About the Project

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.