February 2025 Newsletter

This month, as a team, we returned to Montgomery, Alabama, to visit the Legacy Sites. And on this return, we were bringing our new expanded team. We had folks with us who’d not been permitted to go because of probation issues last year and folks who weren’t on our team then. We had family members with us. And we understood that returning to Montgomery, to the site of so many historic struggles for civil rights, was going to be about the hard work of always rejoicing, even when confronted with sorrow.

You don’t walk out of the Legacy Museum without weeping, don’t see the giant Corten beams that acknowledge Americans who were lynched in this country. And yet, if you are like we want to be, you do not let that suffering make you forget who we might be. 

One story that matters. Just after we’d left the museum, and as we entered the Memorial, we asked a young brother to take a flick of us all. He grabs the camera, looks at the 8 or 9 or 10 of us in the photo, my mother and youngest son with us, the first time I’d been away on a trip like this with my mother, the first time she’d been on a trip like this with my son.

And a young kid, a friend of the photographer, photobombs us.

Clearly the kid ain’t know me. Ain’t know my momma, who was right there with me. Ain’t know my young boy. Ain’t know who we were. He could not understand that we were going to invite him and all ten of his friends in the photo. 

Minutes later, we got all these young brothers in the flick with us. We believe freedom begins with a book. We believe that when you see us, you will see love. Do you believe it? If so, tell someone, freedom begins with a book.

Communications Manager Steven Parkhurst writes about meeting this year’s Inside Literary Prize Judges, and the Prize’s impact on those Inside. 

This February, the Freedom Reads team traveled to Alabama to visit sites along the U.S. Civil Rights Trail. We first traveled to Selma to visit the Brown Chapel AME Church where Civil Rights organizers met to plan marches from Selma to Montgomery during the 1965 Voting Rights Movement. We met Ms. Joyce O'Neal, a teenager during the movement. Ms. O'Neal shared stories about the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the marches from Selma to Montgomery, and what become known as "Bloody Sunday" on the Edmund Pettus bridge. Ms. O'Neal reminded us that the fight for freedom is never over.

The next day, we visited the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum, Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, and National Memorial for Peace and Justice. The Museum shares the dark history and legacy of slavery in America, taking visitors on a journey from slavery to segregation to mass incarceration. The Memorial honors and is dedicated to victims of racial terror lynchings throughout the country.

As we reflected on our trip, members of the team expressed a feeling of "heaviness." But, we also came out of the trip with renewed purpose in our mission to bring joy, inspire hope, and help those Inside confront what prison does to the spirit. Freedom begins with a book.

Doggerel, the latest poetry collection by Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts, is a revelatory meditation on Blackness, masculinity, and vulnerability. Simultaneously philosophical and playful, Doggerel is a meditation on family, falling in love, friendship, and those who accompany us on our walk through life.

Doggerel is available next week on March 4. In the coming months, Dwayne will be presenting on Doggerel at the venues below (with more to come!).

- Ferguson Library / Stamford, CT / March 5, 6:30 pm

- RJ Julia Independent Booksellers / Madison, CT / March 12, 6:30 pm

- Possible Futures Books / New Haven, CT / March 14, 6:30 pm

- Politics & Prose (at Connecticut Ave., NW) / Washington, DC / March 18, 7:00 pm

- Enoch Pratt Free Library / Baltimore, MD / March 19, 7:00 pm

- Wallingford Public Library / Wallingford, CT / April 1, 7:00 pm

- 92Y / New York, NY / April, Date TBD

- City of Asylum, Jazz Poetry Festival / Pittsburgh, PA / May 13

- Chicago Humanities Festival / Chicago, IL / May 18

This February, Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts' upcoming book of poetry, Doggerel, was featured in Library Journal's Titles to Watch list. And, a poem from the collection, "Jethro's Corner," was featured as The Atlantic's Poem for Sunday. Last week, Dwayne's latest op-ed, "I Teach at Harvard. Store Managers See Me as a Threat" was published in The New York Times.

This month, Dwayne, a Visiting Professor of English at Harvard University this semester, also gave Morning Prayers at Harvard University's Memorial Church.

Each newsletter we aim to share at least one letter (or excerpt) from one of Freedom Reads now 37,000-plus Freedom Library patrons. Freedom Reads receives many letters from the Inside. They mean so much to us. And we respond to each and every one of them.

Our work isn’t possible without your support. Thank you for supporting us in our vision to open a Freedom Library in every cellblock in every prison in America.