Last month, I stopped by Third Eye Books to chop it up with co-owner, Charles Hannah. Over an hour or so, we discussed Black books, opening Black bookstores in America and being invisible men in a country where the government is working overtime to roll back civil rights.
It occurred to me that this is why Black bookstores are so important. They are meeting places for Black minds, where they can speak in their native tongue and riff about gigantic goals while empowering each other in spite of gargantuan wrenches strategically placed to destruct Black (and brown) lives and sanity.
Through the course of the conversation, Charles put me on game about owning your life, the mentality needed for success and the tools to turn thought into action. He recommended a few books that he read on his journey, and one of the books is what Iām reading: āAs A Man Thinketh,ā by James Allen.
This book, published in 1903, is said to be the first āself-help book. But even those two words are too verbose for description. I like to call these books: wisdom.
When Hannah recommended the book, we both laughed at the fact that in a Black bookstore, we were discussing a book not written by a Black person. Yet, thereās a balance, so I also picked up āStokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan-Africanism,ā by Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture).1
But good philosophy and good literature can be captured and analyzed; jewels can be plucked out and applied to your own life experiences. 2
For example, this gem:
The Dreamers are the saviors of the world. As the visible world is sustained by the invisible, so men, through all their trials and sins and sordid vocations, are nourished by the beautiful visions of their solitary dreamers; Humanity cannot forget its dreamers; it cannot let their ideals fade and die; it lives in them; it knows them as the realities which it shall one day see and know.
Composer, sculptor, painter, poet, prophet, sage, these are the makers of the after-world, the architects of heaven. The world is beautiful because they have lived; without them, laboring humanity would perish.
Short, powerful books are some of my favorite reads. This one clocks in at just 68 pages, and will immediately become one that I recommend for anyone looking to empower the mind to change their circumstances.
Other books that come to mind that are short in stature but pack a punch are āNavigateYour Stars,ā by Jesmyn Ward, āIntimations,ā by Zadie Smith, āHow To Be An Artist,ā by Jerry Saltz, and āDear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions,ā by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
The overall premise of Allenās work is that āthoughtā itself is the rudiment of tangible change in your life. He means this in a literal sense.
"As a being of Power, Intelligence and Love, and the lord of his own thoughts, man holds the key to every situation, and contains within himself agency by which he may make himself what he wills.ā
āStokely: A Life,ā by Peniel E. Joseph was one of the many books that changed my life. A masterful biography on Stokely Carmichael, one of the most brilliant minds this Earth has seen.
I read this book as if āmanā is actually all of humanity.