Person

James Baldwin

Related Excerpts

People protesting the demolition of homes to make way for the performing arts saying "shelter before culture."

Lincoln Center Destroyed Lives for the Sake of the Arts

The terrific new doc “San Juan Hill” chronicles the 1960s land grab that gave the Metropolitan Opera a home, while scattering longtime residents.
Mural of Black leaders (from left to right) Malcolm X, Ella Baker, Martin Luther King and Fredrick Douglass

Ella Baker, Pragmatism, and Black Democratic Perfectionism

The great civil rights leader was suspicious of charisma, and she had something else in mind.
A rendering of Buckminster Fuller and June Jordan's “Skyrise for Harlem” project published in Esquire, April 1965.

Nowhere But Up

In the wake of the 1964 Harlem riots, June Jordan and Buckminster Fuller’s plan to redesign the neighborhood suggested new possibilities for urban life.
Aaron Douglas, detail from painting Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery to Reconstruction, 1934.

The Cosmopolitan Modernism of the Harlem Renaissance

The world-spanning art of the Harlem Renaissance.
Vice President Joe Biden visits Israel on January 13, 2014.

The Shoah After Gaza

Jewish suffering at the hands of Nazis are the foundation on which most descriptions of extreme ideology and atrocity have been built.
Abstract painting of people in line

How America Ends and Begins Again

Because so much of what we have come to expect of our country is unraveling, we have an opportunity to build it anew.
Dorothy Roberts.

A Damning Exposé of Medical Racism and “Child Welfare”

A new book exposes effects of anti-Black myth-making and calls for an end to the family policing system.
Drawing of Josiah Henson

The Man Who Became Uncle Tom

Harriet Beecher Stowe said that Josiah Henson’s life had inspired her most famous character. But Henson longed to be recognized by his own name.
Entrance to the Texas State Cemetery.

It's Time to Defend the History of All Texans

The way we learn about our collective past is under attack thanks to new leadership at the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA).
Morlok quadruplets with a teacher next to a chalkboard.

Sleepwalking to Madness in Mid-Century America

On Audrey Clare Farley’s “Girls and Their Monsters.”
Miles Davis, Howard McGhee, and unknown pianist. NYC, September 1947.

On Menand’s "The Free World" and Dinerstein’s "The Origins of Cool in Postwar America"

Two differing explorations of post-WWII culture, politics, and ideals.
Ronald Squire, Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge.

Against Race Essentialism

Black identity is a reality, not an idea.
Black writers Askia Toure, Lorenzo Thomas, and Ismael Reed seated at an Umbra meeting.

A New Flame for Black Fire

What will be the legacy of the Black Arts Movement? Ishmael Reed reflects on the transformation and growth of Black arts since the 1960s.
Photograph of an African American family buying ice cream at a segregated ice cream shop

Gordon Parks' View of America Across Three Decades

Two new books and one expanded edition of Gordon Parks' photographs look at the work of the photographer from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.
Mark Wallinger's "Self-Portrait," a painting showing black dripping paint in the silhouette of an unfurled scroll on a grey background

The Illusion of the First Person

The personal essay is the purest expression of the lie that individual subjectivity exists prior to the social formations that gave rise to it.
Portrait of Medgar Evers.

The Day The Civil-Rights Movement Changed

What my father saw in Mississippi.
Illustration of a mid-life crisis by Ruth Basagoitia. A man looking into the mirror imagining a cooler version of himself.

Climacteric!

Taking seriously the midlife crisis.
Whoopi Goldberg overlaid with black and white stripes on red background

Whoopi Goldberg’s American Idea of Race

The “racial” distinctions between master and slave may be more familiar to Americans, but they were and are no more real than those between Gentile and Jew.
Compilation of images: signs at the 1963 March on Washington, poster about censorship, confederate flag, KKK members in hoods, drawing of overseer wielding whip, classroom with portrait of Lincoln on the wall.

Behind the Critical Race Theory Crackdown

Racial blamelessness and the politics of forgetting.
Image of McClure's book, Winter in America: A Cultural History of the Neoliberalism, from the Sixties to the Reagan Revolution.

The Conservative Culture War

American innocence, the possession of history, and January 6, 2021.