Begin Again

Chapter One

The Lie

James Baldwin and Stokely Carmichael first met during the heady days of the movement to desegregate the South. Carmichael was a young activist and a member of a student group at Howard University called the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG), which sought to combat racism and segregation in Washington, D.C., and in the surrounding areas of Virginia and Maryland. NAG offered a snapshot of the civil rights movement s future: Carmichael s fellow students in the group included Courtland Cox, Michael Thelwell, Muriel Tillinghast, and Ruth Brown, all of whom would go on to be influential leaders in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). On Howard s campus, NAG sponsored a series of programs called Project Awareness, which was designed to explore the full complexity and richness of black life and to engage the controversies surrounding the black freedom movement. It was through these programs that James Baldwin was invited to campus.

During the spring semester of 1963, after the violent response directed at the movement in Birmingham, the group organized a symposium about the role and responsibility of the black writer in the civil rights struggle. They invited Baldwin, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, novelists John O. Killens and Ralph Ellison, and actor and playwright Ossie Davis. Ellison sent his regrets, and Hansberry was too ill to attend, but students packed the auditorium. Baldwin had just finished a speaking tour on behalf of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), and this audience was hungry to hear him speak. Malcolm X, in town by happenstance, dropped in to hear Jimmy hold forth. Whenever I hear that this little brother is going to speak in any town where I am, he said, I always make a point of going to listen, because I learn something.

Baldwin didn t disappoint. He was a captivating speaker, with a powerful, almost hypnotic cadence; if the desire to be a preacher had long ago left him, his ability to hold a

Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

Begin Again is a groundbreaking and informative guide to Baldwin and his era. The Washington Post
 
A rugged literary miracle. Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy

Even if you don t agree with Glaude s interpretations, you ll find yourself productively arguing with them. He parses, he pronounces, he cajoles. He spurs you to revisit Baldwin s work yourself. The New York Times
 
Not only is Baldwin brought rushing forth from the page, with all the beauty of his prose and complexity of his thought, but Glaude s voice joins him with a force and clarity of its own. . . . Baldwin and Glaude offer us a path forward that is both exceedingly difficult and genuinely hopeful. The Post and Courier

In the midst of an ugly Trump regime and a beautiful Baldwin revival, Eddie Glaude has plunged to the profound depths and [soared to the] sublime heights of Baldwin s prophetic challenge to our present-day crisis. Cornel West, author of Democracy Matters and Race Matters

Begin Again is . . . a timeless and spellbinding conversation between two brilliant writers. Edwidge Danticat, author of Brother, I m Dying and Everything Inside
 
One need not agree with everything in these pages to learn much from them, and for Americans seeking to understand our past, our present, and the possible futures before us, Begin Again challenges, illuminates, and points us toward, if not a more perfect union, at least a more just one. ­Jon Meacham, author of The Soul of America and Destiny and Power

Glaude's work is urgent, pained, and strangely hopeful. He is issuing a call to reckoning: not just with the dishonesty of America's founding promises, but with the tolls that its intrinsic racism has taken on the artists and thinkers who have come before. Rebecca Traister, author of All the Single Ladies and Good and Mad

James Baldwin is a man for our moment: in a time of Black