Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own

Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 2020

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Chapter 1

Chapters 2-3

Chapters 4-5

Chapter 6-Conclusion

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 2-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 2 Summary: “Witness”

Chapter 2 focuses on the act of witnessing and the fallibility of memory.

In his 1972 book, No Name in the Street, Baldwin recounts the trauma of seeing Don Sturkey’s 1957 photograph of White supremacists harassing 15-year-old Dorothy Count as she walked to her recently desegregated school in Charlotte, North Carolina. Baldwin claims he was so moved by the image, he promptly returned to the US after years of living in France. As Glaude observes, however, the photograph could not have served as the catalyst for Baldwin’s move, as the events in Charlotte postdate his return. Glaude uses this episode to support his claim that trauma fragments memory. Baldwin confronted his traumatic past during his time in Paris, working through his abusive childhood, the death of a close friend, and the racism he experienced in the US. France provided the critical distance he needed to become a truthful poet. His poetry transformed his experiences into art, bore witness to what many had forgotten, and called attention to the lasting impacts of slavery, systemic discrimination, and the willful blindness of White people to the violence that maintains their supremacy. His writings bear witness for those who did not survive, and for those who survived wounded and broken.

Glaude argues that the US has yet to confront its racism. Rather than addressing it head-on, the country minimizes the issue, shifting the blame to fringe actors. No truth and reconciliation commission has exposed the lie, so the truth has not become part of the nation’s story. The lie continues to traumatize Black people and damage White people who need to lie continuously to justify their place in the world, their belief that Black people are inferior, and their claims of being good Christians.

For Baldwin, bearing witness meant telling a story that made real what many refused to believe, namely, that racism exists. Glaude argues that witnesses are equally critical in the Trump era. The media, elected officials, and other sources characterize Trump as exceptional, presenting him as a lone threat to the country. This perpetuates the lie that America is fundamentally good. Glaude urges readers to bear witness to the country’s latest betrayal of Black people, which joins the existing trauma of previous betrayals. Bearing witness demands telling the story of how the nation got to this point. Only by confronting racism directly can America put an end to the lie.

Chapter 3 Summary: “The Dangerous Road”

Chapter 3 focuses on various obstacles hindering the country’s transformation. The title refers to Baldwin’s 1961 article on the nation’s resistance to change for Harper’s Magazine, “The Dangerous Road Before Martin Luther King.” By 1968, the year he introduced King at a fundraiser in Anaheim, California, Baldwin understood that the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts benefited White Americans, allowing them to pat themselves on the back without committing to real change. He saw White people co-opt the civil rights movement to support the story of perfecting the Union. In short, he recognized that history was being remade, in real time, to promote the lie. Thus, rather than highlighting King’s achievements, Baldwin introduced King with a history of the freedom movement.

King’s speech at the fundraiser also told a story, focusing on the gravity of the current moment and the necessity of his Poor People’s Campaign, which aimed to end poverty. Importantly, King stressed that the movement was losing the fight for the nation’s soul. At a celebration honoring the late W.E.B. Du Bois in 1968, Baldwin read an essay titled “Black Power,” which recast Black militancy as an honest response to current conditions in the US. At the same event, King spoke of the lies that condoned White violence and oppressed Black people. He also emphasized the difficult task that lay ahead, casting the current fight for freedom as one that stretched back more than a hundred years.

King’s assassination two months after the Du Bois event highlights the dangers Black people faced (and continue to face) in the struggle for change. Baldwin’s poetry reveals the trauma he experienced after King died. He had little time to mourn, however, as White atrocities continued unabated. These include the murder of 18-year-old Bobby Hutton of the Black Panther Party by Oakland police officers, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, and police riots at the National Democratic Convention in Chicago. For Baldwin, the moral burden to end racism did not rest with Black people. Rather, White people intent on perpetuating the lie had to be convinced to do otherwise. He urged editors (and, by extension, White Americans) to confront their history with a focus on the present.

Baldwin’s emphasis on the relation between the past and present resonates with the current controversy over removing Confederate monuments, most of which postdate the Civil War. White nationalists value monuments that glorify America’s cruel history, viewing their removal as personal assaults. Their violent response to protests proves they are willing to protect America’s White identity at all costs. Glaude argues that the controversy reflects the complicated relationship between historical events and memory. Confederate statues are monuments to an ideology promoting the superiority of White people. Attempts to recast them as symbols of the Southern way of life or military prowess simply promote the lie.

Chapters 2-3 Analysis

The entwined themes of memory and trauma figure prominently in Chapter 2. Trauma fragments how people remember, hindering their ability to narrate the past in a linear way: “Telling the story of trauma in fits and starts isn’t history in any formal sense. It is the way traumatic memory works: recollections caught in ‘the pitched battle between remembering and forgetting’” (44).

Baldwin’s faulty memory of when and why he left France speaks to the impact of trauma on Baldwin’s memory and to the dangerous predicament of Black people after the civil rights era: “[Baldwin’s] misremembering sought to orient us to the after times of the civil rights movement and to call attention to the trauma and terror that threatened everything” (44). Baldwin recognized the effects of trauma and grief on his memory. His 1951 book, Many Thousands Gone, discusses the relationship between memory, trauma, and the past:

It is a sentimental error […] to believe that the past is dead; it means nothing to say that it is all forgotten, that the Negro himself has forgotten it. It is not a question of memory […] The man does not remember the hand that struck him, the darkness that frightened him as a child; nevertheless the hand and the darkness remain with him, indivisible from himself forever, part of the passion that drives him wherever he thinks to take flight (44-45).

Baldwin’s last book, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, published around three decades later, opens with a meditation on memory. Baldwin describes terror as not only difficult to remember, but also purposefully buried in the subconscious.

Glaude employs many powerful images to elucidate different facets of racism. For example, Chapter 2 contains a simile describing the impact of the lie on Black people, which traps them “like flies on sticky paper” (40), while Chapter 3 describes the road to racial equality as “full of potholes” (61), gesturing to the chapter’s title. It also presents the country’s moral vision as clouded by “a poisonous fog of lies” (64). Clarity can only be achieved by confronting history and shearing it of “the rosy tint of American innocence” (83). Past struggles weigh on those striving for equality, who “feel like [they] are fighting old ghosts that have the country by the throat” (83). Change depends on coming to terms with the past and confronting the lie. The consequences of failing will doom Black and White Americans, keeping them “impaled on an unseemly history, like a dead butterfly on a pin” (83). This image of a trapped butterfly resonates with Baldwin’s demand to liberate Americans from the lie.

Current events play a central role in Chapter 3. Glaude argues that racism today must be viewed in light of White America’s commitment to protecting the lie at all costs. For instance, when, in 2017, a self-proclaimed neo-Nazi deliberately drove his car into a crowd of peaceful protestors at a Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, killing Heather Heyer, President Trump blamed both sides for the incident during a now infamous press conference in Trump Tower. Glaude presents this violent display of White supremacy as part of the long battle over how to remember American history. In this case, White nationalists claim that Confederate statues are not racist, though they clearly are “open-air tributes to white supremacy” (71).

Glaude’s analysis of the controversy over the use of Woodrow Wilson’s name on buildings at Princeton University, his home institution, encourages readers to consider how their environments might perpetuate the lie. Wilson oversaw unprecedented segregation in federal offices during his presidency. Moreover, he threw William Monroe Trotter, a prominent civil rights leader, out of the Oval Office in 1914. For student protestors at Princeton, Wilson’s racism disqualifies him as a moral exemplar. For others, his accomplishments outweigh his faults. As Glaude aptly notes, “most people aren’t wholly saints or completely devils” (78). His call to “get the facts right as best we can” urges readers to consider all the facts, even those that complicate current readings of history. Failure to do so does nothing but perpetuate the lie.