Why literacy.
The Understanding Company makes tools that explain how health, time and money are related. Our research asks why Black Americans hold less wealth and live shorter lives than White Americans. In 2025 the median non-Hispanic White family held $332,100 in net worth and the median non-Hispanic Black family $36,800.1 In 2024, life expectancy at birth was 74.8 years for non-Hispanic Black Americans and 78.9 for non-Hispanic White Americans.1
Every tool we build assumes something simple: that the person using it can read what it says.
Reading is getting harder for more people.
- 28%
of working-age American adults scored at Level 1 or below in literacy in 2023, up from 19% in 2017.2
- 40%
of fourth graders read below the NAEP Basic level in 2024, the largest share since 2002.3
- 33%
of eighth graders read below NAEP Basic in 2024, the largest share NAEP has recorded.3
The average adult literacy score fell from 271 in 2017 to 258 in 2023, not significantly different from the international average of 260.2
The gaps follow race and income.
| Students | Grade 4 | Grade 8 |
|---|---|---|
| White students | 30% | 23% |
| Black students | 56% | 48% |
| Hispanic students | 52% | 45% |
| Economically disadvantaged | 53% | 46% |
| Not economically disadvantaged | 26% | 22% |
A history of being kept from reading.
- 1830
North Carolina made it illegal for any free person to teach an enslaved person to read or write, “the use of figures excepted”. Its preamble said such teaching had “a tendency to excite dissatisfaction in their minds”.5
- 1831
In April 1831, months before Nat Turner’s revolt, Virginia made any meeting to teach free Black people reading or writing an unlawful assembly.6
- 1845
Frederick Douglass wrote of overhearing that learning to read “would forever unfit him to be a slave”, and of what he took from it: “I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.”7
- 1870
The census recorded 79.9% of Black Americans and Americans of other races aged 14 and over as unable to read or write in any language. By 1900 the share was 44.5%.8
- 1959
The Supreme Court held that North Carolina’s literacy test for voters was not unconstitutional on its face.9
- 1965
The Voting Rights Act suspended literacy tests in the places it covered.9
- 1970
Congress banned literacy tests for voting nationwide until 1975, and the Supreme Court upheld the ban.9
- 1975
Congress made the ban permanent.9
“I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.”
Literacy and money.
Skills go with pay: in the United States, one standard deviation more numeracy goes with 28% higher wages, the largest return of the countries studied.10 Children who grow up with 500 books at home, rather than few or none, go on to 3.2 more years of schooling, across 27 nations.11 Both are associations, not measured effects.
Knowledge does not explain the racial wealth gap
- William Darity Jr., Darrick Hamilton and their coauthors call the idea that financial literacy will close the racial wealth gap a myth: “Financial literacy without finance is meaningless.”14 Knowledge, they argue, cannot stand in for wealth.
- On average, they find, a Black household headed by a college graduate has less wealth than a White household whose head did not finish high school.14
- Differences in earnings explain about two thirds of the Black–White gap in mean wealth.15
Our own paper, Years and Dollars, takes the second view. Of the wealth gap it says: “Differences in education, saving rates, or financial literacy account for little of it.”1 We do not think a library closes that gap, and we do not claim it.
Where the name comes from.
Linking Literature is a Detroit organization. From 2015 it gave books to children and, until 2019, posted new writing at linkingliterature.org. It gives its mission as “to be a common ground that will link the world through literature and expression.”16
It ran #LinkingLiterature1Million, a book drive on social media: people posted a picture of themselves giving a child a book, toward a goal of a million books for a million children. In 2015 and 2016 it held a Youth Literature Collection in Detroit, with books for every grade from kindergarten to 12th; in 2017, a Back-to-School Drive. In 2017, it says, over 1,000 books went to Detroit children, and over 200 children got backpacks and school supplies.16
Its About Us page, first posted in 2016, says it has put over 11,000 books in the hands of over 2,500 children. It says it has also given books to children in Indiana, Georgia, Ohio and Liberia, and that it had an audience in 106 countries.16 We have not checked these figures.
It also published poems and essays by aspiring writers of all ages. Steven Farrar, now The Understanding Company’s CFO, was its editor-in-chief and the first of its featured writers.
So why a library.
This library carries the name on. A book costs nothing to open, and the library asks for no account and no score. It is a free library of 59,532 books, ten pages at a time: public-domain books, and now the poems and essays first posted on linkingliterature.org, each linked to the original and under its writer’s name where the post gives one.
It is a library, not a course or a test: we have not measured whether it changes how anyone reads, and we make no claim that it does.