Journalists Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, authors of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “His Name Is George Floyd,” are still unclear why they were told they couldn’t read from their book or talk about systemic racism to a room full of high school students in Memphis.
Two days before an event at Whitehaven High School, they said they were “blindsided” by the last-minute restrictions, which they believed event organizers issued in accordance with Tennessee laws restricting certain books in schools. They’d also been told in the weeks before the appearance that their book wouldn’t be distributed at the event.
One thing is for certain, the authors said: The students paid the price ultimately.
“I was thinking about the great disservice that they’re giving these students who deserve better,” Samuels said about the days before the event. “I thought about my personal disappointment and feelings of naïveté that despite all the work Tolu and I had done to make sure the book would be written in a way that was accessible to them, a larger system decided that they were going to take it away.”
A spokeswoman for the Memphis-Shelby County Schools denied that it had placed restrictions on what the authors could say, calling the whole thing a “miscommunication.”
Both Whitehaven High School, where the event was held on Oct. 26, and its Memphis-Shelby County Schools district are predominantly Black, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The room full of Black students sat engaged as they listened to the journalists, but Samuels and Olorunnipa said they felt the high-schoolers were shortchanged. The authors said they weren’t able to speak deeply about the book’s themes, and instead largely shared their own histories with the students.
“This is just another one of those obstacles unfairly being placed in their paths through no fault of their own,”…
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