Knowledge Based

My mother grew up in Savannah, Georgia, during segregation and came of age during the civil rights movement. Like many of her generation, education was seen as a way to overcome the obstacles that made life so difficult for Black people in this country during that time. When I was young, she frequently told me about the library that she was unable to enter due to segregation. It’s a story that’s both a cruel expression of the racism she endured as a child and a reminder that knowledge is so important that the social structure of this country was once determined to keep my mother from accessing it. The concept of a public library is one of the most important elements of a functioning society. In the Los Angeles Public Library system, each branch is similar to a concentric ring found in the cross section of a tree trunk, representing a small, yet critical, piece of the collective whole. The investment in libraries as a public institution is in itself an empowering act, inspired by the b