Dolly Parton, actress, entrepreneur, and singer extraordinaire, passed away at the age of 80 on August 25, 2026. She rose from poverty in Appalachia to global fame and a loyal following.
Tributes have been pouring in and rightly so. I admired Parton not so much for singing, like millions did globally, but for something else: her literacy promotion. Let me explain.
Parton donated some 200 million books in her lifetime. Think about that. Reading is a key process to self-discovery in an increasingly confused and confusing world.
As a youth growing up in a vanilla neighborhood attending an integrated middle school, reading Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown, was an eye-opener. Brown’s autobiography of growing up in Harlem during the 1940s and 1950s was unlike anything else that I had read.
Parton actively facilitated reading and one of its outcomes. I mean critical thinking. That’s never been more important.
My parents had union jobs, and the schools I attended had libraries. My fortune in life is increasingly rare in America now, where 1,000 billionaires rent politicians to get government contracts and favorable laws and policies to accumulate more wealth, as ordinary people struggle to pay for food, fuel, and rent—the affordability crisis.
Later as a young adult, I learned that my father was in Harlem during an uprising against police brutality and economic marginality, of March 19-20, 1935, a history that deepened my appreciation for Brown’s work. Harlem “was where the action was,” my father shared with me. I began to grasp a bigger picture of personal and national history, encompassing Brown's autobiography.
Parton actively facilitated reading and one of its outcomes. I mean critical thinking. That’s never been more important in the current post-truth moment of online disinformation about domestic and foreign affairs, of, by, and for the benefit of billionaires and corporations, a symptom of the overall rot in US economics and politics.
Further, in a nation built with the stolen labor of enslaved Africans that in part relied upon depriving them of learning to read, Parton’s gift of 200 million books to poor and working people is, I argue, a revolutionary act. That she hailed from a community of poor whites long susceptible to the ideology of anti-blackness, a centuries-long ruling class divide-and-conquer strategy, speaks volumes of her revolutionary devotion to humanity.
Parton appeared to be electorally independent of the two-party duopoly, a great thing. Meanwhile, she publicly endorsed the movements of African Americans (Black Lives Matter) and LGBT folks for full recognition of their human rights. In a racist and warrior nation such as the US, where buying a gun is easier than receiving healthcare, her support of the maligned and oppressed via the promotion of reading books should be emulated.
