Hiding Money in Books

SOURCE:  "The Still Hide Money in Books," Daily Stoic, June 26, 2020.
KEYWORDS:  knowledge, wisdom, leadership, education

As a young boy, the famed basketball coach George Raveling learned an invaluable lesson about the power of both knowledge and ignorance from his grandmother, who raised him.

“Why did the slave masters hide their money in books, George?” she asked the young boy, standing together in her kitchen.

“I don’t know, grandma,” he said.

“Because they knew the slaves wouldn’t open them,” she said.

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From this early lesson, George Raveling came to see reading as a moral duty. To not read, to remain in ignorance, was not only to be weak, it was to ignore the people who had fought so hard, who had struggled at such great cost to read and to provide for future generations the right and the ability to do so. It was to spit in the face of Frederick Douglass, of Booker T. Washington, and, of course, of Martin Luther King, Jr. who Raveling had gotten to know.