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On this Day in History America Lost the Treasure that Was James Baldwin

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To say that James Baldwin and his gift of prose was and is one of the phenomenal greats of American, particularly African or Black American, arts, letters, and culture would be an understatement.

On December 1, 1987, Baldwin died from stomach cancer in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France.

He was buried at the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, near New York City.

His book of essays which he dedicated to his nephew before expatriating to Paris, The Fire Next Time, is as relevant today, perhaps more so than when he published them in 1963.

Above: The Fire Next Time, by James Baldwin, 1964, First Printing, Dell 2542 Paperback

“Colour is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.” James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

Well, one survives that, no matter how… You survive this and in some terrible way, which I suppose no one can ever describe, you are compelled, you are corralled, you are bullwhipped into dealing with whatever it is that hurt you. And what is crucial here is that if it hurt you, that is not what’s important. Everybody’s hurt. What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with. You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less. Then, you make — oh, fifteen years later, several thousand drinks later, two or three divorces, God knows how many broken friendships and an exile of one kind or another — some kind of breakthrough, which is your first articulation of who you are: that is to say, your first articulation of who you suspect we all are.

“Love has never been a popular movement and no one’s ever wanted really to be free. The world is held together, really it is, held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people.”

 

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Author of New York Times bestselling novel, The Prophets, Robert Jones Jr. who goes by The Son of Baldwin said it best and most eloquently on Instagram:

They call him a prophet, but I really don’t think he was prophetic. He was just exceptional at understanding history and understanding people and knowing that we constantly repeat our mistakes, because we are constantly denying our history and refusing to reckon with it. Baldwin knew that better than almost anyone else. He was fantastic.

Today, in 1987, the world lost a treasure.

I hope you are resting well, Ancestor Baldwin.

Rest in power.

 

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