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Promoting Literacy for Kids At the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza in Los Angeles, a youthful patron in Malik’s Book Store asks Cynthia Cooper ’86 to sign a basketball.
“Where’s your book?” Cooper asks.
The girl replies that she has no book, prompting the effervescent Cooper to feign an angry stare. “OK,” she says, “I’ll let you by this time.”
The two-time Most Valuable Player of the new Women’s National Basketball Association, Cooper has come from Houston to Los Angeles to promote not basketball, but literacy.
“You all know this is a literacy tour, right?” she asks the crowd of about 30 as she sits down at a table flanked by boxes of WNBA basketballs and stacks of children’s books. “So I’ll sign the book. Then I’ll sign the ball.”
After leading the Houston Comets to their second championship in the WNBA’s second season, Cooper has traveled to eight cities across the nation, donating her time to promote author Lavaille Lavette’s four children’s books about a character named Roopster Roux.
Each colorful, illustrated volume is accompanied by a tape narrated by a pro basketball player. Cooper reads The Adventures of Roopster Roux: Slammin Slime, as Roux thwarts a slime-toting villain.
“I had so much fun doing it,” she says. “I had to do it in different voices. That’s what this is all about – showing families that reading can be fun and encouraging parents to read to their children and take an active role in a child’s education.”
Cooper helps children in many ways in Houston. She raises money for a foundation that aids children with cancer. She’s also starting an inner-city, after-school program to provide tutoring, computer training and other alternatives to gangs.
But her charity begins at home. She’s in the process of adopting a four-year-old nephew and cares for six other nieces and nephews, aged 6 through 19, who live in a separate house with her mother. “I want to give my nieces and nephews an opportunity for a better life,” she says, “an atmosphere where they can grow up in a good learning environment.”
Growing up in Watts, Cooper was encouraged her to read by her mother. “But I did not take advantage of it until college. USC changed my life,” she says of her campus experience, which included playing on the 1983 and ’84 national championship women’s basketball teams. “It was a whole new world. I learned that I could travel all over the world before I was able to purchase a plane ticket. I traveled through reading.”
– Gary Libman
Gary Libman is a Los Angeles-based writer.
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