Black History

In an essay written about the time of my birth, Baldwin gives voice to what it was like to grow up and live as a black man in the society I was born into.  The essay takes the form of a letter written to his namesake, his then fifteen year old nephew.  Many still living today were marked by those conditions.  How many still live in remaining pockets of that despair?  How large are those pockets?  I have no way of knowing.

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"But no one's hand can wipe away those tears he sheds invisibly today, which one hears in his laughter and in his speech and in his songs.  I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it.  And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it."

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"...these innocent and well-meaning people, your countrymen, have caused you to be born under conditions not very far removed from those described for us by Charles Dickens in the London of more than a hundred years ago.  (I hear the chorus of the innocents screaming, "No, this is not true!  How bitter you are!" -but I am writing this letter to you, to try to tell you how to handle them, for most of them do not yet really know that you exist.  I know the conditions under which you were born, for I was there.  Your countrymen were not there..."

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"This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish.  Let me spell out precisely what I mean by that, for the heart of the matter is here, and the root of my dispute with my country.  You were born where you were born and faced with the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason.  The limits of your ambitions were, thus, expected to be set forever.  You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being.  You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.  Wherever you have turned, James, in your short time on this earth, you have been told where you could go and what you could do (and how you could do it) and where you could live and whom you could marry.  I know your countrymen do not agree with me about this, and hear them saying, "You exaggerate."  The do not know Harlem and I do.  So do you."