
In this photograph from March 25, 1965, James Baldwin sits with Bayard Rustin on the speakers’ platform in Montgomery, Alabama, on the final day of the Selma-to-Montgomery Civil Rights March, led by Martin Luther King Jr. / Stephen F. Somerstein (born 1941) / Reproduction of photograph from 1965 / Courtesy of Getty Images
The racial reckoning in the wake of George Floyd’s death has burnished James Baldwin’s reputation as a witness to his age. As a result, The Fire Next Time (1963), a pivotal text in the ongoing struggle for racial justice, has found a new generation of readers. With Baldwin’s centenary, which falls during a fateful election year, we invite the campus community to encounter together the full range of Baldwin’s challenging legacy.
Capacious and incisive, by turns furious and vulnerable, Baldwin sounded his call for racial justice by exposing lies, skewering myths, and refusing consolations. His writings trace the rise and fall of his hope that the civil rights movement would transform his country. Eventually, “the price of being American” cost Baldwin his desire to remain in this country, and his sojourns in France and later Turkey mapped a space of rest and restoration in which he wrote his indelible works: about slavery, Jim Crow and mass incarceration; about the cruel, ongoing devaluing of black lives; about the assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King; about Black Power and identity politics; about urban violence; about being gay and black; and about the ease with which the US glided into the arms of Ronald Reagan. About hate; about love. Ultimately Baldwin would lead a transatlantic life, a life he called “a choice of exiles.” While he invites a global perspective, Baldwin was also, for a time, a sojourner in New Jersey. As he wrote in Notes of a Native Son (1955), “I knew about jim-crow but I had never experienced it…” until he came, still a teenager, to work at a defense plant in nearby Belle Mead.
Baldwin’s works—novels, essays, reportage, plays—challenge what we think we know, and who we think we are; as Eddie Glaude Jr. writes in Begin Again (2020), “Baldwin never relinquished the belief that, at bottom, the problem we faced as individuals and as a nation was, and remains, fundamentally a moral one: it was and will always be a question about who we take ourselves to be.” Baldwin dwelled in possibility; but a mode of possibility that was rich, troubling, and complex.
Inspired by Glaude’s conviction that Baldwin speaks to our moment, the Humanities Council invites the campus community to “begin again” and to encounter Baldwin’s legacy in the intimate setting of a reading circle.
General Questions
Visit the Baldwin Circles FAQs page for more.
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The Humanities Council encourages faculty, graduate students, and staff to engage with the works and legacy of James Baldwin by convening reading circles in the academic year 2024-25. The Council will provide each Baldwin Circle with funding for books, meals, and refreshments. Conveners should register by September 15.
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All University faculty, graduate students, post-docs and staff are invited to convene and participate in Baldwin Circles. If you are interested in being a convener, please register a group officially by completing a brief form on our website.
No previous experience with Baldwin’s work is expected; this opportunity is open to those with a passion for thinking about Baldwin’s work in open discussion in a communal setting. Circles can focus on Baldwin generally or focus on a specific aspect or theme of his work. We invite groups to juxtapose Baldwin with other writers and/or to pursue his legacy in various formats and media; in short, we welcome you to think outside the box. We invite groups to juxtapose Baldwin with other writers and/or to pursue his legacy in various formats and media; in short, we welcome you to think outside the box.
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Yes. If you would like to join an already existing group, please email [email protected] to express interest, and we will let you know about spaces as soon as they become available.
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Visit the James Baldwin Resources section of this website to explore Baldwin’s works and find related centenary events on campus, locally, and around the world. If you have a project or event related to James Baldwin that you would like to add to the calendar, please contact the Humanities Council team directly at [email protected].
In addition, please save the date for the Council’s 18th Annual Humanities Colloquium, which will be held on Thursday, September 5 at 4:30 pm in Chancellor Green Rotunda. This year’s speakers, distinguished Princeton scholars whose work represents different approaches and historical periods, will participate in a panel discussion on the theme “Knowledge and Action,” inspired by Baldwin’s words.
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We encourage you to explore the James Baldwin Resources section of this site for information about Baldwin’s works and influences, as well as links to local events, and projects of interest.
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If you have specific questions about the Baldwin Circles project or convening a reading group, please contact Kathleen Crown, Humanities Council Executive Director.