As Dr. Eddie Glaude spoke about the question of “how James Baldwin speaks to us still” on Nov. 1, he echoed the cadence and direct questioning of Baldwin’s writing, captivating the Lang Performing Arts theater at Swarthmore College. Glaude, the James S. McDonnell distinguished professor of African American studies at Princeton University, delivered the lecture as part of a centennial celebration of Baldwin sponsored by the Cooper Series. The series came a week after the Swarthmore Black studies major was formed by a faculty vote; an upcoming faculty vote will decide whether a department should be founded around the new major. As an alum who spoke at the end of the lecture noted, the potential Black studies department follows in the footsteps of the Seven Sisters and a Brother movement in 1969, which pushed for a more inclusive Swarthmore through an eight-day takeover of the Admissions Office, and recently raised $75,000 for an endowment to further Black studies at Swarthmore through their memoir, “Seven Sisters and a Brother: Friendship, Resistance, and Untold Truths Behind Black Student Activism in the 1960s.”
Black Studies Program Coordinator and Educational Studies Professor Joseph Derrick Nelson welcomed Glaude and thanked English Literature Department Chair Anthony Foy and Associate Professor of Sociology Nina Johnson for organizing the Baldwin centennial celebration. Nelson pointed to Glaude’s work examining the complexities of the American experience and confronting history, in the tradition of Baldwin. Glaude’s 2020 book “Begin Again” brought Baldwin’s lessons to current moments such as the Black Lives Matter movement. As Glaude expanded on in the Q&A portion of the lecture, he is not “this generation’s Baldwin,” but inspired by the legacy of Baldwin’s non-fiction writings and criticism.
Glaude began the lecture by discussing Baldwin’s final non-fiction book, “Evidence of Things Not Seen,” published in 1985 and on the Atlanta Child Murders. In Baldwin’s non-fiction, Glaude said, he offers commentary on pressing, fearful questions raised by American democracy. Glaude himself had been unable to face his subconscious fears the first time he picked up “The Fire Next Time” by Baldwin during his undergraduate studies at Morehouse College, but returned to him in graduate school.
“Baldwin offered the most searing and insightful commentary on the vital questions of race, culture and American democracy,” Glaude said. “His prose gave the nation a language to think about itself differently, loosed from the shackles of ideas of American exceptionalism and the illusion of whiteness that led some to believe that somehow, no matter what God had said, the color of one’s skin accorded one value above or below every other human being. On the page, he forced a confrontation with the ugliness of who we are.”
Baldwin’s frequent use of the “we” is crucial to bring the reader into the confrontation while Baldwin grapples with his own desires and American rage. As a witness to America, Baldwin tackled questions about “who we is” while engaging in deeply personal reflections.
“The moral concern is the beating heart of Baldwin’s prose,” Glaude said. “I think Baldwin’s nonfiction writings are intimate and expansive, vulnerable and relentless in their demands of the reader. They challenge and upset, but the writing cannot be reduced to mere social commentary. Something close to the heart is happening on the page.”
Glaude spoke about his own encounters with Baldwin’s writings and the anger and comfort brought by them, joking about his shock as a Mississippian that Baldwin disliked grits: “I’m left angry at the country’s state of affairs and called to love. I am pushed to examine my pain and wounds, to run towards my fears, to resist the damning comfort of safety, and urged to show mercy and grace. Reading him feels at times like being swept up by the gale force winds of a storm and being held by a lover who tends with soft hands to the soul. His sentences carry the weight of it all. Elegant and rhythmic, emotional and tender, never bitter, even when piping hot.”
Glaude also spoke about how to read Baldwin in the midst of rising political and racial tensions, including a divisive presidential election where Vice President Kamala Harris’s race has been widely discussed. Baldwin’s writings demand an honest assessment about who we are as Americans and how race distorts the nation and individuals, Glaude said. They also free us to deal with who we could possibly become.
“To read Baldwin is to confront honestly without flinching the world and oneself. And, as many of you know, that is no cake walk,” Glaude said. “The open form of the [essay] genre requires a kind of candor that often escapes our talk of race in the United States. Americans lie to themselves repeatedly, and it’s not Donald Trump’s invention.”
Reading Baldwin requires more than tracking pain and suffering, Glaude said. Baldwin does not speak as a victim, but as a poet in the sense that he draws us with love and terror. To read him is to track influences of blues music, the King James Bible, and preaching in his form. His work constantly folds back on itself as deeply personal, and returning to him again and again allows us to layer our souls the way his essays intend, Glaude said.
“It seems to me that reading Baldwin, returning to him again and again, offers us an opportunity to engage in the soul craft his essays demand,” Glaude said. “We do so not as a narcissistic preoccupation apart from the world and its ugliness. We do so because we must realize the world desperately needs better human beings, and that requires a willingness to confront the ugliness in us.”
Baldwin wrote about the importance of using pain to connect with others to be released from the pain. Glaude spoke about how Americans must deal with both what Baldwin’s words hide and what they reveal. Telling the truth in dark times, he said, requires courage to shatter national illusions and deal with the uglinesses in us: “Baldwin’s writings urge us to descend into the belly of life and to step beyond the edges of the world. To imagine that world as it could be, and to imagine ourselves as we could be, and to do that hard work with love necessary in making it all real and felt in the marrow of the bone.”
Glaude ended his lecture saying that we must grapple with the past that continues to halt the present. Revisiting Baldwin means figuring out how we got to this moment, and grappling with the wounds that define us, he said.
In the Q&A, Glaude answered questions by Swarthmore students about storytelling, the election, and activism. One student asked about how we [Black people] can “begin again” — referring to Glaude’s book — without political power. Glaude answered by calling out an assumption in the question that only white people have power to change. There is a place, he said, for poets and writers to reactivate stories broadening our political and moral imaginations, and reveal the lie of history in its workings. Another attendee asked about how to intentionally share stories to counter the lie, which Glaude similarly answered by urging students to reactivate historical moments with an aim to account for the present.
The messiness of the world is a reflection of our interior lives, Glaude quoted Baldwin. To build a more just world, we need to work on ourselves and find beauty in brokenness by being vulnerable about influences and struggles: “What does it mean to be more vulnerable in the very ways in which we inhabit space and time? I think if we were engaged in reaching for higher forms of excellences in pursuit of a more just world, that is applicable across particular institutions.”
When answering questions, Glaude was reluctant to answer for Baldwin or call writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates “this generation’s Baldwin,” as Toni Morrison famously said. Young writers shouldn’t exist in the shadows or compare to the past. Glaude pointed to his own career path writing in religion and religious studies as resisting simple comparison. However, he did speak about finding his voice through apprenticeship and tradition.
“I’m trying to find my voice, and that means sometimes I got to sing off-key to be heard,” Glaude said. “I’m just trying to see what I can say. Trying to figure out how to enact a philosophical set of commitments. I’m an American pragmatist in the vein of John Dewey. What does it mean to bring philosophy down, to bring my skill sets and bring them to bear on the problems of men and women? How do I then think about this thing in these various spaces? How do I bring the full weight of my bibliography within the context of a soundbyte?”
In response to a student’s question asking what it was about Black destiny uncontrolled by the white masses that creates fear, Glaude spoke about how leaving the orbit of expectations enters the territory of revolution.
“The world conspires to make us small,” Glaude said. “The question you have to ask yourself is, will you be complicit? The moment we step outside of their expectations, all hell breaks loose. Walk in any room like you belong there, like you’re supposed to be. Don’t think that Swarthmore has done you a favor. You have done Swarthmore a favor. Morehouse tried to kick me out three times, and now I’m on the Board of Trustees. If you refuse to be small, then you take giant steps, John Coltrane style, and remember that solo in the beginning of Giant Steps? It’s so complex the pianist doesn’t know what to play. Step outside the orbit of their expectations. Imagine yourself in the most expansive terms. Whitman wasn’t thinking about you, but I’m thinking about you. You contain multitudes.”
