Ta-Nehisi Coates

As a boy in West Baltimore, Ta-Nehisi Coates read comics and played Dungeons & Dragons, but he also fought and struggled badly in school. During his first year of high school, he put a hand in an English teacher’s face after being scolded. The confrontation ended in handcuffs and a suspension. He began senior year with a 1.8 GPA.

His mother, Cheryl Waters, was a teacher. Whenever Coates got into trouble, she required an essay that explained what he had done and why. Then she read it. If he had rushed the answer or avoided thinking about his part, she made him write it again. The consequence was not finished when a page was filled; he had to make an honest account that another person could examine.

His father, Paul Coates, built a second kind of education into the house. A former Black Panther, he ran Black Classic Press from the family basement and filled the home with books on Black history. Coates said he devoured them. Paul also remained the parent his sons lived with when school trouble became serious. In a neighborhood where Coates was trying to understand the violence around him, the press and its library gave his questions somewhere demanding to go.

Coates graduated from high school and studied at Howard University for five years, though he left without a degree. Howard’s library and intellectual life mattered more to him than the credential. He worked as a reporter, joined The Atlantic, received a MacArthur Fellowship, and won the 2015 National Book Award for Between the World and Me. He later returned to Howard as a professor.

Coates still described himself as a college dropout who hated school. His parents’ discipline also included physical punishment, which is not a model to reproduce. The useful practice here is narrower. His mother did not accept trouble as the end of the conversation, or a vague apology as proof that it was over. She kept asking for a clearer account. Years later, Coates said those essays had given him tools for introspection and responsibility.