They watched as friends and fellow travelers ended up at the bottom of the Mississippi River. They suffered the billy stick, fire hoses and police dogs. and countless others risked everything to persuade the country to live up to its stated ideals and to rid itself of the insidious view that white people mattered more than others.

We now face a moral reckoning: Americans have to decide whether this country will truly be a multiracial democracy or whether to merely tinker around the edges of our problems once again and remain decidedly racist and unequal. An odd admixture, but an understandable consequence of our troubled times. As Glaude bears witness to the difficult truth of racism’s continued grip on the national soul, Begin Again is a searing exploration of the tangled web of race, trauma, and memory, and a powerful interrogation of what we must ask of ourselves in order to call forth a new America.The videos of George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks dying have combined with the vulnerability caused by COVID-19 and the feeling that the country is broken to bring us all to the brink of madness and, apparently, to the precipice of significant change. In these brilliant and stirring pages, Glaude finds hope and guidance in Baldwin as he mixes biography-drawn partially from newly uncovered Baldwin interviews-with history, memoir, and poignant analysis of our current moment to reveal the painful cycle of Black resistance and white retrenchment.

Glaude Jr., when white Americans met the civil rights movement’s call for truth and justice with blind rage and the murders of movement leaders, so in our moment were the Obama presidency and the birth of Black Lives Matter answered with the ascendance of Trump and the violent resurgence of white nationalism. Just as in Baldwin’s “after times,” argues Eddie S. If one refuses abdication, one begins again.”-James Baldwinīegin Again is one of the great books on James Baldwin and a powerful reckoning with America’s ongoing failure to confront the lies it tells itself about race. Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. Shortlisted for the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice.

One of Esquire’s Best Biographies of All Time.

One of the Best Books of the Year: Time, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune What can we learn from his struggle in our own moment? James Baldwin grew disillusioned by the failure of the civil rights movement to force America to confront its lies about race.

“A powerful study of how to bear witness in a moment when America is being called to do the same.”- Time.

Eddie glaude jr begin again