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What began as a virtual book club for black men in St. Louis at the beginning of the pandemic to maintain a sense of community has now evolved into an organization dedicated to combating the literacy crisis among youth in the city.
Black Men Read was founded in 2020 by Keyon Watkins. The club originally consisted of Watkins and about 15 of his friends who met via Facetime or Zoom to talk about books like The Art of War And The four promisesBut when tragedy struck his family on Mother’s Day two years later, Watkins knew he wanted to do more.
On May 8, 2022, Watkins’ brother Damon Hawkins was shot and killed in a parking lot.
“My older brother was very intelligent,” Watkins said. “But he couldn’t read. If you can’t read, you have limited options in life. What would his life have been like if he could read?”
Because his brother could not read, he did not graduate from high school. Watkins, his mother and his niece helped Hawkins fill out job applications, but Hawkins’ lack of literacy, Watkins said, limited his options in the job market and in finding housing. Watkins described the area where his brother lived as “terrible.” He was killed by one of his neighbors.
Watkins said his brother’s death motivated him to campaign against gun violence and expand Black Men Read into a nonprofit organization that could help young children improve their literacy skills.
St. Louis has struggled for years to improve reading proficiency among its students. In 2021, only 11% of Black students in grades K-12 in the city were proficient readers, compared to 55% of white students.
Research shows that third-graders who cannot read proficiently at the end of the school year are four times less likely to graduate from high school than students who can read proficiently. In 2021, only 89 of 1,149 black third-graders in St. Louis public schools achieved proficiency or advanced English proficiency.
Missouri passed a law in 2022 that would require schools to focus on academic reading strategies to improve reading proficiency. But Watkins and other community members aren’t waiting.
In 2022, his organization partnered with Head Start programs to read to preschoolers. Soon after volunteering at Head Start, he and eight members of the group began reaching out to community members who might be interested in tutoring older students. The organization volunteered at Barack Obama Elementary School twice a week during the second half of the 2023-24 school year. Its members worked after school with 15 students in first through fifth grades and hope to expand their work to more schools in the Normandy School District soon.
Tutors must pass a background check and complete training. They worked with Webster University to obtain appropriate tutoring training and used techniques from the University of Florida Literacy Institute, which teaches language and reading comprehension, to design their lessons. Watkins hopes to offer this training to parents in the future so they can use these methods at home.
The organization also made a major effort to maintain enthusiasm for reading throughout the summer. In June, Black Men Read started a summer reading program at the First Baptist Church of Meacham Park Education Center. On Wednesdays and Thursdays, about 30 children attend for about 3.5 hours. The program began with individual testing to determine each student’s reading level and includes one-on-one instruction throughout the day.
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“We focus on phonics and sight words. We also have flashcards with a story with no words, just pictures, so they can visually arrange what happens first, second and third to improve reading comprehension. We try to make it fun. We have sight word bingo and crossword puzzles to keep them engaged,” Watkins said.
The summer program includes other activities such as slime making and guided workouts with a fitness instructor. Black Men Read has also partnered with another local organization called Ready Readers to give each child a book to take home.
With the school year approaching, Watkins and his team face two major challenges: finding enough volunteer tutors and financial support. He said the community has been supportive, but he hopes to receive grants soon.
The Coalition With STL Kids is committed to “raising awareness of the racist status quo in education,” according to its Instagram page, supporting Black Men Read’s literacy efforts while also holding the local school board accountable for what it sees as low expectations for black students.
“We know that poverty and all of these things affect education, and we need to do everything we can to change that. But we also need to believe that our children can succeed despite their difficulties,” said coalition founder Chester Asher. “But the longer we stay in this pity that all these poor children can’t do anything because of their difficulties, the more we enable and fuel a vicious cycle of poverty.”
Black Men Read and Coalition with STL Kids have partnered to recruit 100 new tutors. On August 16, they will hold a training for new tutors focusing on the science of reading and the five pillars of literacy: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.
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