For James Baldwin, “new laws, gestures of sympathy, and acts of racial charity would never suffice to change the course of the country,” Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., writes. “Something more radical had to be done; a different history had to be told.”
On March 16, 1968, James Baldwin walked to the podium at a fund-raiser, at Anaheim’s Disneyland Hotel, to introduce Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Baldwin had recently arrived in Los Angeles from New York, after Columbia Pictures had bought the rights to Alex Haley’s “his
How Baldwin ended up at the fund-raiser is unclear, although Marlon Brando, who organized it, may have invited him; the two were close. In any case, Baldwin had not been expecting to introduce King, and his short speech said little about the leader. Instead, he told a brief story about the promise of the early days of the civil-rights movement, a promise that was betrayed by the country. “What Rosa Parks was saying in Montgomery, in 1956, and what the Negroes were saying in their march . . .
Baldwin argued that King had to confront the meaning of a new, uncompromising spirit in the movement. Leaders like him were being challenged by their children, who rejected the underlying premise that made “the traditional black leader” necessary in the first place. As Baldwin put it, “These young people have never believed in the American image of the Negro and have never bargained with the Republic, and now they never will. There is no longer any basis on which to bargain.
The importance of history had been in full view for both Baldwin and King just a few weeks earlier, at a Carnegie Hall event, in New York City, celebrating what would have been the hundredth birthday of W. E. B. Du Bois, the great African-American intellectual and the co-founder of the N.A.A.C.P. Du Bois, after seven decades of fighting for racial justice in the United States, had given up on America and died, in exile, in Accra, Ghana, on the eve of the March on Washington, in 1963.
Baldwin was hardly naïve about the human capacity for evil, especially in white folk. “If you’re a Negro, you’re in the center of that peculiar affliction,” he said, “because anybody can touch you—when the sun goes down. You know, you’re the target of everybody’s fantasies.” But what shocked him was that white America had killed someone who espoused love, an apostle of nonviolence. King’s death revealed the depths of white America’s debasement and the scope of black America’s peril.
On August 12, 2017, James Fields, Jr., a twenty-year-old self-proclaimed neo-Nazi from Kenton, Kentucky, floored the gas pedal of his 2010 Dodge Challenger and roared down a narrow street full of anti-racist protesters, during the “Unite the Right” rally, in Charlottesville, Virginia. Heather Heyer, who was raised in nearby Ruckersville, was in the crowd. According to people who knew her, Heyer, thirty-two, had spent much of her life “standing up against any type of discrimination.
Moore was presenting a different narrative about the statues. After Charlottesville, though, American historians made clear that the monuments were not, in fact, erected as contemporaneous memorials of the Civil War. Most were built many years later, either between the eighteen-nineties and the first decades of the twentieth century, when most of the Confederate veterans began to die, or in the nineteen-fifties, when the demand for racial equality intensified.
Something like this question confronted the community of Princeton University, where I teach, in November, 2015. That month, the Black Justice League, a student activist organization on campus, staged a thirty-three-hour sit-in at the president’s office. The action was part of a national student movement in support of anti-racism protests at the University of Missouri.
The issue is far from resolved. Black students at Princeton aren’t interlopers. They are not guests on campus or beneficiaries of charity who should be grateful to the school. They are, unlike in Wilson’s day, an integral part of the community. And, like all students on campus, they should feel a sense of possession of the university. Much more work needs to be done, but their protest brilliantly forced the university to reassess its past in the full light of its current values.
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