It takes eight hours and 15 minutes to read “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” out loud.

“What are you looking at me for? I didn’t come to stay,” Ben Thompson read from the opening pages Saturday. ”I just came to tell you, it’s Easter Day.”

He was one of a few dozen people who spent parts of a damp spring day in Annapolis reading from the late writer and poet Maya Angelou’s 1969 memoir about growing up in the Jim Crow South.

Readers, sniffling in the cold, worked through yellowed paperback editions, tapping in and out as time and endurance allowed.

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Across an empty boat slip and over a metal fence, a squad of Naval Academy midshipmen ran past in a formation of green camouflage. They were too far away to hear.

They won’t find Angelou’s book at the campus library either. It’s one of 373 titles banned by President Donald Trump , removed under his order prohibiting anything at U.S. military academies seen as promoting diversity, equity and inclusion .

“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” was book No. 357. Some of the day’s readers wore the number on their coats, a symbol of the Navy’s purge.

“Wouldn’t they be surprised when one day I woke out of my black ugly dream, and my real hair, which was long and blond, would take the place of the kinky mass that Momma wouldn’t let me straighten?” Thompson read. “My light-blue eyes were going to hypnotize them, after all the things they said about ‘my daddy must of been a Chinaman.‘”

Eight hours and 15 minutes. That’s how long it takes to commit one small act of rebellion.

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That’s what a public reading of a banned book is.

Tracey Ernst, an Anne Arundel County middle school teacher with a long connection to the academy, and Annapolis Book Club members organized the gathering. Her husband works there, and she’s hosted generations of mids in their home.

Readers and their audience at City Dock included students and teachers, librarians and a few state delegates. No one from the academy read from the book.

In a free society, a book ban’s sting travels farther than those closest to it.

“I can’t speak to the intent,” Ernst said. “I can speak to the frustration this makes me feel.”

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“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” is a book banners’ favorite. It describes racism and rape. It is Black self-expression intended for an audience that includes young teens.

To Trump — whose history includes a housing discrimination lawsuit and a campaign to wrongly convict five Black men of raping a white jogger — these ideas are dangerous. Maybe they are more dangerous than ones that a New York Times reporter found still on the academy library shelves.

Adolf Hitler’s hate for Jews in “Mein Kampf” is there, as are claims by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in “The Bell Curve” that Black men and women are genetically destined to be the intellectual underclass.

Angelou’s pages are a reality that Trump wants suppressed. They are undeniably hard truths about the American ideal.

They have proved hard to squelch.

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Crystal Adair came to read, she told the listeners, because she was fired for teaching those truths.

She recounted how, in 2009, she had finished her lesson for the day in a Washington, D.C., junior high school where she taught English. It was the time of Common Core, an educational strategy that mandated teaching to standardized tests.

Adair introduced her students to Angelou’s memoir that day, a book challenged by parents in the District as inappropriate.

“It’s very raw,” Adair said. “It’s filled with deep pain. It’s also filled with deep truthfulness.”

Her son, a student at St. John’s College confronting books with their own difficult ideas , listened from the crowd as she said the decision earned her a call to the principal’s office.

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“They said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m going to have to let you go.‘”

Was it that simple? I don’t know. “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” is that kind of book.

Schools in Anne Arundel, Carroll and Montgomery counties have pulled it from reading lists over the years, or banned it outright.

Anika T. Prather, a Catholic University professor, came to read because the book confronts the homogenized history of America.

“She’s not pulling any punches in sharing her story,” she said.

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If midshipmen are concerned, they’re keeping it to themselves. Mids can leave during their first two years without being asked to serve or pay back the Navy.

“Students who chose to go to the academy chose to get an education and serve their country,” Ernst said. “What they’re finding is that they’re not going to be allowed to hear varied voices.”

If the civilian faculty is afraid, they’re staying quiet. They make up half of the instructors, the half targeted by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth during his confirmation hearings as the “left-wing woke” who needed to be removed.

Mids can still read Maya Angelou, although most won’t. Their days are full.

Faculty can seek other jobs, although Annapolis is one of the most prestigious academic posts in the country.

All that may change.

The Naval Academy could enforce the other part of Trump’s order, requiring it to teach “that America and its founding documents remain the most powerful force for good in human history.”

And Hegseth is watching. The former Fox News host announced a task force last week to check progress on eliminating DEI. A report is due in June.

Reading a banned book is a small gesture, easily blown away by a cold wind on a gray spring day in Annapolis. Sometimes, small gestures matter.

Annapolis High ninth grader Kaylee Jones hasn’t read Angelou’s book. Her tutor told her about the ban, so she took a deep breath and read a few pages in front of a crowd of mostly strangers.

Now she’s curious about the ideas the president wants to suppress.

“I think I’m going to read it.”