By Melinda D. Anderson
From an early age my love of reading was inspired by my unbridled imagination. Our neighbors who worked in a field office for the State Department weren’t just government bureaucrats. Obviously, they were spies. Reading Nancy Drew mysteries and later suspense novels complimented my natural and limitless curiosity. Though at some point in my mid-20s I hit a wall. A full-time job and a part-time job to pay for an apartment and student loans cut into my leisure time. So busy “adulting,” my love of reading started to wane.
This is the mood that I brought with me when I relocated to Washington, D.C. in 1994. New job, new city, who’s got time for books?
Enter my friend, Denise, who led a Black women’s book club. The invitation to join her book club was my ticket back to the world of books and reconnecting with my identity as a voracious reader. “Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism” by Derrick Bell was my first assigned book.
Bell, who passed away in 2011, was a catalyst for racial equity. His life, a tribute to activism and courage, was expertly chronicled by The HistoryMakers, which records oral histories of the Black experience.
