The Message

Coates includes an epigraph from George Orwell’s Why I Write, in which Orwell laments having to be more explicit about his politics in his writing because the age demands it.

The essay is framed as an open letter to students who took a writing workshop with Coates at Howard University. Coates greets his former students as “[c]omrades” and then recalls how special his class with them was (1). The fact that he was teaching students from Howard, one of the nation’s premier historically Black colleges and universities, the original mission of which was to educate formerly enslaved people, added an extra charge to the class. The writing tradition that sprang from that history is one in which writing and politics are always intertwined because Black people have always had the task of writing as a people whose humanity is in doubt. Young writers today must focus on telling stories that are as grounded in particular facts as possible if they are to be good contributors to that tradition.

Coates then narrates his own development as a writer and journalist. Coates understood from an early age that “[w]ords are powerful, but more so when organized to tell stories.