“Really hard to swallow that I was wrong,” he continues.ĭear Martin belongs to a growing body of young-adult literature exploring racial injustice and police brutality from a teen perspective. Justyce is grappling with the recognition that his achievements don’t separate him from the burdens of racism as much as he’d thought they would.
“I thought if I made sure to be an upstanding member of society, I’d be exempt from the stuff THOSE black guys deal with,” he writes the next day, describing a “thuggish” teenager who was killed by a police officer earlier in the summer. It’s from these letters that the novel derives its title. Martin Luther King Jr., hoping that emulating the civil-rights leader will help him navigate the problems he sees around him. Instead, he begins a series of letters to Dr. Justyce-a star scholarship student at the mostly white Braselton Preparatory Academy in Atlanta, who dreams of attending Yale the following year-doesn’t say much after the incident. He is trying to help his drunk ex-girlfriend home from a party the summer before his senior year. Doing all his mother told him doesn’t keep 17-year-old Justyce McAllister from being thrown to the ground and restrained in too-tight handcuffs by an overly aggressive white police officer. The limitations of this counsel become painfully apparent early in Nic Stone’s timely debut novel, Dear Martin. It’s a checklist that many black parents impart to their sons long before these teenagers know they’ll need the advice.
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