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

James Baldwin grew disillusioned by the failure of the civil rights movement to force America to confront its lies about race. In the era of Trump, what can we learn from his struggle?

“Searing, provocative, and ultimately hopeful . . . Begin Again challenges, illuminates, and points us toward if not a more perfect union then at least a more just one.”—Jon Meacham

We live, according to Eddie S. Glaude Jr., in the after times, when the promise of Black Lives Matter and the attempt to achieve a new America were challenged by the election of Donald Trump, a racist president whose victory represents yet another failure of America to face the lies it tells itself about race.

We have been here before: For James Baldwin, the after times came in the wake of the civil rights movement, when a similar attempt to compel a national confrontation with the truth was answered with the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. In these years, spanning from the publication of The Fire Next Time in 1963 to that of No Name in the Street in 1972, Baldwin transformed into 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.

In the story of Baldwin’s crucible, Glaude suggests, we can find hope and guidance through our own after times, this Trumpian era of shattered promises and white retrenchment. Mixing biography—drawn partially from newly uncovered interviews—with history, memoir, and trenchant analysis of our current moment, Begin Again is Glaude’s endeavor, following Baldwin, to bear witness to the difficult truth of race in America today. It is at once a searing exploration that lays bare the tangled web of race, trauma, and memory, and a powerful interrogation of what we all must ask of ourselves in order to call forth a new America.

Advance praise for Begin Again

“A penetrating study of how the words of James Baldwin continue to have (often painful) relevance today. . . . In prose that is eloquent and impassioned—sometimes hopeful, sometimes not—the author presses his fingers on our bruises, the ones many of us would prefer to ignore. . . . Baldwin's genius glimmers throughout as Glaude effectively demonstrates how truth does not die with the one who spoke it.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)