful Struggle offers readers a small and beautiful epic about boys trying to become men in black America and beyond.

Some folks don't believe I read so I took
the book off my shelf and scanned the cover