but it also enabled states to oversee elections as they saw fit.

Our nation’s “founding fathers” wrote about a fair and just democracy for all, but this ideal was not realized in the early stages of the American experiment.

By 1940, Jim Crow laws were deeply entrenched.

. Not surprisingly, the percentage of registered black voters in Louisiana fell from 44.8% in 1896 to just 4% in 1900.

The Civil Rights Act of 1866 granted citizenship but not voting rights

and in some cities, Jews and even Catholics.

as instead been much messier, littered with periods of both expansion and retraction of the franchise with respect to many groups of potential voters.”

it appears that even as we make new leaps toward equality we’re going backward when it comes to voting rights. But that’s nothing new.

The world’s most monstrous crime, the sin and the blood on the white man’s hands, are almost impossible to believe...I read descriptions of atrocities, saw those illustrations of black slave women tied up and flogged with whips; of black mothers watching their babies being dragged off, never to be seen by their mothers again; of dogs after slaves, and of the fugitive slave catchers, evil white men with whips and clubs and chains and guns...

I preferred reading in the total isolation of my own room.

The Norfolk Prison Colony’s library was in the school building. A variety of classes was taught there by instructors who came from such places as Harvard and Boston universities.

    I spent two days just riffling uncertainly through the dictionary’s pages. I’d never realized so many words existed! I didn’t know which words I needed to learn. Finally, just to start some kind of action, I began copying.

I had commanded attention when I said something. But now, trying to write simple English, I not only wasn’t articulate, I wasn’t even functional.

, I later decided I should envision a reader for the stories Iwould write. And the reader I decided upon was my mother, because these were stories about mothers.

So she saidshe would not leave until the doctor called her daughter. She wouldn't budge

When I was fifteen, she used to have mecall people on the phone to pretend I was she.

But I wince when I say that. It has alwaysbothered me that I can think of no way to describe it other than "broken," as if it were damaged and neededto be fixed, as if it lacked a certain wholeness and soundness. I've heard other terms used, "limitedEnglish," for example. But they seem just as bad, as if everything is limited, including people's perceptionsof the limited English speaker.

That man want to ask Du Zong fathertake him in like become own family.

And I use them all -- all the Englishes I grew up with.

I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language

On weekends, I hung out with my friends. The surprise, the wild luck: I had friends.

Everything was going to hell, and then these strangers let me come to their school and showed me how to read. All things considered, every year since has been a more intense and enigmatic joy.

One sat in my room with a beer and “The Phenomenology of Spirit,” reading out a sentence at a time and stopping to ask, “All right, what did that mean?”

No electives. Not a single book in the seminar list by a living author.

As long as nobody had assigned the book, I could stick with it.

I loved that job the way a dog loves a carcass in a ditch.