One of the things I loved most about the late playwright August Wilson’s work was that his plays on Black life insisted on the importance of every member of any given Black community. Wilson crafted his plays based on his experiences hanging out and observing the denizens of the Hill District of Pittsburgh.
Cab drivers, beauticians, bums, architects, lawyers, bricklayers, members of the Nation of Islam, you name it—they all contributed to the love and humor that made up Black neighborhoods throughout the 1960s and 1970s of my childhood.
I remember when I first read an excerpt of comedian-turned-activist Dick Gregory’s autobiography “N*gger.” I was in 8th grade. I was impressed by Gregory’s statement that he was fond of winos because they never hurt anyone but themselves. I grew up watching and imbibing all of my people in all of their varieties at the corner of Hunter and Ashby Streets (now MLK Drive and Joseph E. Lowry Blvd.)
Back in the 1960s there was “Bo” the wino. Bo’s brain was so pickled that he never could understand that I was a girl. Never mind that I had two long braids with ribbons. When Dad ventured to that intersection of Hunter and Ashby Streets without me and he ran into Bo, the question was always the same, “How is that boy?” Daddy responded with the same information he always did. “Bo, I have a daughter.”
My Aunt Ella who was called “Sister” or called by me “Aunt Sis,” owned and ran Top Cats Fish Market. I always loved the painting on the side of the building of the cartoon character “Top Cat.” Winos like Bo and Mumbles would stop by and sweep the floor or wash the windows for a few coins so that they could purchase their wine for the day. “Sister let me have a dime,” Bo would request. “Bo, I don’t have a dime,” she would respond. “You a damn lie,” he would answer.
I never will forget the time Bo came by her fish market and there was a Black physician there who needed his car washed. Bo gladly offered to wash his car. Now, back in the day it was not uncommon to pour some expensive whiskey into a beautiful flask as a gift for a friend. It was also not uncommon to pay a wino anywhere from 10 cents to a few bucks to wash a car or sweep a floor.
Bo went out to wash the doctor’s car. When the doctor paid Bo a few dollars for washing his car, the doctor looked in the backseat of his car and discovered that his flask of whiskey was empty.
“Bo, what happened to my whiskey?!”
Bo replied, “I don’t know what happened. I don’t drink whiskey. I drink wine!”
The doctor looked at him and said, “Are you sure?”
Bo responded, lying through his teeth, “I DON’T DRINK WHISKEY. I DRINK WINE!”
The physician responded, “Well that’s good to know that you didn’t drink it because I was carrying that flask to the lab because I think there is some poison in it!!”
For people who have been reading my posts, you may have noticed that I have written about the United States’ severe literacy crisis twice on this platform. If not, you can read them here: The USA Literacy Crisis & This Election and Literacy Crisis, Part II.
This essay is Part III. Let me point out a few things first. Some 65 years ago in 1960, the United States was one of the most literate nations in the world. In 1960, only a handful of states in this country had an illiteracy rate of 10% for people aged 14 and over. The rest of the states registered only about 3% illiteracy. Now we rank 36th in the world for literacy among industrialized nations. There are other sources that place the USA at a literacy rate much lower.
In 2025, 21% of American adults are completely illiterate while 54% of adults read below the 6th grade level. I want to share with you in this essay, however, what poor reading and writing skills look like when these circumstances are also combined with educational red tape.
I taught College History courses for roughly 7+ years, from 2007 to early 2015. My first 2 years, I taught at a Junior College that had several campuses outside the city limits of Atlanta in the outlying metropolitan areas. My last 5 years I taught at large state universities. Junior Colleges are structured for students who have some academic deficits. Students often attend Junior Colleges to fix a deficit in some academic discipline so that they can eventually qualify to attend a four-year institution to earn a Bachelor’s degree.
When I started teaching, I taught year round. After I taught on this particular campus for about two semesters, I noticed that this campus was slowly being converted into a cash cow. The school started accepting anyone who could pay tuition and occasionally referred to students as “customers.” That did not go down well with me and a lot of other Instructors and Professors.
Most of my History students had some problems with reading, writing, and critical thinking skills. I usually spent the first 3 weeks of every semester correcting grammar and insisting that they trust their answers and their own instincts.
When I asked a simple question, initially none of them could state the obvious answer. I demanded that my students give complete and well-thought out answers and opinions in class discussions instead of the abbreviated and one-word answers that chronic text messaging had fostered.
The majority of my students rose to the occasion. They did the work, read my comments, listened to my instructions and suggestions, and put in the extra time needed to get up to speed in writing and having in-depth discussions about History. I did have one student, whose identity I never knew, who complained about having to write 3 five-page long History papers. Imagine having to write 3 papers in a 16-week long semester in college.
I learned later through the grapevine that this student allegedly had an inappropriate relationship with some man in the Junior College’s administration to who that student complained. One day I was informed that I would have to attend a meeting with my Department Chair and the Ombudsman of the School.
During the meeting, both my Department Chair and the Ombudsman kept telling me things like “Many of these students might not know how to interpret what you tell them. They might not understand what you say to them or write on their papers. One student said you told him or her that they could not write!”
I was confused and raised these points: “I have NEVER told a student that they cannot write. I have told or wrote to many of them, however, that they needed to take a good writing course so that they can improve their writing skills and get more practice writing cogent papers. Also, I speak grammatically correct English in the classroom. How can I know when a student cannot understand grammatically correct English? What type of language or techniques are you asking me to use?”
They both stopped talking for about 30 seconds. I interrupted their silence. “Are you asking me to water down my curriculum?!” No one answered my question. They both began to reiterate how much the students might not understand what I asked students to do. I repeated the question FOUR more times. They NEVER answered my question.
When they suggested that I attend a seminar on Customer Service Skills, it was all I could do to hold my tongue. Then my Department Chair finally ruptured this charade of a meeting and asked me, “Do you want this job?”
I swallowed hard and paused for a good 20 seconds and responded, “That’s a rather loaded question, don’t you think? Obviously, when I applied for this job, I wanted and needed a job. I still do. However, anyone who might be offered a better job somewhere else would probably take the better job. That includes me too.”
When I walked out of that office, I was so angry I couldn’t see straight. The Department Chair’s secretary looked at me as I exited and said “Leslye, what did they do to you in there?! Please, please don’t look like that.” I told her I would come back later and fill her in on the details after the Department Chair went to lunch.
So, here was the dilemma. That handful of students that never had any intention of studying and improving their literacy and writing abilities were now expecting to receive passing grades when they were just as inept at the end of the semester as they were at the beginning of it. That meeting, however, was not my worst moment on that campus.
A young Black woman student emailed me and asked me, when the time came, to write her recommendation letter to Spelman College. She had sent in an application to Spelman and assumed that she would be accepted. When I checked her records, she only had a GPA of about 2.0.
Spelman College is a Historically Black College for women that has always teemed with academic brilliance. No girl graduating high school will even be considered for admission with a GPA less than a 3.5. The average GPA of students who are admitted is a 3.8. It is a highly competitive school with an admission rate of only about 34% of applicants.
I very delicately wrote to this young woman that she would need to pull her grades up in order to get into Spelman. I wrote that she should not be discouraged because, “I know you can do it if you work hard and apply yourself by taking some additional classes.” This was my attempt to tell her the hard truth without crushing her dreams or suggesting that she give up. I signed my name to the email, pressed the “Send” button, and sat and cried for about 15 minutes.
It took me years to understand that people who don’t read well or who rarely read at all constantly misinterpret the meanings in spoken and written language. They also assign their own meanings to what people say and write with little to no comprehension. They make decisions based on what they think or feel about something a person said or wrote.
That is where we are in the United States right now. We have a majority adult population that responds to most political propaganda with their emotions and assumptions, never exactly or entirely based on actual facts. Moreover, many don’t even know where or how to look for the facts.
If the Democrats do not figure out how to reach out to semi-literate people stumbling in the dark with information they can barely decipher, then the Democrats are in danger of losing elections for the next several decades. The Political Left is also doomed to be reduced to little more than a group of well-read, but also self-righteous, ideologues that do not know how to reach the people they need to reach who don’t fit the definition of “well-read.”
One of the things that made my home boy Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. so effective was that he was a young man with a doctorate degree who could go hang out in a pool room and shoot pool and talk trash with the men who hung out there as easily as he could address heads-of-state. He could render presidents and prime ministers speechless because he was better educated and more in-tune with what people needed than the vast majority of them.
He could talk with ease to the poorly educated and to the best educated. For those who don’t know, Martin Luther King Jr. was an exceptional scholar who entered college at age 14 and who graduated Morehouse College at the age of 18 and had earned his doctorate by the time he was 25 years old. Kamala Harris’ Mama also had her doctorate degree by the age of 25. She was working in a laboratory when her water broke with her then soon-to-be-born first child that she named “Kamala.”
(Photo of M.L. shooting pool in Atlanta in 1966. The tall guy on the far right in the cap and glasses was then a Morehouse College Freshman named Samuel Leroy Jackson.)
What is my point? Education and literacy matters; and its singular purpose is to help people focus on what they need to be focused on. In 1960, a man or woman in the United States with little resources knew that the public library was still free and they made good use of it. Today, our semi-literate majority adult population that cannot stay still long enough to read a 5-minute article because they are always ready to look at something that is “trending,” is what we are confronted with now.
Long after I left the classroom, I ran into one of my former students from the Junior College where I once taught. He was attending Georgia State University and was about to graduate. Excited to run into me, he said, “I hated you back then. But you pushed me and demanded that I get the work done. Now, I can’t stop reading and doing research. I cannot read enough BOOKS!”
Hugging his neck I said, “Don’t ever stop. The more you dig the more you will know.
So, in the names of your favorite teachers, instructors and professors, please keep talking about the truths and the dangers of a largely illiterate and poor reading nation. Our welfare as a nation and as human beings depend on it.
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When I was a little girl I went everywhere my Daddy. I often had solo trips to a store, a library, and the park with my school teacher Mama too, but I was a Daddy’s Girl. I remember when it was just the two of us and I had to use the restroom, Daddy and I would often run into a woman who was a friend of our family and she would take me into the women’s restroom so I could do my business.
On many occasions when I was small and I had to use the restroom, Daddy would place his hands over my eyes, walk into the men’s restroom and yell, “Father coming in with his daughter; zip it up or hide it!” He would find a stall with a door, line the toilet seat with paper and then sit me on it.
I bring this up because public spaces like restrooms were not designed for fathers and daughters nor fathers with infants. A mother could take her little ones of any gender and age into the women’s restroom. Dads could certainly take sons into the men’s restroom. My Daddy, like so many other Black fathers I knew defied the limitations of public spaces. He never once said that he couldn’t take me with him somewhere because he wasn’t sure if I could use the restroom.
If you are one of my subscribers on Substack, you have probably seen a few videos on my feed of The Library Dads, which is a non-profit organization that has scheduled weekly library visits for Dads with their children at the public library. It was founded in Atlanta by a young father named Khari Arnold who took his 4-month-old daughter to the library to familiarize her with books. That was her first of many visits.
Arnold noticed a strikingly advanced development of his daughter’s cognitive skills over the course of a year because he read to her all the time. This program is designed to help fathers become involved in the educational and literacy development of their children; and to deepen their bonds with their children. That’s Khari Arnold on the far left in the top photo.
What struck me about The Library Dads was not just their active engagement with their offspring every Saturday at the public library, but also their pushback against the limits of certain public spaces that are less accommodating for fathers and their small children.
My Mama and Daddy took me to the library regularly as did many of the Black parents I knew growing up. I know they both would be impressed with The Library Dads for a variety of reasons. Yet, I must add one more reason that helps us all…
In addition to these young men taking responsibility for their children’s education and development, they also shift the narrative that tends to center on mothers as almost solely responsible for their children’s development. They are a most welcome pushback on the confining and inaccurate gender definitions that the Western world imposes on us all. Go Library Dads!
When I was a small girl in Atlanta, Grandma’s lap and bedroom remained my soft landing if I had misbehaved and Mama was patiently waiting to give me that lecture about my behavior.
Grandma’s bed had a ton of blankets where I couldn’t move if I got in it, but the visit was worth the trip because Grandma had a sweet tooth. There was candy I wasn’t supposed to have in her nightstand and her pockets.
Before I began going to school and even after I started school, Grandma and I had a daily routine of debate and opinions and arguments that could only be had between a 78-year-old woman and her 4-year-old granddaughter whose job was to help sort home grown tomatoes, snap beans, squash and peas from the garden except when I stopped to make mud pies from the rich red Georgia clay after a rain.
We spent hours discussing everything like two old women, but I was a midget version of an old woman. Grandma insisted on me having a reason and an explanation for why I believed certain things, nurturing propositions and hypotheses from my diminutive brain before I knew what a proposition or a hypothesis was.
The other day I told a friend about the year I got a chance to watch a Brown Thrasher build a nest in a tall shrub near my carport. I watched her pick up pine needles and leaves, and craft them together until a nest was in place.
I watched her sit on her eggs. Then later still, I heard the sound of chicks; and finally I saw her nudge them out of the nest. Her babies were gone. She left the nest as well. That nest stayed intact, however, for several years.
Then I remember when the late Dr. Sadye Young told me about her father who built whole houses without any floor plans. Although she was then a retired college professor, Dr. Young knew her way around a house. She had learned certain aspects of building because when she was a child, she often accompanied her father when he was building a home. My eyes brightened because my late maternal Uncle Frank could do the same thing.
Both of these men built foundations, installed plumbing, wiring, and etcetera without any floor plans. Neither of these men had college degrees. Both had been apprentices of carpenters, plumbers, and electricians. But neither of them set foot in a college classroom and majored in architectural engineering. Yet, the homes they built stood the test of time.
Dr. Young’s father and my uncle had something in common with each other and with that Brown Thrasher. They built homes from scratch. They relied on their observations, practice, and their skills, not on architectural drawings. That Brown Thrasher relied on her instincts.
The current state of affairs in this country is going to require all of us to go back to some basics that many of us have lost. We all have instincts, yet we no longer use them. My late maternal grandmother (born in 1886) could predict when it was going to snow simply by observing whole flocks of birds gathering.
We now rely quite heavily on gadgets and technology and self-appointed pundits to tell us everything. But real knowledge comes from reading, research, study, practice, listening, and observation. It is only when we do all of the above that we can trust our gut instincts again.
As Felon 47 attempts to destroy one institution after another, we better ready ourselves to rebuild from his wreckage. Depending on how bad the damage is, we need to prepare to rebuild from scratch which is made more difficult by a population accustomed to having everything done with the press of a button. It is not going to work like that this time.
Leslye Joy Allen 