Angie Thomas
1 book analyzed
Biography
Angie Thomas was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, and grew up in a neighborhood she describes as similar to Garden Heights. She attended Belhaven University, a predominantly white Christian college — the experience of being one of few Black students at a white institution became the source material for Starr's Williamson chapters. Thomas began writing The Hate U Give in 2009, immediately after Oscar Grant was shot dead by BART police officer Johannes Mehserle on New Year's Day in Oakland — an event filmed by multiple bystanders and then watched by the country. Thomas's college thesis became the first three chapters of the novel. The Black Lives Matter movement, founded in 2013 after George Zimmerman was acquitted in Trayvon Martin's death, was already seven years old when the novel published in 2017. By publication, the list of names — Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile — had accumulated to the point where Thomas did not need to cite them directly. The context had already been written by the country itself.