In need of real love poems. Are there any you feel? Send them on and let’s fool time by freezing it for a little while and remembering some thing good. Love.
I will say that Jimmy was not ever the easiest read for me. In fact, I loved him more after I read the letter to Angela Davis. Before that he was someone who had the adult writing life I thought I wanted and was at the cocktail things and rents parties I always dreamed of. His books have amazing quotes amidst stories so sweeping that one feels like if Gypsy Rose were black and from the ghetto, Jimmy would have her cornered. He mingled in a world our parents and grandparents didn’t know existed until he told us about it. And then we all could hope on board the intergrationist express while always keeping the ear out for Malcolm’s words. What other writer could dance a watusti in both worlds? You must understand and repeat after me: James Baldwin, black gay writer from the ghetto turned international metropolitan writer extraordinairre was the writer to which Malcolm shared his story.
Know that before this time, our pop culture celebrities were not anything like Jay or Kanye or even Whoopi. We’d had Butterfly McQueen and Stepen Fetchit but they all lived under the roof of Jim Crow and would not know the life Jimmy had. Nor Malcolm. More than his writing, I value Jimmy’s dedication to staying in the present moment of life. Whenever you read about some movement of that time, Jimmy is there and then writing about it. He was no couch potato activist. I myself am a moderate keyboard activist so I can tell the difference in our movements. Jimmy multi-tasked in a way that was necessary and not just for ambition, success or convenience.
Known widely for his essays, Jimmy shared instead of telling. How many writers make you feel as if you are having a glass of wine with them while listening to a Max Roach record in an apartment off of Central Park, waiting for the driver of some socialite who’s invited everyone back to her place on Park Ave. for cocktails all the while giving you a blow by blow of the latest riot that happened down south?
In tribute, my friend Jelani Cobb who is walking down the essay road that Jimmy paved awhile ago, adding his own detours of course, has sent out this email that I wanted to share.
Hey All:
I’m sure you all have very busy schedules and days crammed with work and responsibilities. I wanted to take a moment to point out that today marks what would have been James Baldwin’s 83rd birthday. I’ve often repeated the story of not really knowing who he was until he passed away my freshman year at Howard and my English professor spent the class trying to impress upon us his monumental significance. Earlier this year I published The Devil & Dave Chappelle, my first collection of essays. As an essayist Baldwin’s work has been indispensable to me. I read Notes of a Native Son and Evidence of Things Not Seen in my early twenties and then devoured his collected non-fiction The Price of The Ticket. I remember being stunned at how eloquently he stated our claim on America and the weight of history in the present. I have pointed more than a few aspiring writers at Spelman in Baldwin’s direction.
I included below some of Baldwin’s notable quotes below. I hope you enjoy them and remember a brother whose contributions to our tradition is inestimable.
Peace & Love,
Jelani C.
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they’re better than other human beings.
People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the battle field.
American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.
Education is indoctrination if you’re white - subjugation if you’re black.
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.
No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.
No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.
One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.
People can cry much easier than they can change.
The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.
The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
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