The Power of Reading Gresham, Samuel Jr. GRESHAM: My name is Samuel Gresham Jr., I am the executive director of the Ohio Commission on African American Males at the Ohio State University. I think in order to put my story in context, I am originally from Greenwood Mississippi which is in the delta and it's in Leflore County, and that's an important part of my literacy dynamic. Also I was the second grandchild in a very close-knit family and when you're in a close-knit family we did the soulful thing, every Sunday we had dinner at my grandmother's house - we called her momma - so we are a very close-knit family. So when I was born, being the first male grandchild, it created a lot of excitement in the family. My name is Samuel Grisham Jr. so that means I was named after my father and that was important in the lineage and the history of my family. Being that I was the first male child, I got a lot of attention and there was a lot expected of me and that's still true to the day. I first started collection though of getting involved in reading was my mom reading to me in a rocking chair and it became a ritual every night, she would read to me before I went to sleep. I remember they never talked baby talk to me, they always talked straight language to me because my parents felt it was important that you develop a vocabulary and begin the structure of the English language - they were very strict on me in growing up and using the English language correctly. My father said it's the King's English and you have to learn to speak the King's English so they were very hard on that. In our house we had books but we didn't have a whole lot of books. We had more periodicals than we had books. Magazines would come in and out of the house; "Ebony," "Jet," sundry and religious periodicals and they were always attractive because they had photographs on the front so as a child I wanted to see what was in them and the other thing about "Ebony" was they had big print so you could read it and you could struggle with it. I had an unusual childhood from the standpoint of literacy. My mom was a domestic worker and as a domestic worker she worked for the Billups family and the Billups family wanted her to come back early but when I was three years old, I couldn't go to school until I was five, so what they did with me was they put me in tending garden. Say for instance elementary school and say for instance an elementary student was a - it was the Franciscan Catholic church where the fathers wore those brown robes - so I was in kindergarten for two years. I was the pro in the kindergarten to it increased my emphasis on reading at an early age. I was taught how to read and required to read at an early age. I'll never forget those 24 months in school. In 1956, in Leflore County, Mississippi, not many black boys got to go to Saint Francis Elementary school at that time - I was the only black boy at that school. In Leflore County in 1954 and 1955 that was an interesting experience, I didn't think much of it at the time but I was taught by the Franciscans who were brothers and nuns at the same time. But in my house, reading was very important and reading was very important because of what was going on at the time. 1956, I remember being read to about Emmitt Till and Emmit Till was about twenty miles from my house, he lived in Mississippi, he was in Money, Mississippi. SPEAKER: Sam just for the record, who was Emmitt Till? GRESHAM: Emmitt Till was a black boy whose body was mutilated and thrown into the Tellahatchi River and became a famous case of civil rights in the 50's in Mississippi. The meeting became important in that way. When we left Mississippi and we went to Chicago and I was turning of age, I think the first time I can remember my father was starting this routine where every day I had to learn a word, every day I had to understand the definition of that word, every day I had to learn to sell that word. My father's belief is that if you have a big vocabulary it protects you from the throws of racism and if you are able to articulate well, it protects you and gives you a competitive advantage. I didn't always like this idea that I had to learn a word every day, in fact I hated the idea that I had to learn a word every day. So each year I learned 360 thousand words [laughing] that I knew how to spell and I knew what the definition was and I had to be able to use that word in a sentence. I just couldn't have the word. At times, I have to say, my father and mom were an interesting couple. My mom was the good cop and my dad was the bad cop so that combination worked very well. I turned out being highly literate with a voluminous vocabulary and was quite litigious. [laughing] GRESHAM: A lot of the words as a result of their effort but words and reading became more important to me as I got into school. Middle school became an important place in my formation. I met this guy, Dr. White - when we were in middle school they used to have you in one A1 and one A2 and all the way up to A210 and the higher the number of words you learned and I was in 7A8 which was a group, and it was a male only group, they put us together and this is where I met Dr. White. Dr. White taught me about the importance of words, being able to read, being able to understand words, being literate, he gave me the definition on so many exams, he showed us how to use photography, he taught us about being black males and the content of African American history. So then reading for me became a different thing. I followed, when I got to high school, Mr. Hall, Mr. Hunt, Ms. Johnson, Mr. Lebowski - these were all my high school teachers. I want you to remember I graduated from high school in 1967 so that means that the heart of the civil rights movement from 1962 to 1967, I was in high school and all the change that was occurring in America, antiwar stuff, the civil rights stuff, all of that stuff, I was living through. So it was important to me and Mr. Hall used to make us read the periodical that they bought for high school students and it was called "Contemporary Issues" or "Current Issues" or something like that - we had to read that thing and we learned a lot from that. Because of the rhetoric and the times of the 60's, I got introduced to a lot of other readings. As an activist - and I was an activist - I perceived myself as an activist, I read a Miles Redd book, I read Mein Kampf, I could tell you I read Machiavelli - this is in high school! This is not in college! But this is in high school, we started reading that stuff because the groups of people that I hung with - I was a jock but I was an activist. I was a football player, I was a wrestler, and I was a baseball player but I was an activist. I remember one time we used the literature to make a statement about the contemporary times. We came to school, this is primarily a black school, in KK outfits - we had on hoods and we had on the white sheets and we called ourselves "KKK": Cool, Colored kids. [laughing] GRESHAM: We thought it was a bit or irony to call ourselves the KKK: cool, colored kids. But that shows you how much we were involved in literature and how much we were reading and how much we understood some aspects of literature. I'll never forget Mr. Mojoleski told me that he was going to take me to a movie and I said, "What movie are we going that you're going to take the whole class?" And he said, "We're going to go see the movie." The movie was "Survival" and I said I'd read that book already I don't want to go see the movie. And Mr. Mojoleski, he was a Polish guy who taught primarily at a black school of subject literature, he told us so many wonderful things about literature. And then there's Ms. Solebania who taught us about history. I couldn't tell you a half a dozen teachers who affected me from that standpoint in high school and led me to be a different type of person because I had all this reading. And then I started accumulating books and have a library now of may fourteen or fifteen hundred books. SPEAKER: Is there a particular type of book or genre... GRESHAM: My books, contemporary, self-help, but a whole book that deals with the post Annabel period - 1865 to 1877 - a lot of books dealing with 1950 to 1969. A lot of those types of books have some important period in my life left. Books led me to the work, like the work that I ended up doing which is activism and community organizer. Books still help me today, they help through the internet and they introduce me to new ideas. I think books are very powerful even at the age I'm at now. One of the things I do is every Christmas, for my kids, I buy books. I may give them another gift but I buy books, now they hate this, but I've been buying books for them for about ten or fifteen years. And the idea is I look at how's your library card? And I know in the modern age people don't believe in books as much. I have one son, and Chucky has kept all his books and every time he moves he moves them out with him. But reading for me is a tool that allows me to be much more proficient at my job. Reading for me is a way of expressing myself because I write myself. Be it post and put things up and organize, literature and writing proposals is very important in what we do in a business. It's also being able to write for me personally, I do poetry, I don't tell many people I do poetry, some of it's nasty as hell. [laughing] GRESHAM: But I do poetry because I have to find a way to express myself. I give it to very few people that I write poetry. I also like writing as a result of literature, I have to write 400 words a day. I try to write 400 words a day just to be in practice because if someone walks in the room and asks you to write this for them and if you practice at it it's easier to do. Most times if you ever have a stock of stuff in hand, you can come up with things, put something together real good. I try to communicate to young people that if you can write and read it will increase your market value and the more proficient you become at it the more your market value increases. I know writing is not seen - well it does have some cache, it still has its value - but a lot of courses still doesn't insist computer stuff but people don't see that as writing. The visual stuff, the stuff that you're doing today. But I think it's a total combination when you can write and put a visual to it. If you can make it artistic it becomes even more powerful. I have three sons and one of them I tried to get to build content for a telephone platform and I tried to get him to understand that if you build contact and you can sell that contact to make money. SPEAKER: One last thing. The archives have the ability to upload documents, pictures, anything that would complement the narrative. Do you think you'd be willing to donate a poem that you wrote? GRESHAM: Oh hell no. [laughing] [laughing] GRESHAM: [inaudible] It's about my moments, it's about my feelings, and I don't really want to share that right now. SPEAKER: That's ok. GRESHAM: If I wanted to be commercial with it then I would have been commercial with it. You know, what people forget is that the ability to read and write allows you to be able to deal with your internal challenges. And if you put it down on paper sometimes, you can unload it or you can understand it better. And that's a powerful thing because we all got issues that are banging up against us even for people who have all the money in the world and trying to figure out how to do that. My father always said to me, "there are three things on Earth and if you'll be able to do these three things you can control your life. If you can understand what's too much for your, what's just right for you, and what's too little for you. Too much for you is the most difficult thing to understand. Sometimes what's too little for you is hard to understand but finding out what is just right for you is much more difficult and being able to read that and draw comparisons helps you solve those problems." So I think reading is very powerful, the earlier you get people involved in reading, the more important it is. And I can't imagine being in this world and not being able to read. That must be one hell of a nightmare and I wouldn't want anybody to be like that.