James Baldwin

This week on the ABR Podcast, Paul Kane marks the centenary of James Baldwin with an essay on this indispensable prophet. Kane tells us: ‘Baldwin insisted that the only way forward, the only way out [for America], was through a renovation of the self, and this could only be accomplished through deep communication and empathy’. Paul Kane is Professor Emeritus as Vassar College in upstate New York. Listen to Paul Kane’s ‘James Baldwin this time: The centenary of an indispensable prophet’, published in the August issue of ABR.  

In 1903 W.E.B. Du Bois famously declared: ‘The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.’ He meant not only in the United States but also elsewhere in the world. As for this century, in America, at least, we can now say it remains the dominant problem. The very fact, for instance, of a movement named ‘Black Lives Matter’ – now a decade old – speaks to something unspeakable: an obvious and overt racism that is driving America to a reckoning.

Rising to the lectern amid a tightly packed crowd in the Cambridge Union’s debating hall, James Baldwin began quietly and slowly to speak. ‘I find myself, not for the first time, in the position of a kind of Jeremiah.’ It was February 1965, and Baldwin was in the United Kingdom to promote his third novel, Another Country (1962). Baldwin’s British publicist had asked the Union if they would host the author. Peter Fullerton, the Union’s president, was quick to seize this opportunity, on one condition: that Baldwin participate in a debate.