(C) Common Dreams
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James Baldwin, Eloquent Writer In Behalf of Civil Rights, Is Dead [1]

['Lee A. Daniels']

Date: 1987-12-02  

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster. - ''Notes of a Native Son''

I am very much concerned that American Negroes achieve their freedom here in the United States. But I am also concerned for their dignity, for the health of their souls, and must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them. I think I know - we see it around us every day - the spiritual wasteland to which that road leads. - ''The Fire Next Time''

If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring; whatever it brings must be borne. And at this level of experience one's bitterness begins to be palatable, and hatred becomes too heavy a sack to carry. - ''The Fire Next Time''

Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality. - ''The Fire Next Time'' (1963)

I do not wish to see Negroes become the equal of their murderers. I wish us to become equal to ourselves. To become a people so free in themselves that they will have no need to - fear - others - and have no need to murder others. - Spoken by the character Meridian Henry in the play ''Blues for Mister Charlie'' (1964)

For our father - how shall I describe our father? - was a ruined Barbados peasant, exiled in a Harlem which he loathed, where he never saw the sun or the sky he remembered, where life took place neither indoors nor without, and where there was no joy. By which I mean, no joy that he remembered. Had it been otherwise, had he been able to bring with him into the prison where he perished any of the joy he had felt on that far-off island, then the air of the sea and the impulse to dancing would sometimes have transfigured our dreadful rooms. Our lives might have been very different. But no, he brought with him from Barbados only black rum and a blacker pride, and magic incantations which neither healed nor saved. - ''Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone'' (1968)

[END]
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[1] Url: https://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/02/obituaries/james-baldwin-eloquent-writer-in-behalf-of-civil-rights-is-dead.html

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