With Atlantic Article On Reparations, Ta-Nehisi Coates Sees Payoff For Years Of Struggle

Ta-Nehisi Coates' Struggle On The Road To Becoming A Household Name
Editors Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois led a line-up of writers, musicians, poets and academics at 92YTribeca celebrating the release of The Anthology of Rap and paying tribute to the influential lyrics and songs in the book.92YTribeca Talks92YTribeca Talks & Classes on FacebookTwitter/92YTribeca
Editors Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois led a line-up of writers, musicians, poets and academics at 92YTribeca celebrating the release of The Anthology of Rap and paying tribute to the influential lyrics and songs in the book.92YTribeca Talks92YTribeca Talks & Classes on FacebookTwitter/92YTribeca

He paid to get here. Paid with the skull-rattling pain of a metal trash can clattering down hard onto his head when he was a kid racing from thugs in West Baltimore. Paid with the jobs he lost. Paid with the sandwiches he delivered when no one wanted to pay him to do what he so desperately wanted to do, what he so unwaveringly knew he was supposed to do: to write.

For Ta-Nehisi Coates, “here” is bigger than a star turn on the stage of the Sixth and I Synagogue, where hundreds lined up down the block to hear him talk last week about his blockbuster Atlantic cover story making the case for slave reparations. No, here is a place of prominence in the stream of American thought, a perch that positions him as an ascendant public intellectual with a voice that stands out in the white noise of a wired and word-flooded era, an object of praise and a target.

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