Literacy Access Quotes

Elimination of illiteracy is as serious an issue to our history as the abolition of slavery.

The commitment to literacy was constant on the part of African Americans. And the percentages of literacy by the end of the century, by 1900, basic literacy has galloped ahead. People believed that education, of course, was the turnstile for advancement.

Universal literacy was a 20th-century goal. Before then, reading and writing were skills largely confined to a small, highly educated class of professional people.

I grew up in the midst of poverty but every black kid that I knew could read and write. We have to talk about the fact that we cannot educate for critical consciousness if we have a group of people who cannot access Fanon, Cabral, or Audre Lorde because they can’t read or write. How did Malcolm X radicalize his consciousness? He did it through books. If you deprive working-class and poor black people of access to reading and writing, you are making them that much farther removed from being a class that can engage in revolutionary resistance.

Mass literacy is a phenomenon of the past few centuries, and one that has reached the majority of the world's adult population only within the past 75 years.

There's a lot of people that need these stories, and they can't come to my book, so I'm going to be the bookmobile and I'm going to come to them.

My feeling is that if you can make a big impact on the global literacy problem, you can uplift a big portion of society.