Excerpt of speech from my film James Baldwin Anthology

Happy Birthday Mr. Baldwin.

A man of great insight and integrity.

His essays on the civil rights movement are excellent.

Language is a means of expressing the inner spirit and ego identification of a people. It conveys one's fears, hopes, love, etc. It is as one is. "In the beginning was the word." English is a language of deceit. Silent letters that have no purpose other than confusion. Renderings that change schizophrenically ( i before e accept after c); rules that conradict themselves (said..long a short i; should be pronounced "sayed". Many others. It is the language of an insane person.

thanks for the sweet intro... because without that i wouldn't have known who put on these important words by mr. JAMES BALDWIN


crackers
from a chicano in la

man I would have loved to have met him.

I really want to see the whole film. I first stumbled upon the entire audio transcript of this speech in the UCBerkeley audio archive several years ago, and it was the most astounding, moving talk I'd ever heard..."the white people in this country know one thing... they may say they don't know what it is I want... but the one thing they know is that they don't want to be black in this country. And that is all they NEED to know". 'a voice and nothing more"...with a voice like his, that's enough.

Baldwin read heavily in anglo saxon literature. Perhaps he didnt seek out black literature because of his own self hatred, thinking that black writers were not legitimate. Then, too, when white gurl Orilla Miller took him under her wings, he undoubtedly moved even farther towards the white literary establishment. But for him to say that there were no black role models in lit is misleading, and he knows it.  This is mid-century Harlem, just slightly beyond the HR. Role models were all around him.

....and Countee Cullen was his high school teacher who took him under his wing and helped him to write his first critical essay. I believe it was Cullen who took him to a library for the first time and drop him him so he could do research for the essay.... Then there was the prolific Zora Neale Hurston, Langston, Wallace, DuBois was still writing, and he was impressed with Alexander Dumas. But Cullen, a respected black writer, personally affect Baldwin.....