Civil-rights campaigner and congressman John Lewis was in tears as he accepted America’s National Book award for young people’s literature in Manhattan on Wednesday night, speaking of how as a child he had been turned away from the public library for being black. “I had a wonderful teacher in elementary school who told me: ‘Read, my child, read’, and I tried to read everything. “When I was 16 years old, some of my brothers and sisters and cousins [were] going down to the public library trying to get public library cards, and we were told the library was for whites only, not for coloureds. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Colson Whitehead, winner of the National Book awards fiction prize. Novelist Colson Whitehead won the National Book award for fiction for his novel The Underground Railway, about a slave who escapes from a cotton plantation in Georgia.

Source: The Guardian November 17, 2016 15:44 UTC