KING: Two things seem to happen simultaneously. So he was an intimate part of the movement, but, again, I think Baldwin always felt a bit misfitted, if that makes sense.

And he wrote brilliantly and powerfully and beautifully about these experiences. According to one biographer, he joined CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC. GLAUDE: Even though he was often accused of compromising his art with politics or by politics, Baldwin always understood himself as a witness, that his charge was to make real the suffering. 'Begin Again: James Baldwin's America And Its Urgent Lessons For Our Own.' We talked about Baldwin's two roles, artist and activist. KING: Years after those early encounters with Baldwin's writing in grad school, Glaude started to love his work and understand it differently. He wants to say that we can't think about Black life as just simply deficit. GLAUDE: There is a sense in which Baldwin is rejecting a kind of social realist understanding of Black life. Baldwin too was interested in the experiences of Black Americans beyond the trauma that racism caused them. And that lie allowed white Americans to think they were innocent. KING: James Baldwin wrote that the United States was built on a lie, that we were a free and equal society. You know, not only was I having to deal with what he was doing to me on the inside, I had to deal with them. It was truthful, but so angry it made Glaude's white classmates uncomfortable, which made him uncomfortable.ĮDDIE GLAUDE JR: When we read Baldwin, all hell would break loose. first read James Baldwin seriously in graduate school.

Begin again eddie glaude review