Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

But you know, America is like Never Never Land.

You know, we all want to be lost boys and girls where we don't want to be responsible or accountable.

We'd rather be safe and secure in our innocence.

And, you know, it's that moment in Baldwin's The Fire Next Time where he says, people either don't know or they don't want to admit, in effect, what's happened to thousands and thousands of their countrymen.

And he said, you can't be innocent in the face of that.

The innocence is the crime.

So America's not unique in its sins.

We may be unique in the efficient way in which we deny them.

When everyone was turning their backs on Black Power, Baldwin didn't.

And he knew the cost.

He should have won a Nobel a long time ago.

He knew the cost.

He turned his back on the New York intellectuals, all of those white writers, the chattering classes of New York that gave him the platform, that projected him out.

He turned his back on them.

When he told those young college students at Howard University in 1963, if you promise your elder brother that you will never believe what the world says about you, I promise you that I will never betray you.

And even when they questioned his manhood, his sexuality, his dedication to black folk, he never betrayed them.

That doesn't mean he wasn't critical.

He understood from whence these young folk came.

And he was trying to tell a story about how their eyes darkened, how these once holy fools who risked everything to transform the country and the bowels of the South as they organized nonviolently.

These same children were now screaming black power and burning cities down.