Henry Louis Gates Jr. on Literary Freedom as an Essential Human Right [nytimes.com]
By Henry Louis Gates Jr., The New York Times, October 12, 2021 “The freedom to write”: PEN America’s always resonant motto has a special resonance for Black authors, because for so many of them, that freedom was one they fought hard for. “Liberation” and “literacy” were inextricable. “For the horrors of the American Negro’s life there has been almost no language,” as James Baldwin once noted . Recall, first, that in many states it was illegal for an enslaved person even to learn how to read...