Studying books gave the sit-in protesters visible courage and discipline.

Evidence

But the young men didn’t get up. They reached down and pulled out thick books from their satchels and then set them on the counter, opened them right up like they was all studying the same thing. Where did they get this courage from? Was it from those books? I wondered what they was studying and if there was a class they took on bravery and if they knew other brave colored people? One day I wanted to know what courage felt like, too. I was trying to see what they was reading but it was hard to read upside down. I saw numbers. Strange numbers. I saw a black-and-white picture of the world. Another one about science. And history. I wanted to know whose history? But I couldn’t ask. I mostly read the Bible. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1001

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the civil-rights-era sit-in movement and the religious vs. secular education divide in Black life, echoing themes in the reader’s broader library on resistance and dignity.