Those are options unavailable to indigent people of color limited by ghetto boundaries and a lack of education and money. But such liberals have the option to retreat back to the quiet suburbs or to a pleasant section of a big city, likely a segregated one. Of course, they are good folks and well-meaning and would not spout racist words or scurrilous comments.

Like his friend MLK, Baldwin would express frustration with white liberals, whom he said were “racial philanthropists.” The kind of commitment referred to is not one taken on a whim, like attending the occasional meeting or perhaps engaging in an exciting political foray from which one can escape without personal cost or inconvenience. “To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.” So wrote Baldwin in “The Fire Next Time,” which he penned in 1962. How he survived may very well help us as we risk everything for a new America.” Indeed, despite persistent challenges and horrors, like the assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., Baldwin never abdicated the responsibility he felt to remain an intrepid voice and a committed artist. It took everything in him to survive it and to bear witness on the other side. Writes Glaude: “In the end, facing the bleakness of his time almost destroyed Jimmy. Known more as a public intellectual before he became celebrated for his fiction, Baldwin remained generous with his insights and conversation up until his death at 63 in 1987. In moving prose, Glaude reminds the reader of the poignancy of Baldwin’s social criticism and how relevant Baldwin remains for our disputed and distressed moment. His most recent book, “Begin Again,” is not intended to be another biographical presentation of Baldwin. is a professor of African American Studies at Princeton. Baldwin left for France and would not return for nine years.Įddie Glaude Jr.

His artistic ambitions could be shattered in the crucible of America’s meanness and contradictions. He might murder someone or be murdered himself.

His personal fury at the rampant injustices he and other people of color were daily subjected to forced him to confront unpleasant possibilities. By 1948, it became apparent to Baldwin that he could not remain in the United States.

Simmering anger over ongoing racism and its accompanying urban poverty exploded.Īll this had a profound impact on the young, gay, Black man who aspired to be a writer. In Harlem, a Black soldier had been shot in the back by a white police officer. The lack of adequate housing, lack of jobs and hostility of the city’s police had precipitated the unrest in Detroit. James Baldwin was a teenager in New York City when, in 1943, riots broke out in Detroit and in Harlem, Baldwin’s neighborhood. (This article was originally published by Real Change News and has been reprinted with permission.)

James baldwin begin again