March 2011
39 posts
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The American Dream and the American Negro
By JAMES BALDWIN March 7, 1965
I find myself, not for the first time, in the position of a kind of Jeremiah. It would seem to me that the question before the house is a proposition horribly loaded, that one’s response to that question depends on where you find yourself in the world, what your sense of reality is. That is, it depends on assumptions we hold so deeply as to be scarcely...
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February 2011
50 posts
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“When Tish cries for Fonny and longs for his freedom, she is the Baldwin voice...”
– David Leeming
James Baldwin A Biography by David Leeming
p. 325 on James Baldwin & If Beale Street Could Talk
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Tell Me How Long James Baldwin's Been Gone →
by Alex Carnevale
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One-man play recounts Baldwin’s life →
On Feb. 18 in the Janet Kinghorn Bernhard Theater, Staged Dreams presented “James Baldwin – Down from the Mountaintop” an original solo play written and performed by Calvin Levels.
The play takes the audience through the life of James Baldwin, who was a novelist, playwright and human rights activist.
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Notes of a Native American: Chronicle of a... →
by Sol Stein The Literary Life July/August 2004 7.01.04
Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin’s best-known book, was published in 1955 by Beacon Press. Baldwin’s editor then was Sol Stein, whom he’d known since high school. This essay is an excerpt from Stein’s Introduction to Native Sons by Baldwin and Stein, which will be published by One World, an imprint of Random House, next month. The...
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Museum acquires rare Baldwin photographs →
By Jacqueline Trescott
A collection of photographs of James Baldwin, one of the leading literary figures of the 20th Century, has been acquired by the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
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If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me,...
James Baldwin
New York Times July 29, 1979
St. Paul de Vence, France—The argument concerning the use, or the status, or the reality, of black English is rooted in American history and has absolutely nothing to do with the question the argument supposes itself to be posing. The argument has nothing to do with language itself but with the role of language. Language, incontestably,...
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‘Take This Hammer’: Classic 1963 film of James... →
KQED’s mobile film unit follows author and activist James Baldwin in the spring of 1963 as he’s driven around San Francisco to meet with members of the local African-American community. He is escorted by Youth for Service Executive Director Orville Luster and is intent on discovering “the real situation of Negroes in the city, as opposed to the image San Francisco would like to present.”
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GRITtv: James Baldwin: Still So Much To Teach Us →
“The paradox of education is precisely this — that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.” James Baldwin wrote that in 1963, but as we watch teachers and their students leading pro-labor protests in Wisconsin and around the country, it remains truer than ever. Baldwin died in 1987, but his novels and...
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James Baldwin, The Art of Fiction No. 78 →
Interviewed by Jordan Elgrably
This interview was conducted in the two places dearest to James Baldwin’s struggle as a writer. We met first in Paris, where he spent the first nine years of a burgeoning career and wrote his first two novels, Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room, along with his best-known collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son. It was in Paris, he says, that he...
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WatchFlorida Forum: James Baldwin - 1963
Courtesy: wolfsonarchive.org Author James Baldwin taped a candid and fascinating studio interview at WCKT - Miami in 1963. Featured in this edition of the long running program, “Florida Forum”: questions by an in-studio audience and a panel of local journalists.
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Another Country: James Baldwin’s flight from... →
by Claudia Roth Pierpont
…Baldwin had been fleeing from place to place for much of his adult life. He was barely out of his teens when he left his Harlem home for Greenwich Village, in the early forties, and he had escaped altogether at twenty-four, in 1948, buying a one-way ticket to Paris, with no intention of coming back. His father was dead by then, and his mother had eight...
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Trapped Inside James Baldwin. →
For a certain generation, the writings of James Baldwin are like the date to the senior prom: a memory so luminous that it is never re-examined. As the civil rights struggle moved to the forefront of the country’s consciousness during the two decades following World War II, its anguish and aspiration found eloquent expression in his novels and essays. Baldwin commanded a full spectrum...
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James Baldwin Speech: January 15, 1979 →
In this 1979 speech Mr. Baldwin talked about being a black writer, about the civil rights movement, and other topics.
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An Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Davis. →
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Freeing James Baldwin. →
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james baldwin interview: on revolution (1964) →
whatijustread:
01:00:38 Robert Penn Warren Civil Rights Oral History Project Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History University of Kentucky
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The state of being alone is not meant to bring to...
tobia:
JAMES BALDWIN “The Creative Process” from Creative America, Ridge Press, 1962
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“All I know about music is not many people ever hear it. And even then, on the...”
– James Baldwin Sonny’s Blues (via cheepandsnail)
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