Testimony of Dr. Reginald Wilson
Senior Scholar
American Council on education

March 20, 2003

Kevin Chavous, Chairman
And Members of the Committee on Libraries, Education, Parks, and Recreation

I speak here not only as a representative of the higher education community, but I speak as well as a black man with direct experience of the devastating effects of poverty and racism in this country. I speak also as a long term resident of the District.

I spent twenty years as Director of Minority Concerns at the American Council on Education, and was previously a President of a community college located in the City of Detroit. There I because deeply familiar with the problems visited on people of color by inadequate education and poor levels of literacy. I saw people of color struggling to improve their lives by getting in to college, weighed down by their lack of a good primary and secondary education, and sinking as often as surviving.

I recognized the vital importance of literacy and early education and brought that sensitivity with me to the District.

It is my opinion that libraries have an important role to play in addressing the problem of illiteracy. Libraries have earlier contact with children than do schools- poor children that is. Middle class parents are literate, have books, own computer and send their children before the age of six to daycare centers and preschool programs. The only place in which poor children can get similar familiarity with books and computers are the public libraries. Without that early contact with books and computers, poor children, (mostly children of color that now include the recently arrived Latino population) arrive in school already late starters in the race for educational achievement. Add this late start to the burdens of race (we are still a racist society) and poverty, and we have created almost insuperable obstacles to achievement for the poor people in the District.

Living here, I see a serious problem with literacy in the District, and the numbers of children that are living in latchkey homes. I believe that problems of poverty and illness in this community can be partially cured by addressing the problem of literacy, for it is obvious that literacy leads to jobs, jobs lead to income, and income helps to sustain both the health of the individual and the economic health of the community.

The health of libraries in the district in not only vital to the well being of the people of the District, but is especially vital to the Black and Latino communities, as well as other communities of color that are crippled by inadequate educational and informational resources in our nation’s capital.

For these reasons, I urge the Mayor to reconsider his cuts to the Library budget, and I urge this Committee and the Council to help the Mayor find the necessary funds to restore the District’s libraries to world-class status.