Dear Martin Study Guide

Nic Stone grew up in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia in 1985. She attended Spelman College, earning a degree in psychology. During a self-professed “identity crisis” when she was 23, she took a trip to Israel, where she met soldiers, militants, refugees, and families from both Palestinian and Israeli cultures. On this trip, she realized she wanted to be a writer, since she was so compelled by the stories she heard. As a result, she began writing Young Adult fiction, especially focusing on narratives that address identity and belonging, issues she herself struggled with as one of the only African American girls in her high school’s accelerated programs. Her debut novel, Dear Martin, was published in 2017 and became a New York Times Bestseller. In the following two years, she published Odd One Out and Jackpot, and has continued to publish essays and short stories.

Dear Martin is based in part on the death of Jordan Davis, a seventeen-year-old black boy who was shot and killed by a white man in Jacksonville, Florida in 2012. Davis and his friends were listening to loud hip-hop at a gas station when an armed white man parked next to them and instructed them to turn down the music. One of Davis’s friends listened to the man, but Davis asked that the music be turned back up, at which point the man was heard saying, “You aren’t going to talk to me like that.” He then took out a pistol and started shooting at Davis and his friends, killing Davis. The shooter was found guilty on three counts of attempted murder, but not on murder in the first degree. The judge declared a mistrial regarding this final count, and the shooter was finally found guilty of first-degree murder in his retrial, where he earned a life sentence in prison without parole, in addition to another 90 years. It’s also worth mentioning that Nic Stone was moved to write Dear Martin as a reaction to a number of other instances of racist police brutality, including the shooting of Michael Brown, Jr. in 2014.

Dear Martin is similar to Angie Thomas’s novel The Hate U Give, which is also about a black teenager from an impoverished neighborhood attending a prestigious and mostly white private high school. Like Justyce, the protagonist of The Hate U Give witnesses a white police officer shoot and kill her best friend. Similarly, Jason Reynold and Brendan Kiely’s co-authored novel, All American Boys, explores racism, police brutality, and stereotyping. In addition to these titles, Dear Martin is related to a number of other Young Adult novels inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, including Kekla Magoon’s How It Went Down and Jay Coles’s Tyler Johnson Was Here.