When Newark Mayor Ras J. Baraka welcomed Ta-Nehisi Coates at Rutgers University–Newark on Wednesday evening, he took the audience at Ruth Bader Ginsburg Hall back to his days at Howard University. Baraka recalled his time at Howard University and the influence of Coates’ father on his studies. He described spending hours with Black literature and archival materials in Howard’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, an experience he connected to his own development.
His recollection gave a local dimension to one of the evening’s recurring themes: the consequences of education and mentorship can unfold over decades, in ways neither teacher nor student can fully anticipate.
“I learned a lot,” Baraka said. “If I did not study, I would not be here.”
The mayor described sharing the stage with Coates as a full-circle moment. His recollection gave the evening an example of something Coates would spend much of the conversation talking about: how the work people do inside Black institutions can shape lives far beyond the time they spend there.
Inquiring Minds in Times of Crisis
Coates spoke on Nov. 4 as part of a public conversation titled Where Do We Go From Here? The Sheila Y. Oliver Center for Politics and Race in America presented the event, with Rutgers’ Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice as co-sponsor.
In her opening remarks, Rutgers–Newark Chancellor Tonya Smith-Jackson recalled reading Between the World and Me, Coates’ National Book Award-winning letter to his son. Its attention to the vulnerability of the Black body brought her back to her own research in engineering psychology. She had studied what happened to trained pilots in flight simulations when stress changed their awareness of their bodies. Coates’ book led her to consider another kind of strain: what it costs a person to stay alert to danger as a condition of everyday life.
Jacqueline Mattis, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, opened her remarks with a question about what people do when they face a crisis: “Who do I call?” She described the choice between calling someone who will tell you what you want to hear and calling someone who will ask questions you would rather avoid. It was her way of explaining why Rutgers had invited Coates.
The Long Arc of Collective Struggle
For Coates, some of the evening’s most consequential questions came down to how long people are willing to work toward change. He recalled arriving at Howard and hearing about earlier student organizing. The stories had taken on the force of legend. His own experience organizing felt less remarkable at the time, he said. It took longer to appreciate that the people in those earlier stories had also been young, trying to figure out what they could do in the circumstances they inherited.
He widened the frame to generations of Black Americans who resisted slavery without living to see its abolition. He also invoked Ida B. Wells, the journalist who documented lynching and campaigned against it, as someone whose work reached well beyond her lifetime.
“My life is not my own,” Coates said, describing the sense of responsibility he drew from that history.
Asked about Between the World and Me, his book written as a letter to his son, Coates resisted the idea that he could easily assess it from outside himself. His relationship with a finished book, he explained, changes after it enters the world.
Readers bring their own experiences to it. They discover meanings and connections that the author no longer directs.
That exchange offered another way to consider storytelling’s reach. A book begins with a writer’s experience, but its life continues through the people who read it, discuss it, and carry it into their own relationships.
“It belongs to you,” he said.
