PROSPECT-LEFFERTS GARDENS — Following media coverage of his purchase of a $2.1 million historic townhouse in the neighborhood, author Ta-Nehisi Coates says he will not move his family to Prospect-Lefferts Gardens after all.
In a piece by Coates published in The Atlantic four days after news of the purchase broke in the New York Post — and spread to many other publications, including DNAinfo — the writer made it clear he never intended his home address to become public and said, after seeing it so widely shared, that his family could not live there.
“Within a day of seeing these articles, my wife and I knew that we could never live in Prospect-Lefferts Garden, that we could never go back home. If anything happened to either of us, if anything happened to our son, we’d never forgive ourselves,” he wrote in the May 9 piece, titled “On Homecomings.”
Coates is one of the most widely-read authors on race and black issues in the country. His bestselling book, “Between the World and Me”, published last year, is a discourse on black life in America, written as a letter to his son. Subjects of his writing in The Atlantic include reparations, mass incarceration and President Barack Obama.
Because of that work, Coates said his family’s security is a concern.
“You can’t really be a black writer in this country, take certain positions and not think about your personal safety. That’s just the history,” he wrote.
Coates brought black history into the very home he has now forgone; the names used to purchase the Lincoln Road house are those of married slaves who made a daring escape from Georgia to Philadelphia in 1948.
It’s unclear what will happen to the Coates home now, or if the writer, who has lived with his family in Paris recently, intends to return to New York.
Inquiries to his representatives were not immediately returned.
