By LACHLAN MOORHEAD
SHANE Papatolicas’s life reads like a bestseller.
Last week Gleneagles Secondary School librarian Lynne Moller invited Shane, an English teacher from the Endeavour Hills school, to speak to the school’s book club members about how a book changed his life.
American-born Shane, whose wife Kelly is Australian, grew up in New Hampshire, a state with a white American population of more than 90 per cent.
When he was in year 11 at Concord High School, Shane studied the book Native Son, a novel which investigated and challenged the concept of racial tensions – alien subject matter for a teenager growing up in a small, predominately white state.
“I had very little exposure to other ethnicities or minorities in New Hampshire,” Shane said.
“And then I read this book about an African American kid in the 1940s who murders this rich white girl.
“It blew my mind a little bit.”
Native Son, written by Richard Wright in 1940, tells the story of Bigger Thomas, a black American youth who commits murder and is put on trial for his life.
The novel explores the systemic inevitability of Bigger’s crimes and is somewhat sympathetic but does not condone the crime.
The book had a profound effect on the then 16-year-old Shane when he read it during the early 1990s.
“From there I got into the civil rights issue. Martin Luther King Day wasn’t official in my state,” Shane said and he decided to do something about changing the discrepancy.
“After that we formed a group at school and we marched on the Senate.
“Without that book I wouldn’t have been exposed to minority issues.”
Following two years of campaigning and a failed attempt to get the bill passed through the state Senate, a vote was finally passed in 1991 that saw a January Civil Rights Day made official in New Hampshire, later recognised as Martin Luther King Day.
“We formed a group called the Children of Peace and we went around to other schools in the state.
“We organised a march and did speeches at the state capital,” Shane said.
“A lot of groups celebrated when we got the bill passed.
“Initially we couldn’t believe it didn’t get passed the first time. Another year at that time of your life feels like forever.”
But the impact of what Shane and his peers did in his home town and there influence on history was certainly not lost on the Gleneagles Book Club students.
“Book club is a place for them to gather at lunch and interact and talk about books in a setting that’s not an English class. That’s incredible,” Shane said.
“The kids get to see how other people enjoy books.”
