A new book out from Pantheon Books is a collection of the writings of James Baldwin who died in 1987. A black man born in "Jim Crow South" and raised in Harlem, he "escaped in 1948 to Europe" to write about race and humanity in America (not a pretty picture). Go Tell It On the Mountain in 1953, Notes of a Native Son in 1955 and The Fire Next Time in 1963; the last a "history of the Nation of Islam". Baldwin writings in this edition "argues that his view of American society and race was more than 'probable'. Anger was inevitable in a society whose majority benefited from subjugating one group of people. And facing that there have been political and personal, as well as economic, benefits for the largely white upper classes in denigrating black people is the only way to move beyond racism". In an essay "Nationalism, Colonialism and the United States" he writes that electing a black man president is not going to correct the problem. In another essay he notes that "I...do not bring down property values when I move in. You bring them down when you move out".
The book is The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings" edited by Randall Kenan.
(Source: "Piercing Glimpses of Pointed Hope" by Laura Impellizzeri of The AP. In The Virginian Pilot on 9/5/10)
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