February 2011
50 posts
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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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WatchTake This Hammer
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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...
