The best way to celebrate your history is to do it everyday. Since this is Black History Month, it's imperative for me to share some of James Baldwin's prolific quotes (about 20). I plan on doing some Poetry Prayer and Sancti-Fly History and Culture honoring the baddest novelist and Mr. Disturber of the Peace, James Baldwin real soon. This man was filled with guts bursting out in truth for the plight and fight for his people. If you and your family do not know who James Baldwin is, please look up his name.
I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.
The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.
Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities
It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.
The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
"Our people" have functioned in this country for nearly a century as political weapons, the trump card up the enemies' sleeve; anything promised Negroes at election time is also a threat leveled at the opposition; in the struggle for mastery the Negro is the pawn.
Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.
I don't think the negro problem can be discussed coherently without bearing in mind its context; its context being the history, traditions, customs, the moral assumptions and preoccupations of the country; in short, the general social fabric. Appearances to the contrary, no one in America escapes its effects and everyone in America bears some responsibility for it.
I can conceive of no Negro native to this country who has not, by the age of puberty, been irreparably scarred by the conditions of his life.
Any society inevitably produces its criminals, but a society at once rigid and unstable can do nothing whatever to alleviate the poverty of its lowest members, cannot present to the hypothetical young man at the crucial moment that so-well-advertised right path.
Most people are not naturally reflective any more than they are naturally malicious, and the white man prefers to keep the black man at a certain human remove because it is easier for him thus to preserve his simplicity and avoid being called to account for crimes committed by his forefathers, or his neighbors.
