President’s Campus Reading Community book discussion – Today, 6 p.m.

 Jackson State University Interim President Leslie Burl McLemore will lead a discussion about the book, “The Souls of Black Folk,” by W.E.B. DuBois at 6 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 29, at the Cyber Café on the first floor of the H.T. Sampson Library. The entire campus community and the public are invited. The book discussion is the first session of the President’s Campus Reading Community, which the university launched this fall to inspire reading throughout campus and the community. About 100 students, staff, faculty and community members are expected to attend.

Those who can’t attend can watch a live webcast of the discussion on the Jackson State website, www.jsums.edu. 

The event is part of a book reading series that JSU will host throughout the academic year. The next book selection for the President’s Campus Reading Community will be announced at the end of Wednesday’s discussion, and 10 copies of the book will be raffled off to participants. For more information or to join the group, visit presidentreading.wordpress.com.

Welcome to the JSU President’s Campus Reading Community

 

I hope you are enjoying our first book selection, The Souls of Black Folk.  Here are some memorable passages for me:

“Herein lies the tragedy of the age:  not that men are poor, –all men know something of poverty, not that men are wicked,–who is good?  No that men are ignorant,–what is Truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men.”

 ”It is, then, the strife of all honorable men of the twentieth century to see that in the future competition of races the survival of the fittest shall mean the triumph of the good, the beautiful, and the true; that we may be able to preserve for future civilization all that is really fine and noble and strong, and not continue to put a premium on greed and impudence and cruelty.”

“Even so is the hope that sang in the songs of my fathers well sung.  If somewhere in this whirl and chaos of things there dwells Eternal Good, pitiful yet masterful, then anon in His good time Americana shall rend the Veil and the prisoned shall go free.  Free, free as the sunshine trickling down the morning into these high windows of mine, free as yonder fresh young voices welling up to me from the caverns of brick and mortar below—swelling with song, instinct with life, tremulous treble and darkening bass.  My children, my little children, are singing to the sunshine, and this they sing.”

 What passages speak to you?