Monthly Archives: September 2022

The American Library Association has been organizing its annual Banned Books Week since 1982. This year’s Banned Books Week will be held September 18-24.  One of the ways in which the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library is participating in this national event is by sponsoring a panel presentation focusing on the freedom to read.  This panel presentation will take place on Wednesday, September 21, 2022, at 6:00 p.m. at ImaginOn: The Joe and Joan Martin Center.  

One of the organizers of this panel presentation is Becca Worthington, the head Children’s Librarian at ImaginOn.  I contacted Becca and asked her for more information about this panel discussion.  Here is what she sent to me:

Every year, the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library is thrilled to celebrate Freedom to Read Week during National Banned Books Week (September 18-24), and we are always excited to have a forum to safely discuss the dangers of censorship and what we can do to support and protect the freedom of information. This year, however, we’re kicking it up a notch. 

Attempts to ban books from schools and public libraries are rising at an unprecedented level across the country. In fact, as of September 16, the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom (ALA’s OIF, the official organization for tracking book bans and challenges across the United States) reported 681 documented attempts to either ban or restrict library resources in school, university, or public libraries so far in 2022, which is on pace to break records as the highest number of challenges in a single year since the OIF began recording statistics twenty years ago. That’s not good. In fact, it’s terrifying.

As high-profile censorship challenges continue with worrying frequency, it is important to acknowledge that censorship in a variety of forms is also happening here in Charlotte and the surrounding areas. We decided to put together a panel discussion on the topic and open it up to the public. 

The event, “From Censorship and Silence to Celebration: A Freedom to Read Panel,” will take place on Wednesday, September 21st from 6:00-7:00pm in the Wells Fargo Playhouse at ImaginOn: The Joe & Joan Martin Center. It will be moderated by Charlotte Mecklenburg Library’s CEO, Marcellus “MT” Turner, and panelists will include Jessica Reid, Media Coordinator at Eastover Elementary who has dealt with book challenges at her school library; Bridget Thomas, founder of the QC Banned Books Club with over 200 members; Dr. Mark West, professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where he has been teaching courses on children’s and young adult literature since 1984 and who has written two books on censorship; and Alicia D. Williams, author of Genesis Begins Again, which received the Newbery and Kirkus Prize honors, was a William C. Morris prize finalist, and won the Coretta Scott King–John Steptoe Award for New Talent. 

We would love for anyone interested in learning more about the dangers of book banning and censorship and the importance of free expression and first amendment rights to consider attending. And if you’re curious and would like to know about promoting and supporting the freedom to read, please visit https://uniteagainstbookbans.org/

As one of the panelists who will be participating in “From Censorship and Silence to Celebration: A Freedom to Read Panel,” I urge everyone in Storied Charlotte to join the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library in celebrating and exercising our precious freedom to read.

For many Charlotte authors, their decision to pursue a writing career comes after working for years in another career.  My friend Landis Wade, for example, pursued a career as a trial lawyer before he penned Deadly Declarations: An Indie Retirement Mystery.  For Charlotte writer Gary Edgington, his decision to try his hand at writing a novel came after pursuing a forty-year career as a law enforcement and counterterrorism specialist. During his career, he served as an embedded advisor during America’s involvement in the Iraq War.  Gary draws extensively on his experiences in Iraq in his debut thriller novel titled Outside the Wire, which Köehlerbooks recently released.

The novel opens in Baghdad in 2008, and it immediately immerses the reader in the chaos and complexities of the war.   The novel is marketed as a military thriller, but it is also a story about a burgeoning relationship between a counterterrorism expert named Rick Sutherland and a military physician named Nancy Weaver.   For more information about Gary and his debut novel, please click on the following link:  https://garyedgingtonauthor.com/

When I learned about the publication of Outside the Wire, I reached out to Gary and asked him how he came to write this novel.  Here is what he sent to me:

Outside the Wire actually started life as The Baghdad Diet. Since my tour in Iraq helped me shed 25 pounds, I thought it would be amusing to poke fun at the latest trendy diets while exploring the realities of wartime deployment. This bit of sardonic humor was meant to warn the reader they were not picking up your average blood and guts war novel. I thought it was great – my agent – not so much.

The inspiration for this book came to me one stifling, dust-choked afternoon as I was walking back from dinner. I had just learned that yet another young soldier had taken his life on base. That, coupled with a recent attempted murder at another camp, got me thinking. What if a retired detective like me was brought in to assist on an Agatha-Christie-like murder investigation? When I returned stateside, I started roughing out an idea for a novel. However, my Agatha-Christie project quickly morphed into a “fate of the world hanging in the balance” military/detective thriller. The story is voiced by a quick-witted retired LAPD Lieutenant. Working entirely out of his element, it doesn’t help that he is constantly hindered by Army red tape, that is not only mystifying but downright scary.

Cops and soldiers share many similar traits, but their missions and methodologies could not be more different. In 2008, the military’s role was pacification and counter-insurgency operations which had to be done while working within the Iraqi Judicial system. That meant GIs now had to write detailed reports, collect evidence and conduct formal interviews. The US Army excels at many things, but Police 101 is not one of them. Part of my job was to share my thirty years of law enforcement experience with the Army and help them identify, track down and eliminate terrorist cells.

I started Outside the Wire while I was living in California, but I finished it after I moved to Charlotte. I’m a history guy and have always loved exploring this region. Many of my Scots-Irish ancestors settled in the Piedmont and Blue Ridge area, so I feel a deep connection to this place. My daughter, a teacher, and her husband, a surgical tech, were the first to move to Charlotte. So naturally, we made a few visits and soon realized this was an exceptional area. We moved here in 2020, and our little tribe was blessed with a grandson late last year. In our mind, Charlotte is a perfect blend of sophistication and southern hospitality, topped by a natural beauty that is second to none.

I congratulate Gary on the publication of his debut novel, and I welcome him to Storied Charlotte’s community of writers. 

When I met Dr. Bertha Maxwell-Roddey in 1985, she was already a living legend in Charlotte’s educational circles.  Even before I met her, I knew that she had started UNC Charlotte’s Black Studies Program (which eventually evolved into the current Africana Studies Department), and I had heard that she had an illustrious career as a teacher and principal in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School System before joining UNC Charlotte’s College of Education in 1970.  Since that initial meeting with her, I have taken an interest in her life and career, so I was pleased when I learned that the University Press of Florida recently published Dr. Sonya Y. Ramsey’s Bertha Maxwell-Roddey:  A Modern-Day Race Woman and the Power of Black Leadership.  For more information about this book, please click on the following link:  https://upf.com/book.asp?id=9780813069326

Sonya is a Full Professor in the History Department at UNC Charlotte.  She also serves as the current Director of UNC Charlotte’s Women’s and Gender Studies Program.  She has a long-standing interest in the history of education, and she wrote on this topic in her first book, which is titled Reading, Writing, and Segregation:  A Century of Black Women Teachers in Nashville. Since her first book is about the schools in her hometown of Nashville, I wondered why she decided to write a biography of a Charlotte educator.  I contacted Sonya and asked her for more information about how she became interested in writing a book about Bertha Maxwell-Roddey.  Here is what she sent to me:

After relocating from Texas in 2007 and completing my first year teaching history at UNC Charlotte, I finally finished my first book on the history of African American teachers in Nashville. Now, I had to find a new research project. In the fall of 2008, I attended Africana Studies Program’s first annual Dr. Bertha Maxwell-Roddey Distinguished Africana Lecture. That night would shape the next few years of my life. I knew that Dr. Maxwell-Roddey founded UNC Charlotte’s then Black Studies Program, but her name seemed so familiar in some other context, but I couldn’t figure out why. As soon as she walked in, I remembered. 

When they announced her name, UNC Charlotte’s Delta Sigma Theta Sorority’s Inc. Iota Rho Chapter quickly stood up to attention.  Disclaimer here: I am also a Delta Sigma Theta Sorority member, but I have not participated in sorority activities for years. I felt so embarrassed because Delta Sigma Theta and the other African American national sororities are public service organizations. Participation begins in college and continues after graduation for the rest of your life. After getting over my feelings of guilt, I started to learn more about this woman who was the 20^th National President of Delta Sigma Theta.

I realized that this local educational activist was a forerunner in Charlotte’s school desegregation struggle as one of the first Black women principals of a white elementary school in Charlotte in 1968, was the founding director of UNC Charlotte’s Africana Studies Department and co-founded the Afro American Cultural and Service Center in the early 1970s, which became the Harvey B. Gantt Center for the Arts + Culture. Nationally, she founded the National Council for Black Studies in 1974 and led Delta as its 20^th National President from 1992 to 1996. She even grew up in Seneca, SC, only a few miles from where my mother grew up, and I spent my summers with my grandmother. I soon had no doubt that I had found the subject for my next research project.

Unlike novelists, whom I imagine have burning passions for writing that cannot be quenched, I have mixed feelings about writing.  While I do love to research and write, I often find it a pressure-filled undertaking that I most enjoy after it’s done. As a former journalism major in college, I loved to learn about people’s lives, but after working as the entertainment editor of The Hilltop, Howard University’s college newspaper, and completing several college newspaper internships, I realized that I had no interest in interviewing arrogant minor celebrities or rushing towards a potentially dangerous event to be first on the scene. So, I soon returned to my first love, the pursuit of history. I managed to get accepted into UNC Chapel Hill’s history program with fellowships, where I began a journey of historical discovery that would bring a newness to the familiarity of local history and attention to the lesser understood experiences of African American women teachers.

Several years have passed since I first decided to write a biography of Dr. Bertha Maxwell-Roddey. As a scholar of recent history, I have the extraordinary opportunity to conduct oral history interviews. Nevertheless, this research process was both rewarding and frustrating as I felt that I had to become a detective because so many well-minded declutterers had tossed or destroyed historical records. Even though UNC Charlotte’s Atkins Library Special Collections housed several valuable archival collections, much of the documentary evidence for this book remained in the personal historical collections that lay in weathered boxes in people’s basements, garages, and attics.

Despite these travails, I cherished visiting with Dr. Maxwell-Roddey as she shared her life story with me. As a charismatic and brilliant woman with wit and humor, she had the uncanny ability to make people do service or work on projects far beyond their job descriptions. Bertha Maxwell-Roddey enthusiastically empathized that she did not think she left a legacy, but it was clearly visible when you visited the Gantt Center, sat with her former students from the 1970s during their weekly visits, or observed her sorority sisters who helped to prepare her to attend many of the events that she is still invited to attend.

My new book, Bertha Maxwell-Roddey: A Modern-Day Race Woman and the Power of Black Leadership, the story of the life and vision as an educational activist is not just a biography of a phenomenal woman. It represents the untold story of Black women and others who fought to turn the promises and achievements of the civil rights and feminist movements into tangible realities as they fought to make desegregation work in the quiet aftermath of the public civil rights marches and the fiery speeches of Black Power activists in the board rooms and classrooms of the desegregated south from the 1970s to the 1990s.

I congratulate Sonya on the publication of her biography of Bertha Maxwell-Roddey. By researching and writing this book, she has succeeded in telling the true and inspiring story behind one of the most famous names in the history of Storied Charlotte’s educational institutions.