Rand Abdel-Fattah

Baldwin was a Black man, he was gay, and he was active from the 1940s to his death in 1987.

He's still considered one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.

His story is amazing, but that isn't what we're going to focus on in this episode.

We're going to meet someone who spent his career diving into the meaning and purpose of James Baldwin's work, of his ideas.

Someone who can help us see the world through his eyes.

So that maybe, just maybe, we can gather a little more strength to face the things that must be changed in ourselves and our culture.

In 2018, Eddie was starting to write that book about Baldwin, but he was struggling.

So he went to Heidelberg, Germany on a fellowship to try and figure it out.

He'd just arrived at the train station when he saw something disturbingly familiar.

Here's how he describes it in his book.

So just to establish, who was James Baldwin?

You know, those lies that, as you say, we tell ourselves personally and socially, like as a society, we tell ourselves.

On the one hand, it's that sort of self-preservation reflex that we have on both that sort of micro and macro level.

And it just makes me think, you know, there's a certain vulnerability that it takes to own up to a lie and to look it straight in the eye and say, this is not the truth.

And so in some ways, you know, that process of confrontation that you yourself, it seems, had to go through just to tackle this subject is also sort of a process of confrontation that Baldwin was saying the country needed to experience.

When we come back, James Baldwin refuses to take the bribe

and pays a heavy price.

Part 2.

The Bribe

And then there was the more radical wing, often called the Black Power Movement, with groups like the Black Panthers who vowed to defend themselves and their communities with arms if necessary.