Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own

by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

Dr. King had gained enough steam to reach a vote in the House, though it did not yet succeed. But Baldwin worried that tributes to King served to obscure a deeper truth. People could ignore what was happening in black communities across the country and instead celebrate the so-called legacy of Dr. King. They could pin King’s wings to the page. In this sense and for that purpose, Baldwin lamented, the memorials and the named streets perfumed the carnage. They hid in plain sight what actually happened to many of the movement’s survivors and their children. All one had to do was look down from the street signs for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue and see the poor neighborhoods along it to get the point. As Baldwin said to David, his words slurring slightly from a bit too much drink: The monument [Dr. King’s memorial] in Atlanta is absolutely as irrelevant as the Lincoln memorial. It is one of the ways the Western world has learned or thinks it has learned to outwit history, to outwit time—to make a life and a death irrelevant, to make that passion irrelevant, to make it unusable for you and for our children. There is nothing you can do with that monument, someone said to the widow. The film makes plain the lessons about the domestication