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When Archishman Raju came to the United States from India four years ago to attend graduate school at Cornell University, he had never heard of the American writer James Baldwin.

Then in April, the 24-year-old accompanied a friend, a Penn graduate student, to a class taught by former Temple University professor Anthony Monteiro. The subject of the weekly Saturday Free School class: Baldwin.

Reading the prolific novelist and essayist introduced him to the history of the black struggle in America, something Raju, who travels from Ithaca, N.Y., for the classes, could compare to India's own anticolonialism.

"It's a critique of the social structure that functions not just in America but in the world," he said of Baldwin's writings.

Now Raju, who is pursuing a doctorate in physics, is an organizer of this weekend's James Baldwin Celebration, a three-day festival at North Philadelphia's Church of the Advocate that includes music, poetry, panel discussions, and screenings of the author's long-ago speeches and debates.

The man whose work coincided with the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and '60s seems to be enjoying attention by a new generation - 30 years after his death. In a world where unarmed black women, men, and children are being shot, his writings remain relevant and instructive - not just for Black Lives Matter activists but for feminists, for immigrants, for writers and artists:

The documentary I Am Not Your Negro, based on Baldwin's unfinished manuscript Remember This House and directedby Raoul Peck, was released in theaters in February.

Look at Twitter, and the #jamesbaldwin hashtag has been used more than 40 times in the last 24 hours, coinciding with no particular event. One is in Turkish.

Tweet from @KhaledBeydoun

At least a dozen books have been published about Baldwin since President Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2009, according to an article in the New York Review of Books. And writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose books include Between the World and Me, takes his inspiration from Baldwin, who died at age 63 in 1987, as he addresses current issues in race relations.

"No one has done more to popularize Baldwin in recent years than Ta-Nehisi Coates," the Review said. Coates has said rereading Baldwin's letter to his nephew in "My Dungeon Shook" was a springboard for Between the World and Me, written as a letter to the author's teenage son.

"...One did not have to be abnormally sensitive to be worn down to a cutting edge by the incessant and gratuitous humiliation and danger one encountered every working day, all day long," Baldwin wrote in his essay "Down at the Cross: Letter From a Region in My Mind," from The Fire Next Time.

" ... When I was 10, and didn't look, certainly, any older, two policemen amused themselves with me by frisking me, making comic, (and terrifying) speculations concerning my ancestry and probable sexual prowess, and, for good measure, leaving me flat on my back in one of Harlem's empty lots."

In thinking up a tagline for the local celebration, Monteiro took from the eulogy of poet Amiri Baraka, where he called Baldwin "God's revolutionary mouth," and changed it to "God's revolutionary voice."

"He is a prophetic voice for fundamental change at a time of peak crises for the nation and the world," Monteiro said.

Raju said he and the friend who first took him to the classes participated in marches when the Democratic National Convention was in Philadelphia last year. But it was what he learned from Baldwin that gave him a chance to go beyond protest, he said.

"Baldwin has taught us that having sustained change in a society requires more than expressing anger and sorrow," Raju said. "It requires understanding the world and participation in sustained organizing."

Raju's friend Meghna Chandra, 26, will start a Ph.D. program in social welfare at Penn next month, and looks to Baldwin for his ability to diagnose what's happening with America "in terms of race relations, but not just in race, but how do human beings relate to one another."

"I think [Baldwin] has this integrity and clarity that nobody we read today really has. ... He's an example to us as young people who want to change the world, who want to understand the world to change it."

While Baldwin wrote about the intense pain of enduring racism, he also wanted to reach out to white countrymen, who didn't understand the lives of black people, by confronting them with love.

Because of this, Baldwin was isolated from various blocs of the civil rights movement - an Uncle Tom to some African Americans while an "angry young man" to the establishment, Nathaniel Rich wrote in the New York Review of Books.

Still, he is gaining traction among new thinkers, and remaining relevant for longtime fans.

"I still refer to his writings when I need strength, and I'm feeling weak about doing these things as an activist and an artist," said Philadelphia poet Ursula Rucker, 49, who will read at the Baldwin celebration this weekend. "Just being an artist is [hard] enough. But when you're an artist who tries to speak up about something and make a change, some people don't want to hear it."
Events for the free James Baldwin Celebration will begin at 4 p.m. Friday and run through Sunday at the Church of the Advocate, 1801 Diamond St. For the schedule, go to www.baldwincelebration.org

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Why James Baldwin still inspires 30 years after his death

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When Archishman Raju came to the United States from India four years ago to attend graduate school at Cornell University, he had never heard of the American writer James Baldwin. Then in April, the 24-year-old accompanied a friend, a Penn graduate student, to a class taught by former Temple University professor Anthony Monteiro.

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-Theodore Roethke, from The lost son.

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That November drive through Virginia back to Washington: Every color seemed somehow brighter. The red and orange leaves on the side of the highway; the clear blue sky; even the maroon in the car. Every face in every cafe and gas station appeared more hopeful. With each hour into the morning the feeling didn't fade. And then somewhere along the drive an official from the South African embassy called me: "The President of South Africa would like to call President Elect Obama to congratulate him on his victory. Can you tell me who to call?" With that call it became more real: This good man was in fact going to be our president. He was going to call other presidents and be in charge. So if you ask me what I remember most from that day? The sunlight; my wife's small brown hand in my own; the feeling that from this moment, our history could be amended, our Union made more perfect, our lives more free.

*

Now we are here.

Over the last year our dominant political narrative shifted from the vision and ideas of President Barack Obama to a political campaign mired in smallness and depravity. Today we find ourselves in a moment of profound uncertainty as Barack Obama exits and an unqualified, mercurial man takes the helm of the United States government; as a man with no experience in public office and no experience with the military becomes the commander-in-chief of the most powerful military force in the world; a man whose language about women and minorities enables violence across the country. Many haven't slept well, haunted by forebodings of what's to come.

Since leaving the Obama Administration last year I have spent my days reading about how human beings withstand significant disruptions. I approached the question first as a former Pentagon speechwriter and security strategist concerned with destructive attacks on the United States, but even more so out of concern for the individual mind, that fertile terrain where political narratives and disruptive events tread their way.

We know how this can feel. The loss of a loved one, a terrorist attack, a surprise political event-such events can shake the very ground beneath your feet. In the worst cases, the mind can grow a little muddled; familiar terrain can become foreign. "Midway upon the journey of our life," as Dante wrote in his opening lines to The Divine Comedy, "I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost." It felt a bit like that in 2016.

We each have a duty as citizens to try to prevent disruptions from occurring whenever we can, to cut them off at the pass. Yet not everything can be controlled, not everything can be stopped. Recall the ancient city of Pompei, bustling one day and gone the next. The question thus becomes: How do we respond after?

Barack Obama understands this problem especially well. We have heard the president address it over and over as he spoke to a nation that has too often mourned senseless gun violence. "For all of us, life presents challenges and suffering-accidents, illnesses, the loss of loved ones," President Obama said in Dallas during his eulogy for the five police officers murdered in July 2016 at a protest they were working to protect.

"There are times when we are overwhelmed by sudden calamity, natural or manmade. All of us, we make mistakes. And at times we are lost," he admitted. "And as we get older, we learn we don't always have control of things-not even a President does. But we do have control over how we respond to the world. We do have control over how we treat one another." In the speech's coda he repeated a refrain he had first said a year before in a eulogy for Reverend Clementa Pinkney and eight others killed in a mass shooting at Emmanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston, South Carolina. "With an open heart," he repeated, paraphrasing the prophet Ezekiel, we may live in darkness, but we can reach out to others with love. We can change how we treat one another.

To live with an open heart; this doesn't always come easily, especially when the mind gets a little muddled. Words can help us see the way forward for our politics as well as our lives.

Following the gun violence of last summer, and to account for the depravity and jarring transition of the 2016 campaign, like many I turned to literature. To James Baldwin's novel Another Country, Tony Kushner's play Angels in America, the essays of Zadie Smith, as well as the poetry of Theodore Roethke, A.R. Amons, Langston Hughes, and many more. Writers that could help me take stock of unstocked things. From literature and from the words and tenure of Barack Obama we can discern four lessons on how to live with an open heart. That's four more than I had before; perhaps more may come, but these four provide a good start.

Four ways to live with an open heart: In the past we struggled and triumphed over adversity, so we should revisit the past and keep faith in future progress; if we confront fear wherever we find it, in ourselves or in others, we help prevent aggression; in the face of a suffering, our best defense lies in love, in the unconditional commitments we make to our families and friends and others; and with an open heart, we can keep at the daily work of politics and service, as citizens, to knit together the world. These lessons don't come easily. History and our experience prove them right. As the character Hannah Pitt says at the end of Angels in America, "You cannot live in the world without an idea of the world, but it is the living that makes the ideas. You can't wait for a theory, but you have to have a theory." Barack Obama and Ezekiel gave us one. The living makes it real.

*

We may suffer tremendous pain in the years to come, but we have a track record of success on which to fall back when times get rough. This is the easiest and most accessible lesson.

Through reading we can see how far we've traveled in the nearly 65 years since the publication of James Baldwin's novel Another Country in 1962. It would have been unthinkable in Baldwin's era to imagine an African-American president and a cabinet as diverse as this last one. It would have been impossible to imagine how the Supreme Court would usher in the national right for same-sex marriage. And yet these things happened.

They happened because we learned how to imagine other lives and expand our sense of what is possible and right. James Baldwin himself was triply cursed-gay, black, and the son of a preacher-and he made it his life's mission to confront the dark forces at work in American society to try to improve the world. Another Country is the story of a small group of white and black and queer friends that are trying to make their way in a hard and racially charged New York City. The novel was written and published before Martin Luther King's world-changing speeches, written when segregation still reigned in the south and homosexuality was still buried deep in American secular and religious consciousness, further than interracial love. Mixed couples faced judgment and violence on the streets; gay men and women hid their homosexuality from the world.

As Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in his 2015 majority opinion affirming the Supreme Court's decision requiring all states to recognize the legality of same-sex marriage, "Until the mid-20th century, same-sex intimacy long had been condemned as immoral by the state itself in most Western nations, a belief often embodied in the criminal law." The American Psychiatric Association even listed homosexuality as a mental disorder until 1973. "For this reason, among others," Kennedy wrote, "many persons did not deem homosexuals to have dignity in their own distinct identity. A truthful declaration by same-sex couples of what was in their hearts had to remain unspoken." These twin evils of forcibly closeted sexual identity and racism come with costs. In its worst form, that cost becomes hatred and violence against oneself or others.

Those costs rain down on everyone in Another Country. Particularly one man. In the opening chapter Rufus, a young, black, bisexual jazz musician, wanders the streets of New York consumed by depression and regret borne of years of oppression, an inner hatred that destroyed his relationship with a young southern white woman, Leona. He withdraws from the world and from his friends. He submits to prostituting himself to desperate men for money. He wanders drunk from bar to bar in a rage. Ultimately his pain sends him off the George Washington Bridge.

James Baldwin called Rufus "the black corpse floating in the American mind," a symbol of the country's racism and violence that it had to confront. Fear and anger and the potential for violence live within each of us, Baldwin understood, and he saw that individuals and societies succumb to violence when they fail to confront the darker aspects of their own psychological nature. Fear of the other, fear of death, fear of aloneness, fear of economic destabilization, fear of humiliation. If left unaddressed individuals and communities create scapegoats as they project their fears onto racial and sexual groups, towards other individuals, or inwards towards themselves. Demagogic leaders trade in the currency of fear; they offer bravado and aggression as false relief to individual souls caught in a suffering world.

Yet relief comes from another path entirely. Living with an open heart means sublimating the darker parts of the self towards empathy and service-the second lesson. Thus President Obama's admonition in Dallas to "control how we treat one another" requires that we each examine our inner selves and our expectations for life and all the memories and emotions that live within us, anger, desire, doubt, fear, all of it.

What might it look like to confront those fears? In late November of 2016 in Texas, a bearded older white man stood outside a mosque and raised a sign saying, "You belong. Stay strong. Be blessed. We are one America." Online the private Facebook group Pantsuit Nation daily churns out stories of women and men from across the United States standing up to hate speech in their lives and for the lives others, sometimes at immense personal costs. Such stories shall be legion. To confront fear and live with an open heart means challenging every word and every idea that would ever denigrate or make vulnerable another life.

*

In the face of an unjust world we will do our best to resist. Yet our resistance requires not only an ability to withstand fear, but the ability to withstand deep suffering and occasionally absolute horror in our lives. This brings us to the third and most difficult lesson. Our best defense against a dark world lies in wrapping ourselves around our loved ones and friends and committing to love them, and ourselves, unconditionally. This isn't easy.

In Tony Kushner's play Angels in America the character Prior Walter becomes deeply ill with HIV/AIDS. He has lesions running all over his body, he's incontinent and falling through a downward spiral, barely out of his thirties and literally covered with vomit and feces. Compounding his illness, Prior and his friends have been abandoned by a political system that has failed to protect them against a pervasive and terrifying disease. He feels lonely and afraid.

It is at that moment that Prior's lover Louis Ironson abandons him for Joe Pitt, a young, closeted Republican. Louis's expectations for an easy life, and an easy life with other people, mismatch the nature of reality. He wanted love and life to be simple yet who on earth ever said that it was? It comes with sickness, and sometimes sickness and political failures like the government's response to the HIV/AIDS crisis combine at the same time. "You believe the world is perfectible and so you find it always unsatisfying," Joe tells Louis, "You have to reconcile yourself to the world's unperfectibility by being thoroughly in the world, but not of it." You need to accept the hardness of life; this doesn't mean that life cannot be improved.

Louis's journey back to Prior becomes the audience's journey into the reality of the disease; only by facing the world with all its marks and illness and by accepting one another for who they are do Louis and Prior move forward in mission. A mission to get the world to pay attention to HIV/AIDS. Through his humor and vision, Kushner's story of resilience and activism helped men and women across the world to confront the disease and stick together in love.

*

To live with an open heart means never giving up on the day-to-day work of building a better world. That is the duty of all citizens; of journalists and authors exposing the truth; of civil servants upholding the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic; of activists leading a march against injustice. Yet the day-to-day work of principles and politics can often be just that-quotidian, dull, occasionally exhausting-and we need inspiration and faith to keep at it. Which brings us back to this moment of transition and to the work that lies ahead-and to the fourth and final lesson.

In Barack Obama's campaign and election many found a leader that embodied so many American hopes and dreams-a politician who could help the individual and the collective on a journey of change, a man who could bring the once marginalized into the center of power, a leader who could help us overcome disunity and realize a better future. No one's perfect, of course, but he is exceptional.

The line from these literary works (and so many others) to Barack Obama's candidacy seems clear in retrospect. In Obama we found a man whose primary message was to sublimate fear and move forward in unity. The most memorable moment of the 2004 Democratic National Convention can be found in Barack Obama's first real national frame. "We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states," he said, "We coach little league in the blue states and, yes, we've got some gay friends in the red states." He captured the world's imagination and a generation of Americans rose up to support his candidacy a few years later.

From the frozen streets of New England to the beaches of Hampton Roads, during the year on his 2007-2008 campaign I met Americans of all shapes and sizes, all walks of life, some in wealthier homes and many in modest ones, some at the peak of their lives, others in the twilight of their years, many struggling with economic hardship, all trying to make their way. Each wondered about the direction of the country and how they could contribute. Their hopes and dreams inspired me then as now. It was a remarkable intersectional rally that brought Barack Obama to power, a coalition that brought blacks and liberal whites and the gay community and Latinos and others together in common work to get out the vote.

Victory was a collective high that lasted for weeks and weeks. Yet for all that he achieved-and for all that his legacy will achieve-nothing can change the inner nature of the world. Sometimes, surprises happen.

*

The world may not be perfectible; but it can always be improved. Working for change on a political campaign, through community organizing, or in government can be immensely tiring and painful. Yet these are the tools we have to make change real.

Day-in and day-out, politics revolves around power and the constant negotiation of agendas. It's tough work no matter how many good people you know. Getting meaningful things done in government, for example, means politicking with hundreds of people. Shockingly not everyone in Congress or the Executive Branch meditates every day on the reality of sin and samsara and the power of transcendence. Senior level daily meetings don't begin with kumbaya but a litany of demands imposed from above and (more often) from the outside. The workday starts at 0600 or earlier for many and goes well past 1900. There's a break for dinner, often with the BlackBerry having its own seat at the table, and then a few hours more of work after the family or the dog goes to bed. It is the opposite of sexy.

People misunderstand each other or compete against each other all the time. This causes friction, of course, and there are narcissists aplenty, especially at the top. There are friends, there are enemies, and there are "frenemies," people whom you may love as people but sit in opposing positions that sometimes require them to take views at odds with your own. Then sometimes there are friends who are actually enemies and enemies who are actually friends, but you just can't quite tell until your agenda has been knifed or saved.

You toil away on a campaign or in bureaucracies for years to make politics and policy happen or to bring stories to light. It can drain you in ways you could barely imagine. Then on some days, the work pays off.

"The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times," Justice Kennedy wrote in his decision ratifying the right of gay marriage for the country. The founding fathers entrusted to future generations in the Constitution a charter that carried with it "the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning. When new insight reveals discord between the Constitution's central protections and a received legal stricture, a claim to liberty must be addressed." The country had finally arrived at another moment in the long struggle for freedom that Baldwin and Kushner and so many others had worked to address. A claim on liberty made its way to the highest court of the land.

Gay men and women hoped "not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization's oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right. The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is reversed. It is so ordered." With these words walls fell down and love won; the world moved forward. Across the world people sent the decision to partners and lovers and parents and friends.

Faith may offer cognitive freedom from an imperfect world, literature may help us see the way, but "only in politics does the miraculous occur," as Louis Ironson says; only politics can change laws and govern the world. For that we can never give up on it.

The list of this Administration's achievements accumulated before and after 2015, some known across the world, some classified, some still unfolding today. Somehow this one decision made every day worth it. In this our Union was made more perfect.

*

We are at a moment of transition as a country. The end of this Administration is a difficult time for those that believed in this president; it is even harder now given the fear and uncertainty that our incoming president engenders. Our journey, it seems, lies between the twin poles of resistance and resilience: Between the power and hope of the political project-the need to address any injustice and violence in the world-and the equal but divergent need to withstand a world where wickedness will always exist. How shall we make our way forward? By pursuing an authentic search for truth; by confronting fear; by finding and sustaining love wherever we can; by committing to the daily work. By living with an open heart.

Literature gives us something on which to fall back when the straightforward path gets lost. The legacy of the last eight years and the writings of prior eras can help us imagine our way through whatever may come. To plot a course for our politics as well as our lives. "The world only spins forward," Prior Walter says at the end of Angels in America. "The time has come. Bye now. You are fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: More Life. The Great Work Begins." It began in 2008, and it was pretty great.

Now it begins again, in a manner we never expected. Soon we'll make our way without this president and his gifted wife and family. It's more than a little scary and more than a little sad. Yet when the country suffers or stumbles, as it will, we will have something far greater than our present world to hold onto: The truths of love, as found in words and in our historical experience and in each other. Our literary and political history from 1962 to 1991 to today gives us a record of words and world-changing action. Life won't be easy; real change never is; real love never is. Yet together we strive and move forward and won't ever give up. It is so ordered, indeed.

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Obama: On the End of a Literary Presidency

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Theodore Roethke, from The lost son. Article continues after advertisement That November drive through Virginia back to Washington: Every color seemed somehow brighter. The red and orange leaves on the side of the highway; the clear blue sky; even the maroon in the car. Every face in every cafe and gas station appeared more hopeful.

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James Baldwin in 1965 talking about a black president

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James Baldwin responding to Bobby Kennedy's remarks that the USA might see a black president in 40 years. He explains why black and white Americans received the comments differently. Source video: https://youtu.be/oFeoS41xe7w

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Following a screening of the newly restored documentary, James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket, the filmmaker Karen Thorsen, Tufts professor Peniel Joseph, poets Nikky Finney and Rose Styron, and James Baldwin's niece, Aisha Karefa-Smart discussed his call for equality and its relevance today.

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african-american civil rights movement (1955–1968) (event)

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Civil Rights and the Black Power Movement

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Tufts Professor Peniel Joseph, author of Stokely: A Life; Harvard Professor John Stauffer, author of Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln; and civil rights activist Elaine Jones discuss the civil rights challenges facing the nation in 1964 and beyond, which led to the rise of the Black Power movement.

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Gode råd til struktur, fx indholdsfortegnelse

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Gode råd til struktur, fx indholdsfortegnelse

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I finished The Fire Next Time on a plane to Greenville, South Carolina. I am here to give a talk tonight about the legacy of the Civil War. I probably should not have read Baldwin before coming into the backyard of John Calhoun and Pitchfork Ben Tillman. I'm all on fire and resolved to bring some of that fire forth tonight. I have come to places like this before. I have never shrunk from speaking my piece, but I dislike making people directly uncomfortable and have a tendency in person to complicate things that I know are not complicated at all. I am resolving to move away from that. Manners have their place. I should not conflate them with cowardice.

Though he loves hard, though he deeply understands that race is a creation, he is never blinded by love.
I want to thank everyone who pointed me toward how much Baldwin really does embrace love. I am remembering what I, myself, loved about him as a young man. I came to college a total Malcolmite. I kind of still am. But Baldwin was among a set of influences that talked me out of my younger self. He is tough to pin down, because he understands the anger in black people, he feels it himself, and fears it. There is something of the atheist about him, though he does not directly say it. His encounters with racism leave him on the edge of violence and hatred, but The Fire Next Time is all about why one should walk back, all about why you should never judge yourself by the standards of the owner of the boot presently on your neck.

That is how Baldwin got me. He revealed to me that black nationalism is, itself, a kind of philosophical integration. If you listen to any of Malcolm's speeches they sound like they are straight out of the Enlightenment, and Malcolm himself uses the American revolution and the nationalism of whites around the globe as a model. Baldwin's reply is not to interrogate black nationalism in isolation, but to interrogate nationalism-and the nation-itself. He hates the hypocrisy and self-congratulation of white liberals and though he loves hard, though he deeply understands that race is a creation, he is never blinded by love:

The real reason that nonviolence is considered to be a virtue in Negroes-I am not speaking now of its racial value, another matter altogether-is that white men do not want their lives, their self-image, or their property threatened. One wishes they would say so more often.

Now, there is simply no possibility of a real change in the Negro's situation without the most radical and far-reaching changes in the American political and social structure. And it is clear that white Americans are not simply unwilling to effect these changes; they are, in the main, so slothful have they become, unable even to envision them. It must be added that the Negro himself no longer believes in the good faith of white Americans-if, indeed, he ever could have.

Most of the Negroes I know do not believe that this immense concession [Brown vs the Board] would ever have been made if it had not been for the competition of the Cold War, and the fact that Africa was clearly liberating herself and therefore had, for political reasons, to be wooed by the descendants of her former masters. Had it been a matter of love or justice, the 1954 decision would surely have occurred sooner; were it not for the realities of power in this difficult era, it might very well not have occurred yet. This seems an extremely harsh way of stating the case-ungrateful, as it were-but the evidence that supports this way of stating it is not easily refuted. I myself do not think that it can be refuted at all. In any event, the sloppy and fatuous nature of American good will can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems.

I cannot accept the proposition that the four-hundred-year travail of the American Negro should result merely in his attainment of the present level of the American civilization. I am far from convinced that being released from the African witch doctor was worthwhile if I am now-in order to support the moral contradictions and the spiritual aridity of my life-expected to become dependent on the American psychiatrist. It is a bargain I refuse. The only thing white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.

White people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live. Rather, the white man is himself in sore need of new standards, which will release him from his confusion and place him once again in fruitful communion with the depths of his own being. And I repeat: The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks-the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind. Why, for example-especially knowing the family as I do-I should want to marry your sister is a great mystery to me. But your sister and I have every right to marry if we wish to, and no one has the right to stop us. If she cannot raise me to her level, perhaps I can raise her to mine.

These are some of the coldest American sentences ever written. When I was a young nationalist, this was the one that really shook me. "I don't what your sister-but if we wanted each other, no one has the right to stop us." It was something I'd never seen before-the black pride of nationalism fused to the undeniable morality of integration.

I don't want to cherry-pick here. On the contrary, my point is that after all of this-after all his hard talk-Baldwin is still talking about love. These essays are amazing acts of intellectual and emotional courage. I got off the plane here in Greenville and called my agent (who knew "Jimmy" as she called him) and asked, "Does anyone still write like this?" The question was rhetorical. No one does. No one had. No one will.

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Is James Baldwin America's Greatest Essayist?

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I finished The Fire Next Time on a plane to Greenville, South Carolina. I am here to give a talk tonight about the legacy of the Civil War. I probably should not have read Baldwin before coming into the backyard of John Calhoun and Pitchfork Ben Tillman.

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A novelist and essayist of considerable renown, James Baldwin bore witness to the unhappy consequences of American racial strife. Baldwin's writing career began in the last years of legislated segregation; his fame as a social observer grew in tandem with the civil rights movement as he mirrored Black people's aspirations, disappointments, and coping strategies in a hostile society. Tri-Quarterly contributor Robert A. Bone declared that Baldwin's publications "have had a stunning impact on our cultural life" because the author "... succeeded in transposing the entire discussion of American race relations to the interior plane; it is a major breakthrough for the American imagination." In his novels, plays, and essays alike, Baldwin explored the psychological implications of racism for both the oppressed and the oppressor. Best-sellers such as Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time acquainted wide audiences with his highly personal observations and his sense of urgency in the face of rising Black bitterness. As Juan Williams noted in the Washington Post, long before Baldwin's death, his writings "became a standard of literary realism. ... Given the messy nature of racial hatred, of the half-truths, blasphemies and lies that make up American life, Baldwin's accuracy in reproducing that world stands as a remarkable achievement. ... Black people reading Baldwin knew he wrote the truth. White people reading Baldwin sensed his truth about the lives of black people and the sins of a racist nation."

Critics accorded Baldwin high praise for both his style and his themes. "Baldwin has carved a literary niche through his exploration of 'the mystery of the human being' in his art," observed Louis H. Pratt in James Baldwin. "His short stories, novels, and plays shed the light of reality upon the darkness of our illusions, while the essays bring a boldness, courage, and cool logic to bear on the most crucial questions of humanity with which this country has yet to be faced." In the College Language Association Journal, Therman B. O'Daniel called Baldwin "the gifted professor of that primary element, genuine talent. ... Secondly he is a very intelligent and deeply perceptive observer of our multifarious contemporary society. ... In the third place, Baldwin is a bold and courageous writer who is not afraid to search into the dark corners of our social consciences, and to force out into public view many of the hidden, sordid skeletons of our society. ... Then, of course, there is Baldwin's literary style which is a fourth major reason for his success as a writer. His prose ... possesses a crystal clearness and a passionately poetic rhythm that makes it most appealing." Saturday Review correspondent Benjamin De Mott concluded that Baldwin "retains a place in an extremely select group: That composed of the few genuinely indispensable American writers. He owes his rank partly to the qualities of responsiveness that have marked his work from the beginning. ... Time and time over in fiction as in reportage, Baldwin tears himself free of his rhetorical fastenings and stands forth on the page utterly absorbed in the reality of the person before him, strung with his nerves, riveted to his feelings, breathing his breath."

Baldwin's central preoccupation as a writer lay in "his insistence on removing, layer by layer, the hardened skin with which Americans shield themselves from their country," according to Orde Coombs in the New York Times Book Review. The author saw himself as a "disturber of the peace"-one who revealed uncomfortable truths to a society mired in complacency. Pratt found Baldwin "engaged in a perpetual battle to overrule our objections and continue his probe into the very depths of our past. His constant concern is the catastrophic failure of the American Dream and the devastating inability of the American people to deal with that calamity." Pratt uncovered a further assumption in Baldwin's work; namely, that all of mankind is united by virtue of common humanity. "Consequently," Pratt stated, "the ultimate purpose of the writer, from Baldwin's perspective, is to discover that sphere of commonality where, although differences exist, those dissimilarities are stripped of their power to block communication and stifle human intercourse." The major impediment in this search for commonality, according to Baldwin, is white society's entrenched moral cowardice, a condition that through longstanding tradition equates Blackness with dark impulses, carnality and chaos. By denying Black people's essential humanity so simplistically, the author argued, whites inflict psychic damage on blacks and suffer self-estrangement-a "fatal bewilderment," to quote Bone. Baldwin's essays exposed the dangerous implications of this destructive way of thinking; his fictional characters occasionally achieve interracial harmony after having made the bold leap of understanding he advocated. In the British Journal of Sociology, Beau Fly Jones claimed that Baldwin was one of the first Black writers "to discuss with such insight the psychological handicaps that most Negroes must face; and to realize the complexities of Negro-white relations in so many different contexts. In redefining what has been called the Negro problem as white, he has forced the majority race to look at the damage it has done, and its own role in that destruction."

Essayist John W. Roberts felt that Baldwin's "evolution as a writer of the first order constitutes a narrative as dramatic and compelling as his best story." Baldwin was born and raised in Harlem under very trying circumstances. His stepfather, an evangelical preacher, struggled to support a large family and demanded the most rigorous religious behavior from his nine children. Roberts wrote: "Baldwin's ambivalent relationship with his stepfather served as a constant source of tension during his formative years and informs some of his best mature writings. ... The demands of caring for younger siblings and his stepfather's religious convictions in large part shielded the boy from the harsh realities of Harlem street life during the 1930s." As a youth Baldwin read constantly and even tried writing; he was an excellent student who sought escape from his environment through literature, movies, and theatre. During the summer of his 14th birthday he underwent a dramatic religious conversion, partly in response to his nascent sexuality and partly as a further buffer against the ever-present temptations of drugs and crime. He served as a junior minister for three years at the Fireside Pentecostal Assembly, but gradually he lost his desire to preach as he began to question Black people's acceptance of Christian tenets that had, in essence, been used to enslave them.

Shortly after he graduated from high school in 1942, Baldwin was compelled to find work in order to help support his brothers and sisters; mental instability had incapacitated his stepfather. Baldwin took a job in the defense industry in Belle Meade, New Jersey, and there, not for the first time, he was confronted with racism, discrimination, and the debilitating regulations of segregation. The experiences in New Jersey were closely followed by his stepfather's death, after which Baldwin determined to make writing his sole profession. He moved to Greenwich Village and began to write a novel, supporting himself by performing a variety of odd jobs. In 1944 he met author Richard Wright, who helped him to land the 1945 Eugene F. Saxton fellowship. Despite the financial freedom the fellowship provided, Baldwin was unable to complete his novel that year. He found the social tenor of the United States increasingly stifling even though such prestigious periodicals as the Nation, New Leader, and Commentary began to accept his essays and short stories for publication. Eventually, in 1948, he moved to Paris, using funds from a Rosenwald Foundation fellowship to pay his passage. Most critics feel that this journey abroad was fundamental to Baldwin's development as an author.

"Once I found myself on the other side of the ocean," Baldwin told the New York Times, "I could see where I came from very clearly, and I could see that I carried myself, which is my home, with me. You can never escape that. I am the grandson of a slave, and I am a writer. I must deal with both." Through some difficult financial and emotional periods, Baldwin undertook a process of self-realization that included both an acceptance of his heritage and an admittance of his bisexuality. Bone noted that Europe gave the young author many things: "It gave him a world perspective from which to approach the question of his own identity. It gave him a tender love affair which would dominate the pages of his later fiction. But above all, Europe gave him back himself. The immediate fruit of self-recovery was a great creative outburst. First came two [works] of reconciliation with his racial heritage. Go Tell It on the Mountain and The Amen Corner represent a search for roots, a surrender to tradition, an acceptance of the Negro past. Then came a series of essays which probe, deeper than anyone has dared, the psychic history of this nation. They are a moving record of a man's struggle to define the forces that have shaped him, in order that he may accept himself."

Many critics view Baldwin's essays as his most significant contribution to American literature. Works such as Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, The Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street, and The Evidence of Things Not Seen "serve to illuminate the condition of the black man in twentieth-century America," according to Pratt. Highly personal and analytical, the essays probe deeper than the mere provincial problems of white versus black to uncover the essential issues of self-determination, identity, and reality. "An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian," Baldwin told Life magazine. "His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else can tell, what it is like to be alive." South Atlantic Quarterly contributor Fred L. Standley asserted that this quest for personal identity "is indispensable in Baldwin's opinion and the failure to experience such is indicative of a fatal weakness in human life." C.W.E. Bigsby elaborated in The Fifties: Fiction, Poetry, Drama: "Baldwin's central theme is the need to accept reality as a necessary foundation for individual identity and thus a logical prerequisite for the kind of saving love in which he places his whole faith. For some this reality is one's racial or sexual nature, for others it is the ineluctable fact of death. ... Baldwin sees this simple progression as an urgent formula not only for the redemption of individual men but for the survival of mankind. In this at least black and white are as one and the Negro's much-vaunted search for identity can be seen as part and parcel of the American's long-standing need for self-definition."

Inevitably, however, Baldwin's assessments of the "sweet" and "bitter" experiences in his own life led him to describe "the exact place where private chaos and social outrage meet," according to Alfred Kazin in Contemporaries. Eugenia Collier described this confrontation in Black World: "On all levels personal and political ... life is a wild chaos of paradox, hidden meanings, and dilemmas. This chaos arises from man's inability-or reluctance to face the truth about his own nature. As a result of this self-imposed blindness, men erect an elaborate facade of myth, tradition, and ritual behind which crouch, invisible, their true selves. It is this blindness on the part of Euro-Americans which has created and perpetuated the vicious racism which threatens to destroy this nation." In his essays on the 1950s and early 1960s, Baldwin sought to explain Black experiences to a white readership as he warned whites about the potential destruction their psychic blindness might wreak. Massachusetts Review contributor David Levin noted that the author came to represent "for 'white' Americans, the eloquent, indignant prophet of an oppressed people, a voice speaking ... in an all but desperate, final effort to bring us out of what he calls our innocence before it is (if it is not already) too late. This voice calls us to our immediate duty for the sake of our own humanity as well as our own safety. It demands that we stop regarding the Negro as an abstraction, an invisible man; that we begin to recognize each Negro in his 'full weight and complexity' as a human being; that we face the horrible reality of our past and present treatment of Negroes-a reality we do not know and do not want to know." In Ebony magazine, Allan Morrison observed that Baldwin evinced an awareness "that the audience for most of his nonfictional writings is white and he uses every forum at his disposal to drive home the basic truths of Negro-white relations in America as he sees them. His function here is to interpret whites to themselves and at the same time voice the Negro's protest against his role in a Jim Crow society."

Because Baldwin sought to inform and confront whites, and because his fiction contains interracial love affairs-both homosexual and heterosexual-he came under attack from the writers of the Black Arts Movement, who called for a literature exclusively by and for Blacks. Baldwin refused to align himself with the movement; he continued to call himself an "American writer" as opposed to a "Black writer" and continued to confront the issues facing a multi-racial society. Eldridge Cleaver, in his book Soul on Ice, accused Baldwin of a hatred of Blacks and "a shameful, fanatical fawning" love of whites. What Cleaver saw as complicity with whites, Baldwin saw rather as an attempt to alter the real daily environment with which American Blacks have been faced all their lives. Pratt noted, however, that Baldwin's efforts to "shake up" his white readers put him "at odds with current white literary trends" as well as with the Black Arts Movement. Pratt explained that Baldwin labored under the belief "that mainstream art is directed toward a complacent and apathetic audience, and it is designed to confirm and reinforce that sense of well-being. ... Baldwin's writings are, by their very nature, iconoclastic. While Black Arts focuses on a Black-oriented artistry, Baldwin is concerned with the destruction of the fantasies and delusions of a contented audience which is determined to avoid reality." As the civil rights movement gained momentum, Baldwin escalated his attacks on white complacency from the speaking platform as well as from the pages of books and magazines. Nobody Knows My Name and The Fire Next Time both sold more than a million copies; both were cited for their predictions of Black violence in desperate response to white oppression. In Encounter, Colin MacInnes concluded that the reason "why Baldwin speaks to us of another race is that he still believes us worthy of a warning: he has not yet despaired of making us feel the dilemma we all chat about so glibly, ... and of trying to save us from the agonies that we too will suffer if the Negro people are driven beyond the ultimate point of desperation."

Retrospective analyses of Baldwin's essays highlight the characteristic prose style that gives his works literary merit beyond the mere dissemination of ideas. In A World More Attractive: A View of Modern Literature and Politics, Irving Howe placed the author among "the two or three greatest essayists this country has ever produced." Howe claimed that Baldwin "has brought a new luster to the essay as an art form, a form with possibilities for discursive reflection and concrete drama. ... The style of these essays is a remarkable instance of the way in which a grave and sustained eloquence-the rhythm of oratory, ... held firm and hard-can be employed in an age deeply suspicious of rhetorical prowess." "Baldwin has shown more concern for the painful exactness of prose style than any other modern American writer," noted David Littlejohn in Black on White: A Critical Survey of Writing by American Negroes. "He picks up words with heavy care, then sets them, one by one, with a cool and loving precision that one can feel in the reading. ... The exhilarating exhaustion of reading his best essays-which in itself may be a proof of their honesty and value-demands that the reader measure up, and forces him to learn."

Baldwin's fiction expanded his exploration of the "full weight and complexity" of the individual in a society prone to callousness and categorization. His loosely autobiographical works probed the milieus with which he was most familiar-Black evangelical churches, jazz clubs, stifling Southern towns, and the Harlem ghetto. In The Black American Writer: Fiction, Brian Lee maintained that Baldwin's "essays explore the ambiguities and ironies of a life lived on two levels-that of the Negro and that of the man-and they have spoken eloquently to and for a whole generation. But Baldwin's feelings about the condition- alternating moods of sadness and bitterness-are best expressed in the paradoxes confronting the haunted heroes of his novels and stories. The possible modes of existence for anyone seeking refuge from a society which refuses to acknowledge one's humanity are necessarily limited, and Baldwin has explored with some thoroughness the various emotional and spiritual alternatives available to his retreating protagonists." Pratt felt that Baldwin's fictive artistry "not only documents the dilemma of the Black man in American society, but it also bears witness to the struggle of the artist against the overwhelming forces of oppression. Almost invariably, his protagonists are artists. ... Each character is engaged in the pursuit of artistic fulfillment which, for Baldwin, becomes symbolic of the quest for identity."

Love, both sexual and spiritual, was an essential component of Baldwin's characters' quests for self-realization. John W. Aldridge observed in the Saturday Review that sexual love "emerges in his novels as a kind of universal anodyne for the disease of racial separatism, as a means not only of achieving personal identity but also of transcending false categories of color and gender." Homosexual encounters emerged as the principal means to achieve important revelations; as Bigsby explained, Baldwin felt that "it is the homosexual, virtually alone, who can offer a selfless and genuine love because he alone has a real sense of himself, having accepted his own nature." Baldwin did not see love as a "saving grace," however; his vision, given the circumstances of the lives he encountered, was more cynical than optimistic. In his introduction to James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays, Kenneth Kinnamon wrote: "If the search for love has its origin in the desire of a child for emotional security, its arena is an adult world which involves it in struggle and pain. Stasis must yield to motion, innocence to experience, security to risk. This is the lesson that ... saves Baldwin's central fictional theme from sentimentality. ... Similarly, love as an agent of racial reconciliation and national survival is not for Baldwin a vague yearning for an innocuous brotherhood, but an agonized confrontation with reality, leading to the struggle to transform it. It is a quest for truth through a recognition of the primacy of suffering and injustice in the American past." Pratt also concluded that in Baldwin's novels, "love is often extended, frequently denied, seldom fulfilled. As reflections of our contemporary American society, the novels stand as forthright indictments of the intolerable conditions that we have accepted unquestioningly as a way of life."

Black family life-the charged emotional atmosphere between parents and children, brothers and sisters-provided another major theme in Baldwin's fiction. This was especially apparent in his first and best-known novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, the story of a Harlem teenager's struggles with a repressive father and with religious conversion. According to Roberts, Go Tell It on the Mountain "proved that James Baldwin had become a writer of enormous power and skill. [It] was an essential book for Baldwin. Although clearly a fictional work, it chronicles two of the most problematic aspects of his existence as a young man: a son's relationship to his stepfather and the impact of fundamentalist religion on the consciousness of a young boy." In her work entitled James Baldwin, Carolyn Wedin Sylvander praised Baldwin's family chronicle particularly because the author "is dealing comprehensively and emotionally with the hot issue of race relations in the United States at a time ... when neither white ignorance and prejudice nor black powerlessness is conducive to holistic depictions of black experience." Indeed, the overt confrontation between the races that characterizes Baldwin's later work was here portrayed as a peripheral threat, a danger greater than, but less immediate than, the potential damage inflicted by parents on children. Sylvander wrote: "It is painfully, dramatically, structurally clear throughout Go Tell It on the Mountain that the struggles every individual faces-with sexuality, with guilt, with pain, with love-are passed on, generation to generation." Littlejohn described Baldwin's treatment of this essential American theme as "autobiography-as-exorcism, ... a lyrical, painful, ritual exercise whose necessity and intensity the reader feels." Pratt likewise stated that Go Tell It on the Mountain "stands as an honest, intensive, self-analysis, functioning simultaneously to illuminate self, society, and mankind as a whole."

In addition to his numerous books, Baldwin was one of the few Black authors to have had more than one of his plays produced on Broadway. Both The Amen Corner, another treatment of storefront pentecostal religion, and Blues for Mister Charlie, a drama based on the racially-motivated murder of Emmett Till in 1955, had successful Broadway runs and numerous revivals. Standley commented in the Dictionary of Literary Biography that in both plays, "as in his other literary works, Baldwin explores a variety of thematic concerns: the historical significance and the potential explosiveness in black-white relations; the necessity for developing a sexual and psychological consciousness and identity; the intertwining of love and power in the universal scheme of existence as well as in the structures of society; the misplaced priorities in the value systems in America; and the responsibility of the artist to promote the evolution of the individual and the society." In The Black American Writer: Poetry and Drama, Walter Meserve offered remarks on Baldwin's abilities as a playwright. "Baldwin tries to use the theatre as a pulpit for his ideas," Meserve stated. "Mainly his plays are thesis plays-talky, over-written, and cliche dialogue and some stereotypes, preachy, and argumentative. Essentially, Baldwin is not particularly dramatic, but he can be extremely eloquent, compelling, and sometimes irritating as a playwright committed to his approach to life." Meserve added, however, that although the author was criticized for creating stereotypes, "his major characters are the most successful and memorable aspects of his plays. People are important to Baldwin, and their problems, generally embedded in their agonizing souls, stimulate him to write. ... A humanitarian, sensitive to the needs and struggles of man, he writes of inner turmoil, spiritual disruption, the consequence upon people of the burdens of the world, both White and Black."

Baldwin's oratorical prowess-honed in the pulpit as a youth-brought him into great demand as a speaker during the civil rights era. Sylvander observed that national attention "began to turn toward him as a spokesperson for Blacks, not as much because of his novels as his essays, debates, interviews, panel discussions." Baldwin embraced his role as racial spokesman reluctantly and grew increasingly disillusioned as the American public "disarmed him with celebrity, [fell] in love with his eccentricities, and institutionalized his outrage ... into prime- time entertainment," to quote Aldridge. Nor was Baldwin able to feel that his speeches and essays were producing social change-the assassinations of three of his associates, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, shattered his remaining hopes for racial reconciliation. Kinnamon remarked that by 1972, the year Baldwin published No Name in the Street, "the redemptive possibilities of love seemed exhausted in that terrible decade of assassination, riot, and repression. ... Social love had now become for Baldwin more a rueful memory than an alternative to disaster." London Magazine contributor James Campbell also noted that by 1972 "Baldwin the saviour had turned into Baldwin the soldier. What [observers] failed to notice was that he was still the preacher and the prophet, that his passion and rage were mingled with detachment, and that his gloomy prognostications were based on powerful observation and an understanding of the past which compelled their pessimism."

Many critics took Baldwin to task for the stridency and gloom that overtook his writings. "To function as a voice of outrage month after month for a decade and more strains heart and mind, and rhetoric as well," declared Benjamin De Mott in the Saturday Review. "The consequence is a writing style ever on the edge of being winded by too many summonses to intensity." New Republic correspondent Nathan Glazer likewise stated that Baldwin had become "an accusing voice, but the accusation is so broad, so general, so all-embracing, that the rhetoric disappears into the wind." Stephen Donadio offered a similar opinion in the Partisan Review: "As his notoriety increased, his personality was oversimplified, appropriated, and consumed. ... Mr. Baldwin created a situation in which the eye of the audience was fixed on the author as a performer, and the urgency of the race problem in America became a backdrop for elaborate rhetorical assaults which could be dutifully acknowledged but forgotten with a sigh."

Baldwin's passionate detractors were offset by equally passionate defenders, however. Sylvander wrote: "Wading through vehement and sometimes shallow reactions to the deep water of the statements and works themselves, one is struck repeatedly by the power of Baldwin's prose, and by our continuing need, as readers and as citizens, for his steadying apocalyptic vision. Finally, in his fantastic, experientially various, wide-ranging, searching, and committed life, one can find a vigorous model for venturing beyond charted areas." Charles Newman made two points in James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays. First, Newman noted that Baldwin's experience is "unique among our artists in that his artistic achievements mesh so precisely with his historical circumstances. He is that nostalgic type-an artist speaking for a genuinely visible revolution." Second, Newman maintained that as an observer of this painful revolution, "almost alone [Baldwin] continued to confront the unmanageable questions of modern society, rather than creating a nuclear family in which semantic fantasies may be enacted with no reference to the larger world except that it stinks." Kinnamon concluded: "James Baldwin has always been concerned with the most personal and intimate areas of experience and also with the broadest questions of national and global destiny-and with the intricate interrelationships between the two. Whatever the final assessment of his literary achievement, it is clear that his voice-simultaneously that of victim, witness, and prophet-has been among the most urgent of our time."

At the time of his death from cancer late in 1987, Baldwin was still working on two projects-a play, The Welcome Table, and a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. Although he lived primarily in France, he had never relinquished his United States citizenship and preferred to think of himself as a "commuter" rather than as an expatriate. The publication of his collected essays, The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948- 1985, and his subsequent death sparked reassessments of his career and comments on the quality of his lasting legacy. "Mr. Baldwin has become a kind of prophet, a man who has been able to give a public issue all its deeper moral, historical, and personal significance," remarked Robert F. Sayre in Contemporary American Novelists. "Certainly one mark of his achievement, ... is that whatever deeper comprehension of the race issue Americans now possess has been in some way shaped by him. And this is to have shaped their comprehension of themselves as well." Sylvander asserted that what emerges from the whole of Baldwin's work is "a kind of absolute conviction and passion and honesty that is nothing less than courageous. ... Baldwin has shared his struggle with his readers for a purpose-to demonstrate that our suffering is our bridge to one another."

Perhaps the most telling demonstration of the results of Baldwin's achievement came from other Black writers. Orde Coombs, for instance, concluded: "Because he existed we felt that the racial miasma that swirled around us would not consume us, and it is not too much to say that this man saved our lives, or at least, gave us the necessary ammunition to face what we knew would continue to be a hostile and condescending world." Playwright Amiri Baraka phrased a similar assessment even more eloquently in his funeral eulogy to Baldwin. "This man traveled the earth like its history and its biographer," Baraka said. "He reported, criticized, made beautiful, analyzed, cajoled, lyricized, attacked, sang, made us think, made us better, made us consciously human. ... He made us feel ... that we could defend ourselves or define ourselves, that we were in the world not merely as animate slaves, but as terrifyingly sensitive measurers of what is good or evil, beautiful or ugly. This is the power of his spirit. This is the bond which created our love for him." In a posthumous profile for the Washington Post, Juan Williams wrote: "The success of Baldwin's effort as the witness is evidenced time and again by the people, black and white, gay and straight, famous and anonymous, whose humanity he unveiled in his writings. America and the literary world are far richer for his witness. The proof of a shared humanity across the divides of race, class and more is the testament that the preacher's son, James Arthur Baldwin, has left us."

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A novelist and essayist of considerable renown, James Baldwin bore witness to the unhappy consequences of American racial strife. Baldwin's writing career began in the last years of legislated segregation; his fame as a social observer grew in tandem with the civil rights movement as he mirrored...

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Hvad er kildekritik? - Københavns Universitet

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For det første er det vigtigt at gøre sig klart, at der ikke findes "dårlige" kilder. Det kommer helt an på problemformuleringen, hvilke kilder, der kan bruges. Nazistisk propaganda kan f.eks. ikke sige noget om "hvordan jøderne var", men det kan sige noget om "hvordan nazisterne ønskede at fremstille jøderne".

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The Imperfect Power of ‘I Am Not Your Negro’

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Raoul Peck’s documentary brings to life James Baldwin’s urgent ideas about race in America, but leaves out a key aspect of the writer’s life and work: his sexuality.

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At the tail end of the 1970s, the decade in which the dreams of revolution that sparked a generation went to die, James Baldwin wrote to his literary agent in order to put forth an idea for a book that he would never complete. The unrealized book, tentatively titled Remember This House, would be an account of the lives and murders of three of his friends-Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X-who are the most revered martyrs of the civil rights causes. Baldwin only finished 30 pages of the proposed booked before dying of AIDS in 1987. Haitian director Raoul Peck, whose previous, wide-ranging work has engaged with the political assassination of a Congolese statesman (2000's Lumumba) and the Rwandan genocide (2005's Sometimes in April), reclaims James Baldwin's quest in his new documentary I Am Not Your Negro.

An Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary, the 95-minute film is narrated by Samuel L. Jackson in Baldwin's words. It delves deep into the author's canon to erect, in bold cinematic terms, an audiovisual analog to the unfinished book. Leaning heavily on Baldwin's late-career film criticism, collected in The Devil Finds Work as much as the Remember This House manuscript, I Am Not Your Negro is a remarkable headlong rush into Baldwin's psyche and the nation's still-unresolved sicknesses of white supremacy and white fragility-the dueling things American liberals used to call, in Baldwin's day, "The Negro Problem." Peck combines archival material from popular films, the author's television appearances, and photographs of Baldwin alongside many of the contemporaries the film eulogizes. These sequences are juxtaposed with footage from more recent scenes of racial unrest, suggesting the continuum between events and eras. The director of as potent an exploration of America's irrational relationship with race as has ever been produced, Peck recently sat down with VICE for a conversation about his new film and the contemporary global political scene.

VICE: When did you first hear of Remember This House?
Raoul Peck: Oh, very late. I already had access to the rights. The estate had given me everything. I could use whatever I wanted. You ask for an option, and it's usually a one-year option that you can renew one, two, or sometimes a maximum of three times. And then they expect you to do the film and to buy the rights. I told them clearly that I didn't know what film it would be. I was experimenting between narrative and the documentary. I spent time with different authors trying to find the right axis, the right story.

Until, four years into it, I just decided the only way to go about it is to be very personal. To do a documentary and to give myself all the freedom I could-politically, artistically, on all levels, in terms of content, in terms of form. And then the question was how do I find the right entry point? How do I tell the film in a very original way, where it would be creative and where I would also feel inspired. That came through the form of these notes. I remember these that were given to me one day by Gloria Karefa-Smart-James Baldwin's younger sister. And that was it for me. That was the idea. The book that didn't exist, and then I said to myself, "Well it did, it's just all over the place of his body of work." So my job was to find it and to reconstruct that work in a very imaginative way, creative way.

And it gave me the excuse, beside those notes, to take out all the stuff about Baldwin that I loved all my life, all the books I had underlined, all the subjects. It gave me not only the freedom, but the access to everything because I could connect them.

It's interesting that you talk about those connections with his other works, his broader, his milieu. I was immediately thinking of The Devil Finds Work. The historical perspective that he engages film with-it's remarkable.
The Devil Finds Work is basically a deconstruction of how Hollywood-how the media, how literature-basically invented the "nigger," as you would say. It's all there. And this invention is linked with power. It's linked with economy. It's linked with history, and you have all that. So really reconstructing this book is at the same time an attempt to place Baldwin in all these different latitudes and levels and make a story out of it. And a story that would be the essence of all Baldwin.

"History is not the past. This story is the present."-Raoul Peck

One thing I think the film does marvelously is juxtapose footage of contemporary black liberation struggles and the work of past movements, with the sickness of contemporary life as a whole. There's that remarkable montage toward the end of reality television shows, talk shows, and Baldwin's words about how we're creating this false society, which somehow feels prescient in that moment.
The industry deals with this as they would deal with narcotic. But it connects those concerns to the past. It connects that society that we've created to avoid the truth to the tumult of the 1960s and of these three men's lives and Baldwin's relationships with them in that era. And history is not the past. This story is the present. That's an important statement. That means you say you are your history.

Did the new stuff that you shot in New York and in various places grow out of how you were responding to the archival material?
The idea itself was already there, and it was improved as we would go. There was an instance where people were watching and said, "Well, you need to give me a date here, so I understand I can follow." I said, "No. Where I want to go is that we can go back-and-forth without you asking me this question. And as long as you ask me this question, the edit is not where it should be."

We had a very clear idea of what we were looking for. My chief archivist was a French woman, but she knew the US very well. So she would search in the archive here, Library of Congress, and all the companies, but also we would do that in Germany. We would do that in Italy. We found footage about America that only existed on French television. And the idea was also to find images that people don't know that much. The civil rights era-you know those images. I didn't want to use those black-and-white images that we know so much. And people don't watch them anymore. Once you see them you say, "Oh yeah," and then you move on.

"Whatever the repression was 40 years ago, it's the same system, using just better tools."

Seeing, in a couple shots, an image turn from black-and-white to color again suggests this relationship between the past and the present. The continuity of history-your history is here and now. It's today.
That's why I play a lot of those images, because the subject is about creating images and where you don't know what is true and untrue and where color is a sign of modernity and black-and-white is old. And then I turn the images of Ferguson in black-and-white, so that, consciously or unconsciously, you react to that.

Whatever the repression was 40 years ago, it's the same system, using just better tools. But it's exactly the same thing. What it shows you, I hope, is that you need to find the proper response as well. The civil rights movement found a way to organize, and they were solid. Today we have movements, we have anger, we have spontaneous reaction. But are we solid enough to bring a response to what we are going through today? The film questions that, too.

What do you think, personally?
What I think is-it's not so much what I think-it's the facts, the facts of what: They killed most of the [civil rights movement's] leadership, or they bought them. When I say bought -they changed class, they became wealthy. Or their descendants became wealthy, or they became nobility. [Black sellouts] killed a lot of them. Some of them became crazy. Some of them are in exile. So the new generation has basically had no transition, and the few guys doing the transition are the first rappers. And then rap became commercial.

It's synonymous with capitalism.
Exactly. And on TV, the same thing. You could find some sort of, I would say, resistance in Soul Train or the black exploitation film. At the beginning, we thought wow, and then it becomes commerce again.

It's been argued that those films are empty catharsis.
Well, it simplifies stuff and gives you an idea. "Oh well, we are like the other, but we're just black." There is justice in that: This is a black bad guy and a white bad guy. We aren't used to having bad white guys.

Before those films, Baldwin actually talked around these issues in The Devil Finds Work, that black men are desexualized. And in Blaxploitation movies, they are hyper-sexualized.
Exactly.

There aren't black heroes that win, resorting to violence, hyper-violence. Even as belief in the viability of armed confrontation waned among black nationalist groups. And yet in that overreaction, perhaps, those films lost a chance to normalize the struggle for black liberation as well as the sort of lived in real experiences of working-class and middle-class African Americans.
You are right in the de-politicization, because what it said, basically, is [that] it keeps you in the black ghetto. It doesn't give you the big picture. It doesn't tell you that the problem is capitalism. The problem is class. The problem is poor on one side and the rich on one side

Or, as you suggest in the film via Baldwin's text, the NAACP was a classist organization.
Exactly, exactly. This is the dilemma now. By the way, I don't just see Black Lives Matter-I see Occupy Wall Street, I see many other movements that lost their momentum at the very moment when they needed to make the leap into politics. We are a civilization now where there is no more ideology. There is no more scientific truth. There is no more academic truth. Climate change exists, climate change doesn't exist.

You're a filmmaker who's taken on legacy subjects such as Patrice Lumumba's killing or the Rwandan genocide. This new film is very much about the life of a black American and the lived realities of black Americans. What do you think specifically allows you to inhabit, as an artist, these various spheres of pan-African storytelling?
They're not disparate-that's the thing. I was privileged very early on to start to see the connections. And I had decided very early on with the life I was having, the life my parents were having. The only way I can survive is to make sure wherever I am, I'm engaged. I'm in exile. This is something I never accept. I am where I live, you know? My father left Haiti in 1960. And I left in 1961. I was eight, and I went [to the Congo] with the image of Africa that I knew from American films-John Ford and all that. And I could swear to God that when I arrived I would see safari, I would see Africans dancing and smiling, and that's really what I thought. And that was one of the first shocks of my life. I grew up like this.

So it's part of my biography. And I think it's a freedom to never accept whatever other people say I should be. Baldwin said the same. He doesn't wake up and look at himself in the mirror and say, "Oh my God, I'm black, so I'm gonna act as a black man all day." You don't say that. When you grow up in the world, you think about the world. What can I do to change the world? What can I do to change my neighborhood? What can I do?

I have friends who were angry all of their life. I understand this anger. I understand, because it's frustrating. But then how do I tell them, yes, but what do you do? Are you going to do that all your life? Or beat the machine or try something else? Because that's what they want. They want to keep you angry.

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I Am Not Your Negro is now playing in theaters nationwide.

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'I Am Not Your Negro' Is a Brilliant Documentary About James Baldwin's Never-Finished Book

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At the tail end of the 1970s, the decade in which the dreams of revolution that sparked a generation went to die, James Baldwin wrote to his literary agent in order to put forth an idea for a book that he would never complete.