From “Down at the Cross” (1962)

Celia, James, and Me

“…"Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within, " wrote Baldwin in "Down at the Cross. " 14 This love is the nexus in which Baldwin and Cruz meet.…”

Tortuous Time

“…To paraphrase Baldwin, only this new, utopian, and temporally reorganized humanism, whose vanguard is the Black population of the world, knows that every concession heretofore granted to the victim by the "good will" of the heads of state, instead of being autonomously expropriated from below, has in reality been a concession "made in order to stay on top. " 43 With a gathering wave of comrades utterly repulsed by all halfmeasures, all revisionism, all white moderate compromise, all adaptation to the war-mongering of a neo-fascist empire, this vanguard lays the grounds for a new world precisely because it will not let go of the past. Only when such grounds are laid will we begin to prove that we are taking seriously the eternity of suffering that the tortured continue to endure.…”