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Reader recommendation: This Is the Day

Monitor readers share their favorite book picks.

  • By James Patterson, San Francisco

As our nation celebrates the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where he delivered his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech to a crowd of 250,000, I am reading This is the Day: The March on Washington. It is a 110-page photo-essay on the 1963 March. Photojournalist Leonard Freed (1929-2006) captured the enormity of the crowd in 57 black-and-white photographs. Hopeful marchers, young and old, celebrated that day for rights long denied them. Some of the male marchers wore suits and ties. Females wore expensive dresses and hats. Other marchers wore denim overalls and straw hats. Some carried signs from Mississippi. In one dual page photograph, whites and blacks joined hands as they sang for a better future. “Labor unions, church groups, and civil rights organizations across the country mobilized their members and supporters for the march, ” writes scholar and activist Julian Bond in the book's Foreword. The book includes an essay, “August March,” by Michael Eric Dyson who writes, “It was undoubtedly one of the greatest gatherings of American citizens since the republic’s birth.” The dramatic photographs bear witness to that statement and share with us the faces of the struggle.

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Mark Sappenfield
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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

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