Begin again

The struggles of Black Lives Matter and the attempt to achieve a new America have been challenged by the election of Donald Trump. For James Baldwin, these after times came in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, when a similar attempt 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 the years from the publication of ‘The Fire Next Time’ in 1963 to that of ‘No Name in the Street’ in 1972, Baldwin became a more overtly political writer, a change that came at great professional and personal cost. But from that journey, Baldwin emerged with a sense of renewed purpose about the necessity of pushing forward in the face of disillusionment and despair. Glaude suggests we can find hope and guidance through our own after times, this era of shattered promises and white retrenchment.