Names matter. In prison, I found myself around a bunch of teenagers who, wanting to be more than whatever crime landed them there, gave themselves the names they hoped to grow into. I took on Shahid, meaning "witness," true to the way the things I'd see would shape me afterward. Then, I came home to reclaim my father's name and try again to make good on whatever his parents imagined it promised him, and what he and my moms had imagined it promised me.
So what's in a name? While this initiative of ours to let books cascade into prisons by any other name would still support the efforts of people inside to envision their lives in new ways... We are leaving behind “Million Book Project” and embracing Freedom Reads, a new name that honors our driving recognition: Freedom begins with a book.
After all it wasn’t a million or even ten books that first set me on the path that has most recently gotten me named by Fortune one the world’s 50 greatest leaders – an honor that is the project’s and our partners' and honestly only mine in the sense of the good company I keep. Nor was it a million books that got me invited to give the commencement address at Wesleyan University last month, another humbling occasion. Nor a million, finally, that motivate me to advocate, like in this May piece in TIME, for access to education in prison, where, yes, people still crave discovery and engagement with the unexpected.
It was one book, at first, slid into my prison cell, in which I both recognized myself and by which new possibilities were revealed, set free. The poet and YA phenom Erika Sánchez, a recent guest on our podcast whose book we’ve sent widely to juvenile detention centers, didn’t emphasize quantity when she told us, “Reading allowed me to imagine a life different than the one that I was living.” (Exactly.) Our distinguished advisor James McBride didn’t, either, when he said, “I can't emphasize it enough: If you read, you're moving on the path towards true freedom.”
Since the start we’ve had as a touchstone the Frederick Douglass quotation, “When you read, you become forever free.” Thank you – as we come up on a year since our launch – for forming part of the Freedom Reads community, affirming everybody’s right to chase freedom, and recognizing the irreplaceable motivation books are in this pursuit.