James Baldwin's America and its Urgent Lessons for Today with Eddie S Glaude Jr
Channel: British Library
Date: 2021-03-21

Eddie S. Glaude Jr of Princeton University follows the increasingly politicised journey of 'the poet of the revolution' James Baldwin, in the years from The Fire Next Time in 1963 to No Name in the Street in 1972. This was the time of the Civil Rights Movement, when attempts to force a confrontation with the truth of America's racism was answered with the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.

In his new book Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for Today, Glaude suggests we can find hope and guidance for our own times, a new era of shattered promises and white retrenchment. Mixing biography with history, memoir and trenchant analysis of our moment, Begin Again bears witness to the difficult truth of race in America. It is at once a searing exploration that lays bare the tangled web of race, trauma, and memory, and a powerful interrogation of what we all must ask of ourselves in order to bring about a more just future.

Glaude will be in conversation with Rob Berkeley.

Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor and chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. He is the former president of the American Academy of Religion, the largest professional organization of scholars of religion in the world. Glaude is the author of number books, including Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul. He hails from Moss Point, Mississippi, a small town on gulf coast, and is a graduate of Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.

Rob Berkeley, a former Director of race equality think tank the Runnymede Trust, is director of Black gay men's community journalism platform, and mutual-aid collective, BLKOUTUK. Former adviser to the BBC and Labour Party on strategy, he is currently a trustee of Doc Society, Baring Foundation and Riverside Studios, and writing on Black queer community organising in the UK.

Supported by the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library