“We cannot cordon off his rage and leave behind the later works.” Americans need that wisdom and rage now, Glaude argues, because the nation is again in the downswing of a tragic cycle: the United States commits to multiracial democracy, reneges, and renews its allegiance to a racial hierarchy.

But today’s readers often reach only for the early Baldwin-the Baldwin of the civil rights years-and are therefore “only grasping a part of his gift,” according to Glaude. With the emergence of Black Lives Matter, a new generation of readers has ushered in a Baldwin revival. Glaude Jr.’s timely new book, Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own. What Baldwin learned, and how he endured the betrayal of civil rights, is the subject of Eddie S. “On one level,” according to Baldwin, “the civil rights movement was betrayed, but on a much more important level, we all learned something tremendous out of that effort and out of the betrayal something important about ourselves.”

Baldwin recast the movement as a “slave insurrection.” Baldwin not only demythologized the era in retrospect-he also found in it sources of hope. Baldwin had been a key player in the movement, with Malcolm X calling him “the poet of the revolution,” and King praising his testimony to the “problems of being black in a multiracial society.”īut Baldwin also felt it his duty to correct the triumphalist story of civil rights that had already begun to form. In 1979, over a decade after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., an interviewer asked James Baldwin to reflect on the civil rights struggle.

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