Reading as a Subversive Act: Libraries as the Guide to Liberation
By Fr. Cyprian Davis, O.S.B.
Copyright, Catholic Library Association; Catholic Library World 78:4 (June 2008), 302-305.
Reprinted with permission.
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We who are teachers, scholars, researchers, and librarians, are faced with the fact that reading a book is not a very important activity on the part of young people today. The computer is seen as more accessible. In fact, the computer with its manifold options is another kind of media than the book or the page. The interaction of YouTube on the computer screen operated by the keyboard seated before it, is a totally different experience than the printed page or the written parchment speaking from the page, held in the hand. And yet, no doubt we will also learn how to do our lectio divina online….

Permit me, however, to suggest that the next time a kid comes in from the projects and complains that none of these books in your library are about black people, explain that two hundred years ago more or less black people in this country learned the meaning of freedom by carefully examining letters in a book and thereby learned the meaning of the words. And they did all this risking life and limb. Or explain that two thousand years ago there was this very important black man riding in a chariot on the Gaza road from Jerusalem to Nubia. Although a slave and an eunuch he was a rich man - with his personal chariot - and his own manuscript scroll. He was the treasurer of the Kandake, the queen mother, in Nubia, south of Egypt. He was reading like all ancient peoples by forming the words with his mouth…he was reading in Greek. We don't know his name but we know that Philip heard him read, and he explained to him the passage of Isaiah about the Messiah. Tell them to read about it in Acts, Chapter 8. The queen-mother's treasurer - a powerful rich black man - read words and received baptism. And this time reading became the key to salvation.

1. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. An American Slave. Written by Himself. Ed. Benjamin Quarles. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1988.) 58.
2. Ibid., 64.
3. "Hal Hutson," in The WPA Oklahoma Slave Narratives. Ed. T. Lindsay Baker and Julie P. Baker. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 205-207.
4. Ibid., "Marshall Mack," 276-78.
5. Ibid., "Doc Daniel Dowdy," 128-32.
6. Cornelius in her book, When I Can Read my Title Clear. (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1991) 9, agrees with the noted African American historian, Carter G. Woodson, Education of the Negro (Washington, D.C., 1921) 228.
7. George Moses Horton. Early Black American Poets. Ed. William H. Robinson. 22-23.
8. "Petition of the Catholic People of Color in Philadelphia, 1817." In "Stamped with the Image of God" African Americans as God's Image in Black. Eds. Cyprian Davis, O.S.B. and Jamie Phelps, O.P. (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2003.) 20.
9. Cyprian Davis, O.S.B., History of Black Catholics in the United States. (New York: Crossroad, 1990) 86-87. Also Davis and Phelps, "Stamped with the Image." 22-24.
10. Janet Cornelius, "When I Can Read…" 142-43. Thomas L. Webber, Deep Like the Rivers: Education in the Slave Quarter Community, 1831-1865. New York: Norton, 1978) 138.

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