In February, my reading theme centered around Black authors, characters, and experiences. My favorite book this month was not actually one I originally picked for this theme, but it happened to fit the theme: To Drink from the Well: The Struggle for Racial Equality at the Nation’s Oldest Public University by Geeta N. Kapur.
As a white girl growing up in the suburbs, I did not grasp the present and pressing need for racial justice until 2012, when a young Black boy my age was shot and killed while walking back from a convenience store. I began my freshman year at the University of North Carolina in August 2014, and the Black Lives Matter movement was a major theme of my first year at college. We left class early to participate in a die-in in the Pit, we discussed the protests taking place around the country, and we walked past a small, table-like memorial on the upper quad and beneath the shadow of a larger-than-life-size statue just feet away. My college years were marked by political and social events that made the need to fight for racial justice clearer than ever, but they largely remained beyond the borders of my safe little campus bubble. During my senior year, that bubble was popped as the protests around Silent Sam escalated. We resorted to keeping each other apprised of when white supremacist counterprotestors were at the statue, so we would know when to avoid the upper quad for our own safety.
On the whole, though, Carolina was a place where I felt safe and loved, a place where I belonged and where I could figure out who I was and who I wanted to be. In To Drink from the Well, Geeta N. Kapur details how, for over two hundred years, the university has not been that place for Black people. The university was built on the back of exploited slave labor to benefit the sons of wealthy white Southern families, and for over two centuries the most powerful people at the university and in North Carolina’s government have fought to keep it that way. Kapur includes historical information about Durham’s Black Wall Street, the national civil rights movement, and more to illustrate how the inequality at Carolina had a broader effect on the state and national level.
As one can clearly see through continuing discussions over the fate of Silent Sam, the controversy over Nikole Hannah-Jones’s appointment and tenure, and the ongoing renaming of buildings bearing the names of white supremacists, the fight for racial equality at Carolina is not over. All students, alumni, fans, and anyone with a stake in Carolina’s future should read this book to build a deeper understanding of the university’s unequal past and the ways we can all work toward making sure it truly is the university of the people, for all people.
February’s reads and ratings (out of five stars)
Theme reads
- From the Desk of Zoe Washington, Janae Marks: five stars
- Kindred, Octavia Butler: five stars
- The Parker Inheritance, Varian Johnson: four stars
- Ace of Spades, Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé: five stars
- Tomorrow’s Bread, Anna Jean Mayhew: five stars
- Dear Miss Metropolitan, Carolyn Ferrell: three-and-a-half stars
- The Other Black Girl, Zakiya Dalila Harris: four stars
- The Boys of Winter, Wayne Coffey (Olympics theme): five stars
Others
- Call Us What We Carry, Amanda Gorman (reread): five stars
- The Spanish Daughter, Lorena Hughes: four stars
- The Red Palace, June Hur: five stars
- The Christie Affair, Nina de Gramont: four stars
- Road of Bones, Christopher Golden: four stars
- To Drink from the Well, Geeta N. Kapur: five stars
- Good Girl Complex, Elle Kennedy: two-and-a-half stars
- Letter from Birmingham Jail, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (reread): five stars
- The Bone Spindle, Leslie Vedder: five stars
- Punching the Air, Ibi Zoboi & Yusef Salaam: five stars
- Becoming Mrs. Lewis, Patti Callahan: five stars
Moriah Sharpe 