Black Boys Don't Read

Omar Tyree Official Website

One of my favorite writers is Omar Tyree. I own several of his novels and have been reading him since the early 1990's. I was driving to get some coffee this morning and he just happened to be on the radio. Of course, he was pitching his latest novel and discussing something close to my heart. The literacy or the presumed lack of it among young black males. He said that he was trying to write children's books aimed at black boys but, he was having trouble getting his publishers to back him. He said that the presumed notion of most publishers is that young African American males don't read and on this presumption alone, nothing was ever geared towards them.

This troubles me because I'm going to assume that little white boys equally don't like to read. They don't like to read what is put out there for them to read... which is nothing. What I'm saying is that males in general aren't catered to in the literary world at any age. Give them something to read that they are interested in when they are young and they will read. Once they start reading and begin to like it, they will gravitate to other things. This is not just black boys but, little white boys, Hispanic boys, Asian Boys, and what have you.

It angers me though that black boys (and in the larger sense black people) are labeled as non-readers. Part of this theory was destroyed years ago when authors like Omar Tyree, Terri McMillan, Bebe Moore Campbell, and Walter Mosley found a market in the black community for their early works that turned into ca$h money cows for publishing houses. My wife and I began reading and collecting books by African American authors around that same time.

My own love for reading came from both my mother and my grandfather. They read to me as a child and this made me want to read and enjoy going to libraries. It probably also led to me wanting to write my own stories. The first serious book that I read was the Autobiography of Malcolm X. I read it for "Negro History week" when I was in the 7th grade and read it again when I was a grown man, around the same time that Spike Lee made the movie with Denzel Washington of the same name. That book had a profound effect on me and it led me to read Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Eldridge Cleaver, and most of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance. I haven't stopped reading since.

I'm not saying that every black child, male or female, is going to read as much as I do but, they will read provided the material that is put in front of them is interesting and speaks to them. If they are going to go on to college and higher learning, reading is going to be a must so, they might as well begin at the formative ages.

I applaud authors like Omar Tyree because he wrote some children's books aimed at young black males and he told his interviewer that he was going to get them out there if he had to publish them himself. After all, that's how he got started. Do any of you remember an underground classic called "Fly Girl" that was set right here in Philadelphia, PA that got passed around from barber shop to hair salon back in the late eighties? That was Omar Tyree's first project and he sold it out of his car. By the time Simon & Schuster picked it up and published it in 1993, every black person of a certain age in Philly had already read it. Now, that's publishing hip-hop style.

Much respect for Brother Tyree for standing up for the next generation.