The Social Justice Book Club of the Woods Hole Public Library has been reading and meeting in discussion all summer. Their first book was The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson, about the migration north and west of freed slaves in the century after the Civil War. The second meeting of the group focused on two books: James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time” and the recent update by Jesmyn Ward “The Fire This Time. “ That evening also featured a stimulating and thoughtful talk by Dr. George M. Langford, nationally known cell biologist and neuroscientist and his wife Sylvia Langford, bringing the topic to a very personal and local level. After these two stimulating evenings of discussion, the Book Club continues with its study of the third book of the summer, Never Caught.
Never Caught is history from the vantage point of the enslaved fifth of the early American population. It tells the story of Ona Judge’s quest for freedom while George and Martha Washington tried to use federal power to keep her enslaved. With impeccable research, historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar weaves an engrossing tale that offers fascinating new scholarship on how one young woman risked everything to gain freedom from the famous founding father.
The Book Club will meet to discuss Dunbar’s book at the Library on Wednesday, August 30, at 7:30 PM. The event is free and open to the public and will be held in the lower level of the Library which is handicapped accessible.