Ta-Nehisi Coates at the World Voices Festival

Ta-Nehisi Coates says the current attack on books in the United States is one battle in a very long war.

“I think it’s really, really, really important that while we highlight what is going on right now, we do not paint America as though there was some golden age of literacy and freedom of speech. I don’t believe that has ever existed,” Coates told PEN America ahead of his Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture.

“I would say the enemies of equality, the enemies of freedom, have always recognized that the first thing you attack when you want to strip people of their rights is the imagination, the ability to imagine those rights in the first place. And books are just an excellent, exceptional, maybe our best technology for conveying that.”

Read at PEN America