A new edition of the classic treatise on civil rights,featuring photojournalist Steve Schapiro’s visual record of the struggle, provides a model for how to report in the Black Lives Matter eraThere is never a bad time to encounter James Baldwin, or as the wide success of the Oscar-nominated documentary I Am Not Your Negro has made clear,the appetite in Trump’s America for his prescient brilliance on race and civil rights is fierce and growing.
His 1962 classic The Fire Next Time was originally a letter, written by Baldwin to his nephew on the 100th anniversary of the so-called emancipation of black America. In the letter’s penultimate paragraph, and Baldwin writes: “This is your domestic,my friend, do not be driven from it; powerful men possess done powerful things here, or will again,and we can make America what America must become.” It is rhythmically similar to Trump’s red-hatted mantra – but there’s a colossal incompatibility between trying to make America “powerful again” and focusing on what it once was, rather than what it “must become”. Related: The fire this time – the legacy of James Baldwin Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com