An excerpt from

BEGIN AGAIN: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own by Eddie
S. Glaude Jr.
__________
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 Mary-land.
NAG offered a snapshot of the civil rights movement’s future: Carmichael’s fellow students in
the group included Court-land 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 some-thing.”
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 crowd
in his hand had not. “It is the responsibility of the Negro writer to excavate the real history of this
country . . . to tell us what really happened to get us where we are now,” he boldly declared from
the stage at Howard. “We must tell the truth till we can no longer bear it.”
After the symposium ended, Baldwin, Killens, and Davis joined a group of students in
the small, cramped apartment of a few NAG members. The hour was late. Jimmy needed a glass
of Johnnie Walker Black, but the liquor stores were closed. Someone knew a bootlegger. The
impromptu rap session went on until sun-rise. “Our older brothers reasoned with us like family,”
Carmichael, who would become known as Kwame Ture, later recalled, even though he confused
the date of the panel and the subsequent events. “We had three years of struggle behind us,” he
said. “So was the March on Washington and Dr. King’s Dream. John F. Kennedy had recently
been gunned down. The national mood was sore, tense, and uncertain, as was our mood.”
Everyone understood the burden the students carried on their shoulders. Despite their relative
youth, they had already confronted the brutality of the South in an effort to desegregate lunch
counters and to register black people to vote. Many had been beaten and chased down dusty
roads in Mississippi and Alabama by the Klan and by white sheriffs. These students were the
shock troops of the civil rights movement, and many suffered from the trauma induced by a
region and a country reluctant to change. Pessimism and rage threatened to overwhelm them.
Baldwin worried about the young men and women like an older brother who did not
know exactly how to protect them from the dangers he already glimpsed ahead. For him, the
brutality of “Bull” Connor’s dogs and firehoses in Birmingham had already foreshadowed what
was to come, revealing a depth to the country’s depravity that no single piece of legislation could
cure.
As the meeting wound down, Baldwin was left to say the final words, and he brought the
conversation full circle to the reason why the students had invited him to campus. “Well, here we
are, my young brothers and sisters. Here’s how matters stand. I, Jimmy Baldwin, as a black
writer, must in some way represent you. Now, you didn’t elect me and I didn’t ask for it, but here
we are.” All eyes were fixed on him. “Everything I write will in some way reflect on you. So . . .
what do we do? I’ll make you a pledge. If you will promise your elder brother that you will
never, ever accept any of the many derogatory, degrading, and reductive definitions that this
society has ready for you, then I, Jimmy Baldwin, promise you I shall never betray you.”
It was an avowal of love, and a declaration of his responsibility as a writer dedicated to
speaking the truth.
________

“It is, alas, the truth that to be an American writer today means mounting an unending
attack on all that Americans believe them-selves to hold sacred,” Baldwin wrote in 1962. “It
means fighting an astute and agile guerrilla warfare with that American complacency which so
inadequately masks the American panic.” In this sense, Baldwin’s view of the writer was a
decidedly moral one. The writer puts aside America’s myths and legends and forces a kind of
confrontation with the society as it is, becoming a disturber of the peace in doing so.
By the time Baldwin sat down with the Howard students in 1963, he was at the height of
his powers, if not yet the full- on disturber of the peace he would soon become. In a relatively
short period of time since the publication of his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, in 1953,
his play Amen Corner in 1954, and his first book of essays, Notes of a Native Son, in 1955, he
had become one of the most prominent African American writers and critics in the United States.
With his view of the moral role of the writer; his faith in the redemptive possibilities of human
beings, no matter their color; and his initial faith in the possibility that the country could change,
Baldwin was catapulted to literary fame and emerged as one of the most incisive and honest
critics of America and its race problem. His admirers stretched across racial and political
spectrums. Malcolm X referred to him as “the poet of the revolution.” Edmund Wilson described
him as one of the great creative artists of the country.
 Since the publication of Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin had insisted that the country
grapple with the contradiction at the heart of its self- understanding: the fact that in this so-
called democracy, people believed that the color of one’s skin determined the relative value of an
individual’s life and justified the way American society was organized. That belief and
justification had dehumanized entire groups of people. White Americans were not excluded from
its effects. “In this debasement and definition of black people,” Baldwin argued, white people
“debased and defined themselves.”
Baldwin’s understanding of the American condition cohered around a set of practices
that, taken together, constitute something I will refer to throughout this book as the lie. The idea
of facing the lie was always at the heart of Jimmy’s witness, because he thought that it, as
opposed to our claim to the shining city on a hill, was what made America truly exceptional. The
lie is more properly several sets of lies with a single purpose. If what I have called the “value
gap” is the idea that in America white lives have always mattered more than the lives of others,
then the lie is a broad and powerful architecture of false assumptions by which the value gap is
maintained. These are the narrative assumptions that support the everyday order of American
life, which means we breathe them like air. We count them as truths. We absorb them into our
character.
One set of lies debases black people; examples stretch from the writings of the Founding
Fathers to The Bell Curve. According to these lies, black people are essentially inferior, less
human than white people, and therefore deserving of their particular station in American life. We
see these lies every day in the stereotypes that black people are lazy, dishonest, sexually
promiscuous, prone to criminal behavior, and only seeking a handout from big government.
Baldwin made the Howard students promise him that they would never believe the lies the
country told about them, because he knew that the lie would do irreparable harm to their souls, as
it had done to the country.
Another constituent part of the lie involves lies about American history and about the
trauma that America has visited throughout that history on people of color both at home and
abroad. According to these lies, America is fundamentally good and innocent, its bad deeds
dismissed as mistakes corrected on the way to “a more perfect union.” The United States has
always been shadowed by practices that contradict our most cherished principles. The genocide
of native peoples, slavery, racial apartheid, Japanese internment camps, and the subordination of
women reveal that our basic creed that “all men are created equal” was a lie, at least in practice.
These weren’t minor events in the grand history of the “redeemer nation,” nor were they simply
the outcomes of a time when such views were widely held. Each moment represented a profound
revelation about who we were as a country— just as the moments of resistance against them said
something about who we aspired to be.
But the lie’s most pernicious effect when it comes to our history is to malform events to
fit the story whenever America’s innocence is threatened by reality. When measured against our
actions, the story we have told ourselves about America being a divinely sanctioned nation called
to be a beacon of light and a moral force in the world is a lie. The idea of the “Lost Cause” as
just an honest assessment of what happened after the Civil War is a lie. The stories we often tell
ourselves of the civil rights movement and racial progress in this country, with Rosa Parks’s
courage, Dr. King’s moral vision, and the unreasonable venom of Black Power, culminating in
the election of Barack Obama, are all too often lies.
Taken as a whole, then, the lie is the mechanism that allows, and has always allowed, America to
avoid facing the truth about its unjust treatment of black people and how it deforms the soul of
the country. The lie cuts deep into the American psyche. It secures our national innocence in the
face of the ugliness and evil we have done.

Excerpted from Begin Again by Eddie S. Glaude Jr. Copyright © 2020 by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.. Excerpted by
permission of Crown, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.