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

by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

In July of 1968, just a few months after King’s assassination and against the backdrop of American cities burning, Baldwin gave an interview to Esquire magazine. He set the tone of the interview with his answers to the magazine editors’ first two questions. Q. How can we get the black people to cool it? A. It is not for us to cool it. Q. But aren’t you the ones who are getting hurt the most? A. No, we are only the ones who are dying fastest. The editors did not see how the moral burden of America’s racial nightmare rested not with the black people rioting in the streets but with those white people who insisted on holding so tightly to the belief that they were somehow, because of the color of their skin, better than others who were not white. These people, Baldwin argued, had to see themselves otherwise. Passing new laws or declarations of unending sympathy or acts of racial charity would never be enough to change the course of this country. Something more radical had to be done; a different history had to be told. Now Baldwin spoke directly to the editors—and, by extension, to white America. I imagine his brow furrowed, with a slight smile in the beginning, only later turning to an intense gaze: I’m not trying to accuse you, you know. That’s not the point. But you have a lot to face….All that can save you now is your confrontation with your own history…which is not your past, but your present. Nobody cares what happened in the past. One can’t afford to care what happened ...