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Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • "A powerful study of how to bear witness in a moment when America is being called to do the same."-Time
James Baldwin grew disillusioned by the failure of the civil rights movement to force America to confront its lies about race. What can we learn from his struggle in our own moment?
Named one of the best books of the year by Time, The Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune • Winner of the Stowe Prize • Shortlisted for the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice
"Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again."-James Baldwin
Begin Again is one of the great books on James Baldwin and a powerful reckoning with America's ongoing failure to confront the lies it tells itself about race. Just as in Baldwin's "after times," argues Eddie S. Glaude Jr., when white Americans met the civil rights movement's call for truth and justice with blind rage and the murders of movement leaders, so in our moment were the Obama presidency and the birth of Black Lives Matter answered with the ascendance of Trump and the violent resurgence of white nationalism.
In these brilliant and stirring pages, Glaude finds hope and guidance in Baldwin as he mixes biography-drawn partially from newly uncovered Baldwin interviews-with history, memoir, and poignant analysis of our current moment to reveal the painful cycle of Black resistance and white retrenchment. As Glaude bears witness to the difficult truth of racism's continued grip on the national soul, Begin Again is a searing exploration of the tangled web of race, trauma, and memory, and a powerful interrogation of what we must ask of ourselves in order to call forth a new America.
James Baldwin grew disillusioned by the failure of the civil rights movement to force America to confront its lies about race. What can we learn from his struggle in our own moment?
Named one of the best books of the year by Time, The Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune • Winner of the Stowe Prize • Shortlisted for the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice
"Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again."-James Baldwin
Begin Again is one of the great books on James Baldwin and a powerful reckoning with America's ongoing failure to confront the lies it tells itself about race. Just as in Baldwin's "after times," argues Eddie S. Glaude Jr., when white Americans met the civil rights movement's call for truth and justice with blind rage and the murders of movement leaders, so in our moment were the Obama presidency and the birth of Black Lives Matter answered with the ascendance of Trump and the violent resurgence of white nationalism.
In these brilliant and stirring pages, Glaude finds hope and guidance in Baldwin as he mixes biography-drawn partially from newly uncovered Baldwin interviews-with history, memoir, and poignant analysis of our current moment to reveal the painful cycle of Black resistance and white retrenchment. As Glaude bears witness to the difficult truth of racism's continued grip on the national soul, Begin Again is a searing exploration of the tangled web of race, trauma, and memory, and a powerful interrogation of what we must ask of ourselves in order to call forth a new America.
Editorial Reviews
"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 Lives Matter, we've come to think about our past, our colonial history, enslavement, matters of race and identity. You're left with an understanding of the extraordinary modernity, relevance, and the immense power of James Baldwin. It's a simply wonderful book."-Philippe Sands, author of East West Street
"The magic of Begin Again is that it allows us to ponder Baldwin both in his perilous era and in our own. Remarkable, and remarkably relevant."-Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Life on Mars
"Begin Again is an unparalleled masterpiece of social criticism. Glaude thinks alongside America's finest essayist, matching ...
"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 Lives Matter, we've come to think about our past, our colonial history, enslavement, matters of race and identity. You're left with an understanding of the extraordinary modernity, relevance, and the immense power of James Baldwin. It's a simply wonderful book."-Philippe Sands, author of East West Street
"The magic of Begin Again is that it allows us to ponder Baldwin both in his perilous era and in our own. Remarkable, and remarkably relevant."-Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Life on Mars
"Begin Again is an unparalleled masterpiece of social criticism. Glaude thinks alongside America's finest essayist, matching ...
Readers Top Reviews
S. RosenfeldSherry C
This is a must-read for those of us who were shaped by the works of James Baldwin. Professor Glaude masterfully reflects on our predicament today through the prism of Baldwin’s words back then. It’s more than “I am Not Your Negro”, a long cinematic soliloquy, quoting Baldwin, which was beautiful in its own right. This work of art uses Baldwin’s words as rich and varied pigments, applied to the page with care by Glaude’s brilliant brush. In this way, Begin Again achieves the originality of a joint enterprise.
Shark🦈
This book kind of connects with this book called "Theories Of A Mastermind" by James Moultrie. I feel like you cant read this and not read that one aswell. These books are well written and give you a whole new outlook and new foundation to your behavior. A radical change will take place within yourself. !!!
Dante Stewart
An absolutely stunning engagement with one of the most important literary minds in America. Dr. Glaude once again has written a word for this moment as we wrestle with the deepest questions of democracy. If you’re concerned about change, read this book.
Gloria
As a correctional employee currently working in a private prison, Begin Again presented an important historical perspective that has helped me to gain empathy and the courage to move forward in life. After over three years of Trump's ugly, racist and misogynistic regime, I felt I would rather die than endure another four years of this gross human being who is representing all of us. Mr. Glaude's writing is exhilarating; when he is on Morning Joe I am captivated by his words of wisdom. Now, if Mr. Glaude could just explain to me how we ever elected such a despicable person to the most prestigious office in the world … and how our Senate could ever follow (and not impeach) such a deviant. I am disappointed in our elected Republican leaders beyond words … no, not really … they will all be the compost heap of history.
Alex Saperstein / O
I think Begin Again will be on my bedside stand for the rest of my life. Glaude's own writing, and not just the amazing passages he includes of Baldwin's, moved me profoundly. I've been reading it slowly all week long, putting it down often because it is so challenging, so beautifully written, and achingly wrenching to read. I'm buying copies for my niblings, and for friends. Sometimes books come along and you know you will be changed by them hopefully forever. This is one of those books.
Short Excerpt Teaser
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 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 sunrise. "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 sheriff "Bull" Connor's dogs and firehouses 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 wr...
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 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 sunrise. "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 sheriff "Bull" Connor's dogs and firehouses 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 wr...
