A PERSONAL RECOLLECTION

David responds to the Leonard Pitts Op Ed to which I linked with this powerful quote from James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son:

"The only real change vividly discernible in this present, unspeakably dangerous chaos is a panic-stricken apprehension on the part of those who have maligned and subjugated others for so long that the tables have been turned ….  Out of this incredible brutality, we get the myth of the happy darky and Gone with the Wind. And the North Americans appear to believe these legends, which they have created and which absolutely nothing in reality corroborates, until today. And when these legends are attacked, as is happening now--all over the globe which has never been and never will be White--my countrymen become childishly vindictive and unutterably dangerous. The unadmitted icy panic of which I spoke above is created by the terror that the Savage can, now, describe the Civilized: the only way to prevent this is to obliterate humanity."

A personal story about James Baldwin.  In 1992, when I transferred from the UMass Philosophy Department to the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, I was assigned an empty office down the hall from the Departmental office, on the third floor of New Africa House.  UMass was [and still is] an underfunded state university and there were not many amenities, but each professor did get a little name plaque that was mounted on one’s office door.  My new office had very little in it save a wooden desk and some chairs.  In the desk drawer I found a stack of name plates that had belonged to former occupants.  As I flipped through them, curious to see who had sat in my chair before me, I came across a plate with the name “Chinua Achebe” on it.  The great Nigerian novelist, author of Things Fall Apart and other important works, had been a member of the department.  A few nameplates later, I found one that read “James Baldwin.”

I was walking in the footsteps of giants.