From Inmate to Mentor, Through Power of Books

The Book Club

In March 2005, Betts was released from prison with little idea of what he wanted to do. He'd completed high school in prison, so he applied to Prince George's Community College.

A few months later, he met Yao Glover, co-owner of Karibu Books. Within seconds, it was clear to Glover that "the way he was dialoguing with literature was different."

Glover told Betts that he should work for him and followed up with a call. In June 2005, Betts was hired as an assistant manager at Karibu in Bowie. "I got three felonies, and this guy is letting me make $3,000 deposits," Betts marvels.

That August, he started community college and made straight A's. In his second semester, he was accepted into the honors academy, which comes with automatic admission and partial scholarships to the University of Maryland and American University, and a full scholarship to Howard University. He got straight A's that semester, too.

He became a manager at Karibu in January. He got the idea for a book club for black boys and started telling everyone who came in the store. For the first meeting, he bought 20 books, copies of "Bronx Masquerade" by Nikki Grimes and "The Legend of Buddy Bush" by Sheila P. Moses. Eight boys showed up. Since then, attendance has varied from four to 20 youths, and titles have included "Life in Prison" by Crips co-founder Stanley "Tookie" Williams, who was later executed, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Fences" by August Wilson.

"Young people don't read because they don't see other people they can associate with being cool reading," Betts says. "I've got a space where we can come together."

At the last book club meeting of the summer, Jibril Sinclair, 12, of the Bronx, N.Y., is eager to talk about "Letters to a Young Brother." He visits his grandfather in Northwest Washington every summer and heard about the book club from his tutor. "The idea that young African American men read a book and share their thoughts about it is so very, very positive," says his grandfather, Carl A. Grimes.

Tell me something you related to in the book, Betts says.

"The fact that [Hill Harper] grew up with a single parent, and I'm only growing up with my mom," Jibril says.

Ellington Barron, 13, of Bowie likes the fact that Harper was named after his grandfather. "My mom, she really liked Duke Ellington," he says. "I really want to get into the Duke Ellington School of the Arts."

This is the kind of space Dwayne Betts wanted but never had. He has mentors now: He has interned at the Hurston/Wright Foundation, and he has studied with former poet laureate Rita Dove. He quit the bookstore to focus full time on maintaining his grades and figuring out his next school. Glover counsels him to center himself and stay patient.

Betts is trying to make up time. It takes focus and resources and people to help you develop character, he says -- to grow into "who you want to be in the world."

And, Betts says, it takes a space, where it's really okay, cool even, for black boys to read. He offers his own life as parable.