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Literacy Among African-American Youth: Issues in Learning, Teaching and Schooling, edited by Vivian L. Gadsden and Daniel A. Wagner. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1995. 336 pp. $55.00, cloth; $22.95, paper.
In this edited volume, Gadsden and Wagner have brought a coterie of minds to bear on a range of literacy issues confronting African American youth, their parents, schools, and communities. The result is a book that explores the linkages between illiteracy, poverty, and race; and that addresses issues that have been the concerns of educators, researchers, policy makers, and parents for several decades.
Several contributions stand out as particularly noteworthy. Among these is Herman Beavers's introduction to the first section of the book. In this brief but brilliant piece, Beavers describes the early efforts of African Americans to attain literacy. He notes, as does James Anderson in the lead essay to the book, that enslaved and free Blacks struggled to gain reading and writing skills in the face of inexorable forces bent on keeping African Americans illiterate. Fueled by a seemingly unquenchable desire to gain...