Attending a Reading by Leon Dash

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Recommended: Narrative of brown v board of education

Rosa Lee and Leon Dash

The Reading Brown Series hosted a reading by Leon Dash at the YMCA. Professor Dash was born in 1944 in Massachusetts, but he grew up in the Bronx of New York. He worked as a writer from 1966-1968 for the Washington Post. He was also in the Peace Corp shortly after traveling throughout Africa. He later went back to the Washington Post and has since done studies on various things.

I had a hard time trying to find out exactly where the reading was going to take place as I walked around the YMCA. I finally got the guts to walk up to someone and ask for help, the male phenomenon. The event took place in a back room behind the kitchen. The room had four tables put together as to look like two. There were many chairs and few people to fill them as I walked in. There were a handful of people in the room and most seated around the tables set up in a V-shape from the podium. The room slowly started to fill as it came closer to twelve o’clock. As I looked around the room, I saw the “bleacher section”, a set of 12 chairs to the side of the room away from the speaker nearly filled. Most of those seats seemed to be occupied by students who appeared to be taking notes.

The rest of the room had an odd accumulation of people. For a reading based around the commemoration of the Brown vs. Board of Education case, there was only one African American in the room besides the speaker. There were many older white people who gave the impression that they were faculty. A few of them and others brought lunch in on a tray or in a bag, presumably on their lunch break. The room looked as if it was split fifty-fifty between students and faculty. I would guess that there were around 20 to 25 people in the room. The room was large enough and had enough seating to make it seem as if the people were very spread out. There was very little interaction between the people before and during the event. It seemed as though everyone was just eager for the reading to start and finish.

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